A 103-year-old teacher and folklorist, who still gives weekly classes to the Traveller community, is to receive an honorary degree today.
Mr Patrick Greene, of Ballinalee, Co Longford, is to be honoured at a special ceremony in NUI Galway, when he receives an honorary Master of Arts in recognition of his contribution to Irish education.
Mr Greene, or Master Greene as he is known in the Ballinalee area, is also being recognised for his work for the Irish Folklore Commission, especially material collected from the Travelling community.
Some 10,000 pages of material he collected, along with taped recordings, are now in the Irish folklore archive.
He was also a primary school teacher, spending most of his 40-year career as principal of Lislea National school, close to the village in Ballinalee. He retired almost 40 years ago.
As part of his folklore work, he also became an expert in the Traveller language, Cant, which he still teaches to the community at weekly classes in Longford.
"I picked it up from a Travelling woman 70 years ago," he recalls of how he learned his first words of Cant. "It was in the early days of the Folklore Society. I had started collecting folklore, and I just stopped to talk to an old Traveller woman."
Master Greene teaches Cant each week to the Travelling community in St Mel's resource centre in nearby Longford town.
The town has a large community of settled Traveller families but according to the retired teacher, there is not a huge demand for his classes.
"They're not very interested in it, especially the young men," he says. According to Mr Greene, the community has become very integrated with the settled community, and some Travellers view some cultural aspects of their way of life, such as Cant, as a stigma.
Mr Greene began teacher training at St Patrick's College in Drumcondra in 1918 on a king's scholarship, having spent four years as a school monitor.
"There was nothing else going on at the time," he said.
He became a school monitor when his local parish priest in Legan, Co Longford, approached his father with a number of options, including the possibility of training as a Jesuit priest.
"I wasn't inclined that way," he said of the priesthood, while his father was anxious to keep him at home "because I was a delicate youngster".
He was not the first teacher in his family. His great grandfather, Peter Naughton, was the first national school teacher in the Ballinalee area in the 1840s.
At today's ceremony Mr Greene will be accompanied by five of his six children at today's ceremony, two of whom, Roisín and Anne, are also retired national school teachers. His granddaughter, Ms Miriam McElroy, is also a teacher in nearby Mullingar.