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Customs, Lore and Legend of Other Clare Days:
Clare's Rich Heritage


There is probably no other county in Ireland as rich in lore and legendary tales as Co. Clare. This has often been stated by outsiders who have visited the place from time to time. On his arrival in Clare in 1839 in the course of his work for the Ordnance Survey, the antiquarian John O'Donovan wrote:

'I now enter upon a field of topographical research which is truly romantic and full of interest,
the county of the Dal gCais. Its history and ancient topography are better preserved than
those of any county I have yet visited
.'

And again, writing from Corofin on the 10 October, 1839 he remarked:

'This place is full of historical tradition, and the people by one thousand degrees
more historically intelligent than the Laginiary or Ossarians
. . .'
John O'Donovan and Eugene Curry, The Antiquities of County Clare (Ennis, 1997)

We have already seen what high value Séamus Ó Duilearga of the Folklore Commission placed on the huge storehouse of material that he collected from the last generation of native speakers in the Doolin area. But many other parts of Clare were also rich in the Irish oral tradition. Ernie O'Malley who spent some time in Clare in 1919 as an organizer for the Provisional Government tells of the seanchas and verse he heard from the old men who dropped in each night to his host's house at Ballagh, near Kilfenora:

'Sometimes they'd laugh together and shake their heads with delight when speaking of Pedlar McGrath [An Mangaire Sugach] or Sean O'Twomey . . . It was then I regretted that I had not studied Irish thoroughly. I knew next to nothing of these poets save in translation. But here the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lived again, for these men could tell story after story of the poet's pranks, drinkings and songs, and describe them as if they had lived in the same parish. They recited verses of men whose names I did not know. Their sense of literature was on their lips and in their faultless memory . . .
In craggy Carron an old man recited the whole of The Midnight Court for me. They were not literary, nor had they any pretence to learning. The extension of their knowledge made them simple; they were not conscious of it, but they knew more of poetry as a living feeling than anybody else I had met save the poets themselves. .
What I liked most about them was their independence, their air of being true to themselves. In the towns people conformed to their suppressed selves, to an outward convention; here they created their own environment in and through themselves. They had no feeling of equality or inequality, but a definite reality, and it would be a long time, I knew, before I would ever hope to have anything as real in myself as they had.'
Ernie O'Malley, On another man's wound, (London 1936).

It seems of interest to point out that many of the long tales collected in Clare by Ó Duilearga and others from the Folklore Commission belong to that genre of folk tales known as the Red Branch Cycle. It has been remarked that, apart from Co. Clare where they would appear to be of fairly general currency, those tales were not frequently encountered outside Ulster. They are set in the days of the legendary king Conor Mac Neasa of Ulster and his Red Branch Knights, and depict an era that belongs culturally to the final phase of prehistoric Ireland. According to Douglas Hyde, the Red Branch tales represent Europe's oldest vernacular literature, and he goes on to say that their development over a period of fifteen hundred years must be regarded as 'one of the most remarkable examples in the world of continuous literary evolution.'


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