By recovering old Irish songs and stories Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin is reclaiming our collective memory, writes Pól Ó Muiri.
There is a saying in Irish: Más mian leat do mholadh, faigh bás. It means: If you want praise, die. It's a cynical reminder of what can happen after we've lost someone: we praise them and remember their talents while never admitting we probably didn't show the same appreciation while they were alive.
Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin, a singer of great talent with six albums under her belt, has undertaken her own act of remembrance - and linguistic, musical and cultural reclamation - in Hidden Ulster: People, Songs And Tradition Of Oriel.
Don't bother looking for Oriel on the map. As Ireland lost its fifth province, so it lost Oriel - its 33rd county, if you will - an area in south-east Ulster that included south Co Armagh, north Co Monaghan and Omeath, on the Cooley peninsula in Co Louth. For 200 years it was an area of song, music and poetry, "a Mecca for musicians and harpers", says Ní Uallacháin.
As late as 1925 an elderly community of Irish speakers in Omeath held the work of 17th- and 18th-century poets - Séamus Dall Mac Cuarta, Peadar Ó Doirnín and Art Mac Cumhaigh, among others - as part of their living repertoire. Yet the artistic region in which they lived disappeared like an Atlantis of the amhrán beneath waves of English. That Anglicisation was helped in no small measure, she says, by the Catholic Church's hostility towards the language.
Ní Uallacháin speaks fluently and passionately about charting the landscape anew. "I felt there was a serious neglect of the traditions that were part of the area where I live . . . . With the loss of the language there was a collective memory loss in the community. People weren't aware of the wealth of tradition and song and story incorporated in the language which had been the language of the community 100 years previously."
As she has family ties in Cos Armagh and Louth - and lives in Mullaghbawn, in Co Armagh - she is able to give a unique insight into the area. Her book is an impressive piece of scholarship, containing an introduction to the area, 54 songs, their translations by Ní Uallacháin, original music to accompany them and pen portraits of the singers and the collectors who walked the highways and byways in search of material.
Ní Uallacháin refers to them as carriers of song, "ordinary men and women with extraordinary gifts". She says: "I felt that the work of the collectors was completely unknown and that their work lay in archives, forgotten." As they were both Catholic and Protestant, she wrote the book in English, so the story "should be known to those who wish to access it".
Ní Uallacháin's story of Oriel has three chapters so far: the first was the release of 14 local songs as a Gael-Linn CD, An Dealg Óir (The Golden Thorn); the second is the book's publication; and the third will be her recording of all 54 songs, so they will never again fade from memory. She speaks of the loving intimacy of transmitting song; she learned verses from her late father, Pádraig, as he had learned them from an earlier generation.
That passion was to sustain her during arduous archive work. She gave up a well-paid job as a teacher and is dependent on a fellowship from the Community Relations Council in Belfast and a major arts award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to complete her task.
Her priority was "to remarry the songs with their collective airs, so that the songs could be sung again as part of the oral tradition". Most of the songs had no written music. "There is a major severance in the tradition - not just fragmentation but severance - of memory and the passing on of the oral tradition when the language died. It was a casual entrance into the world of music acquired by osmosis: people sang songs; people told stories; people knew the place names; the place name told a story in itself. It was an amazing memory loss. The book is reminding people who we are."
She came across old photographs, many of them reproduced in the book, among her family papers. "The faces were begging me to tell the story. I was able to connect the photographs with the names of people who sang the songs. It was very moving when the people began to come to life. They weren't just songs on paper; they were songs that people sang - and, of course, songs are the heart and soul of the people."
Yet this is not a work of archeology but a re-sowing. Tá 'na Lá, "the last known song to have been heard sung in native Armagh Irish", has been taught at a Gaelscoil in Monaghan. "That gave me great encouragement," says Ní Uallacháin.
The collapse of Irish was a communal impoverishment. The singers and storytellers didn't pass on their art to their children "because there was such a great fear and threat surrounding the Irish language", she says. "On the one hand you had a parent who had 1,000 lines of rich, colourful poetry from the poets of the area and a son or daughter who could hardly speak English or Irish, never mind sing or recite poetry. That was frightening."
Equally frightening, she argues, is Ireland's continued neglect of its songs and folklore. There is enough material on Oriel alone in the archives of the Folklore Commission to fill two or three PhDs, she says. "I was travelling through Longford when I saw a sign for Ardagh. I thought of the Ardagh chalice and the value of the Ardagh chalice and the beauty of the Ardagh chalice and if anything were to happen to the Ardagh chalice what an uproar there would be about it - and rightly so. I thought that all I have done is lifted the equivalent of another Ardagh chalice from beneath stones and dust and polished it up and said to people around me: 'This is our Ardagh chalice.' "
A Hidden Ulster by Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin, published by Four Courts Press, will be launched by Michael Longley at the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, today at 6 p.m.
