Ireland is a nation of storytellers, with a deep tradition of passing old stories down through generations. As decades go by and society changes, so too does the way we share our scéalta.
We’ve witnessed the transition from oral to written to visual and now, a new generation of historians are passing on tales of old through short-form videos on social media, namely TikTok.
The platform has seen an influx of such videos, with the hashtag #IrishHistory accumulating more than 20,000 posts from comedy creators, businesses and dedicated citizen historians.
Some of the more established creators sharing Irish history on the platform include Jane Casey (@janecasey.ie), Brinsley McNamara (@weirdireland), and Gemma Leahy (@theirishgem), all of whom have gone on to grow their online personas on other platforms such as Instagram, as well as creating podcasts and even writing books.
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Casey, who is 35 and originally from Bray but now lives in Dublin, began her working life in advertising 15 years ago. In the past year, however, she has quit her job to become a freelance social media consultant, while also creating content about interesting historical titbits.
“I love history. I’m that person that drags all my mates to read a plaque on a weekend away. I’m like, ‘Lads, can we just take a detour by this graveyard?’”
Combining her grá of history with her professional experience, Casey can get a message across to audiences in a way that is, as she describes it, accessible. But her transition to becoming a content creator wasn’t planned.
Her very first TikTok was about prehistoric tombs in the Dublin mountains. “I didn’t expect anything [from the video]. I had [done] no editing to it – nothing – no fancy voice over. I just put it up and I got 10,000 views,” she says.
From there her platform grew; she now has more than 20,000 followers. She spends a lot of time researching and exploring interesting, often overlooked, sites mostly in Dublin and Wicklow. Whether it’s a video about the origins of Irish surnames or castles hidden in plain sight off the M50, her TikToks regularly clock up hundreds of thousands of views.
A lover of “fun facts”, she particularly enjoys investigating quirky elements of our social history, like how Club Rock Shandy got its name (the Blackrock swimming club frequently stopped by O’Rourke’s pub in the south Dublin town for the beverage after their meets) – and is currently on a quest to find why we call the ice cream a “99”. “Where did that come from? Everyone has a different story around it,” she says.
Often an idea for a video will come to Casey while walking by an interesting building or structure, which she will later do a deep dive on using Google or the Irish Newspaper Archives.
“A lot of Irish people want to learn more about their environment,” she says. “I want to deepen people’s appreciation for their surroundings and for this country.”
Around 20 per cent of her video views come from outside Ireland, mainly the US. “There’s also a massive cohort of people who might have left Ireland years ago, or maybe their parents left Ireland, and they have found my content while seeking a connection to the homeland, which is really lovely too.”
Like Casey, Leahy (35) has found a fan base in the US and Canada; about 70 per cent of her views come from across the pond, with the remaining 30 per cent spread across Ireland and Europe. She has a following on TikTok of 1.1 million.
“A lot of Americans have extreme pride about being Irish and they like to learn a bit more about where they’ve come from, their culture. They just like to see someone chatting about the place they’re proud of. Some of them are nearly more proud than we are,” says Leahy, who is a learning and development manager for PepsiCo by day.
Now living in Leicester in England but originally from Westmeath, Leahy was on furlough from work during the Covid-19 lockdowns and was alone during the day as her partner, a postwoman, was busy delivering letters and packages. Friends began to tag her in videos that reminded them of her and, eventually, this lead to her creating her own content and TikTok page.
Her videos typically feature her chatting directly to the camera about Irishisms, presumably directed at international audiences. One of her videos like this, about the origins of Dracula, has more than 1.1 million views; another, about how to pronounce Irish girls’ names such as Caoimhe and Róisín, has been watched more than nine million times.
She has also made some on-location videos from the likes of Seán’s Bar in Athlone, which dates from AD 900 and claims to be the oldest pub in Ireland. Leahy says she particularly loved making that video because she got to see the old-school interior and learn how to pull a proper pint of Guinness.
“I’ve put [the video] up multiple times now and it always does well, because people just find it fascinating.”
History hasn’t always been Leahy’s thing – in fact, she didn’t like it much as a subject at school. But her interest has grown since emigrating to the UK.
“As you move away from home, you become more proud to be Irish and, then, you’re more proud of showing off the stuff that maybe you didn’t learn in school. Living in England especially, you become extra proud to be Irish. I love to have discussions with people over here,” she says.
Leahy says she particularly loves sharing stories about what the Irish have achieved on the world stage, such as how Kilkenny-born James Hoban designed the White House, how Irish soldier Michael Keogh came close to assassinating Adolf Hitler, and the story of inspirational women such as Lady Gregory and Grace O’Malley.
McNamara’s TikToks start off with a distinctive introduction – “Well, I’m Brinsley McNamara and welcome to Weird Ireland” – before launching into whatever interesting snapshot he has put together for the day’s video.
The 32-year-old started with a page documenting “Weird Westmeath”, where he is from, widening the focus last year to all of Ireland. He has since gone on to publish a book and start a podcast.
“All the stuff that’s in [Weird Ireland] is stuff I was looking at anyway, I just wasn’t taking videos and pictures,” he says.
“It was just a matter of taking the leap and starting imperfect and getting better. I like going around looking at things. I like making videos of them. And having a page to do that, it’s great.”
He works off recommendations from viewers these days, but also looks at Google Maps to find interesting sites.
Within weeks of starting his page, he noticed a “tremendous” reaction to the videos, with views reaching in the hundreds of thousands. Like Casey, he believes it stems back to people’s connection with their locality.
His videos may not be as detailed as other creators on TikTok; McNamara deliberately offers just enough information to engage a viewer but allow them to do further digging on the topic elsewhere, if they want to. He encourages people to visit the sites themselves, take some photos and “make a day out” of it.
While these creators have built a platform based on sharing history with others, none have studied history at university. Does this matter?
For professional historian Kerron Ó Luain, who has a BA, MA and PhD, it does not, though he can see how some historians may have an issue with the short-form format of these videos.
“If I’m sitting there, picturing older historians or professors, they’d be saying: ‘How can you really deliver, in such a short format, the whole picture or whole context.’ But, personally, I wouldn’t have a problem with it, as long as [the videos] are direct.”
Diarmaid Ferriter, professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin and a contributor to The Irish Times, sees social media as a tool for democratising history, which is often kept behind closed doors in academic databases and in universities.
Social media can also distort history in a very serious and damaging way because people can decide to be very selective
— Diarmaid Ferriter
“There’s no point in us being snobbish about it,” he says. “We’re not high-priest historians who have some kind of monopoly on the communication of history, or the right interpretation of history, so it’s not for us to be dismissive.”
For the most part, these “citizen historians” are acting out of a genuine love and interest for times gone by, but a concern for Ó Luain would be the odd “bad-faith actor” who could use a platform under the guise of Irish history to spread hateful messages, such as anti-immigration ones.
As Ferriter says: “Social media can also distort history in a very serious and damaging way because people can decide to be very selective about what they choose to highlight, if they’re trying to make a particular case or if they’re trying to argue around some contentious issue that they are right by pointing to history.”
Ó Luain says the way history is told has changed over time, long before social media.
“Something similar happened in the 1960s – prior to that, everything was based on only written history texts. Then, this new thing – oral history – emerged and there was the same critique: ‘You can’t trust what people are saying.’ But oral history developed in its own way over the last 50 or 60 years and it’s now an established format,” he says.
If historians don’t move with the times, they’ll be left with a very small audience. “Public history was a thing going back like 10 or 15 years before the emergence of social media, where some historians say, ‘We have to get out and do talks in local communities’ and things like that – bring history to the average citizen,” he says. “Now, if you’re talking to a room of 20 people, you can talk to a room of 20,000 at any given time. It’s just that on a grander scale.
“Some historians only speak to an increasingly narrow demographic. And that’s the way these things are shifting towards the youth – it’s all about these platforms. So why not use both if you can?”
Capitalising on the trend, TikTok Ireland is launching a hub to bring content together in one place under the hashtag #IrishHistory, which will make the content easier for users to discover, and boost the profiles of the creators making such content. For the creators such as Casey, it’s a welcome move. As she explains, there are plenty of historical programmes broadcast on the likes of RTÉ or Virgin Media, but viewership of traditional media has decreased, particularly among young people.
“TikTok is where people are at. The likes of the Irish History Hub is an amazing way to present history in a really accessible way and to encourage creators to get involved too. It’s a way to bring our heritage to a new audience because the reality is, they’re not watching TV. They’re on their phones. TikTok is far more than just dances, as it was a couple of years ago.”
