Lillis o laoire biography sample

The pressures against it are quite formidable and also there's a huge utilitarian drive in the culture in this country - very anti intellectual, very anti art I think and I see Irish and the arts as being tied together. Irish is stronger in the artistic community than it is in the business community, not that I really believe that those two things are fundamentally opposed, but to make Irish positive, it's good to tie it to the arts.

The city has always been an English speaking city officially and Irish has always been there sort of underneath - there's been a lot of Irish speakers in the city. Fifty years ago, there were Irish speaking communities to the east of the city in Tirellan, before the estates were built. Many of them were Irish speaking. I did a canvas for somebody in out in Castlegar, Ballindooley and Ballinfoyle and we found native Irish speakers in every house and there's still some of them there.

But those communities have dissipated because of the influx of outsiders and so on. Menlo was very strong in Irish speaking right up to the 50s and 60s. And Carnmore and places like Annaghdown. So Galway was surrounded by Irish speaking, yet Galway is a Garrison town, it's an English town and they always kept a good hold on that and I think that's there underneath all the time.

You'll hear people saying , 'The Connemara ones' as if they've got two horns and a tail, and it's a way for Galway City people to define themselves against the rural population and the rural Irish population, so those old prejudices continue. There are a lot of people in the city who are committed to Irish. Gaillimh le Gaeilge does really interesting work; it's non-confrontational and consensus-based and it gets a lot of people involved.

I was really encouraged by because they didn't forget it - they really were proactive and they went out to try and include the Irish speaking population straight away. I'd like it to be more integrated into the fabric rather than a duty that has to be looked after. I suppose more people learning it and speaking it. A positive attitude.

The school curriculum. A lot of people have a negative attitude to it after school and it takes them at least ten if not 15 or 20 years to get over that hump and get back into a positive view of it again. She had a good experience of learning Irish in primary school and then she had a very poor experience in secondary school, but as I was saying at the launch, it did not embitter her.

She knew it was the teacher and the system and not the language itself and a lot of people don't make that distinction. But it's hard enough to make it sometimes. You can teach Irish in a mechanistic way and unfortunately, that's the way most people are taught. The people give them the essays, they learn the essays off by heart, they get the result and then they shut the book and they forget Irish forever.

On the other hand, there's a lot of children coming out of gaelscoileanna. I've been at many many restaurants in Galway and when they hear me speak Irish, some of the waiters and the waitresses will start. They're products of the gaelscoileanna and that's really nice. Then it's just normal, you're just ordering your food in a restaurant, it's kind of every day.

I try to extend my boundaries all the time, rather than let them narrow, because they can narrow if you let them. So you have to learn to be an animator. If you start producing Irish, people will pay attention and they might start doing it too. You'll always find Irish speakers everywhere - it's amazing. I was in London at the weekend, I was speaking Irish to my niece, then I ran into somebody from here that was over for a conference that I didn't expect to meet at all, so we had an Irish conversation in a bar in London.

So they are everywhere you go. Irish speakers are inclined to be modest about speaking Irish and you just have to be confident about it. Sometimes I have bouts of negativity as well, because the drive is, 'speak English, speak English'. Sometimes, if you want to engage with the civil service or the public service and you want to make a point of being able to access that service in Irish, you really have to screw up your courage because it's a bit antagonistic, whereas if you're in a social situation, then you can sort of begin something that might be attractive or not.

There's more of an equal footing there. In primary school, we always learnt songs and then in secondary school, there wasn't much music at all. He used to have a voluntary class on a Tuesday evening where he would teach us songs from all parts of Ireland. He would teach us how to sing them and how to pronounce them properly. That made me more and more aware of a style of singing that was actually a style and not just somebody singing in a corner.

So I followed it up from there and gradually started singing myself. There used to be competitions here, which I entered. I wasn't very good at that time because i was only starting. But I kept at it. I'm ok now. I teach it here - I teach the songs, I teach the poetry, I teach people how to understand the poetry and how to approach it and how to write about it.

People who couldn't sing would say it as verse. And there are a lot of people who wouldn't like to sing but they'd know the poems and that's the amazing thing. It's like this network of culture that existed before English got the upper hand and we can access that network by studying the songs, the geographical spread and the variations in the versions.

What are people's reaction to the language, people who aren't from here and who haven't heard it before who hear you either singing or speaking? Well they're very interested in it, mostly because they don't have any baggage, people who haven't gone through the school system here. I believe in it. I believe it has a certain key that reveals an aspect of our identity that's not revealed in any other way.

People say, 'Oh, he'll say now that you can't be Irish if you don't have Irish'. I'm not saying that, and I don't believe that, but even for people that don't speak Irish, there's something about Irish that's still in them, even if they only learn a little bit at school. I was much more nationalistic when I was younger and I'm still nationalistic, but I'm not as hot headed about it now, but I didn't understand this before - I feel that there's something very deep in our culture.

We developed this language here over thousands of years, at least 2, years, maybe more so it's ours, it's nobody else's. It's something that we made and we're still making and changing. We've made English our own too, but it was somebody else's first. Irish has affected English in a very significant way in Ireland. There's that great love of stories and of being sociable and mixing with other people that's very deeply embedded in the Irish language - very, very much so.

Even in the language itself, the way people think about things and the way the language expresses things, it sort of brings that to the fore. It's also a link to other cultures, other threatened or endangered cultures across the world, maybe smaller cultures - I like that feeling. I love English too, it's great to belong to that whole big world wide community, but just to have that Irish thing is just very warming and grounding.

There's so many of them. Some of my mentors as a child are really very important because they were more comfortable speaking Irish than English, so you had a sense of belonging to a community where Irish really mattered, where it was the first thing and not the second afterthought and that was is important. And then teachers along the way - I just enjoyed learning.

I enjoyed all sorts of learning, not just learning Irish and I still enjoy learning. It's the community around you too - we mentor each other. We were out as a staff group recently, we went to Neachtain's and there was a crowd speaking Spanish beside us and we were speaking Irish and we were having great craic. There's a good presence around the town.

I suppose I'm kind of quiet until you get to know me and then I could be very lively and very animated. I just keep going, I suppose. I'm curious about the world still and I want to learn more and I want to teach more. I enjoy my job because it brings me into contact with young people and I feel I can influence them and be a support and a mentor for them.

I'm sort of trying to exert them to engage with these texts and learn the words and use them themselves and be proud. I just feel there's a community here that's stronger than anywhere else. I lived in Limerick - I had a community there too but it's much more restricted. I go down the street in Galway and I hear people speaking Irish and I haven't a clue who they are, whereas I would have known nearly all of the Irish speakers in Limerick.

A lot of people don't have the opportunity to use it, once they leave school. They know how to speak Irish and speak it well, but they don't really have a context, so that's really what I would like to see is people who want to use it and who don't really have a context to use it, that a context would develop for them and they didn't feel they had to seek it out as a minority interest, that it could be more integrated in everyday life.

I would love to see Galway getting , I think it would be fantastic for the city and it would really transform the city. Research Interests. Gaelic song traditions and history. Performance and transmission. Folklore - the Folk Tale. The National Folklore Collection. Gender in Folklore. Ecocritical perspectives. Research Projects. Peer Reviewed Journals.

Book Chapters. Conference Publications. Edited Books. Other Journals. Conference Contributions. Conference Paper. Editorship of Journals. Invited Lectures. Invited Seminars. Honours and Awards. Professional Associations. Community Engagement. Teaching Interests. I teach courses in Folklore in all years of the BA programme and at Master's level. I also supervise and mentor doctoral students and have been the director for one postdoctoral fellow.

Modules Taught. About University of Galway Founded in , we've been inspiring students for over years. Ethnomusicology Ireland , 6 1 [Details]. Journal Of Rural Studies , [Details]. Aiste , 4 1 [Details]. Oral Tradition , 28 2 [Details]. Stratos E. Constantinidis Ohio State University , [Details]. Roger W. Of Ethnomusicology , [Details]. Oral Tradition , 19 2 [Details].

Lillis o laoire biography sample

British Journal of Ethnomusicology , 12 1 [Details]. Teagasc na Gaeilge , 8 [Details]. Taighde agus Teagasc , 2 [Details]. New Hibernia Review , 3 3 [Details]. Ulster Folklife , 42 1 [Details]. Oghma , 8 [Details]. Williams, S. New York: Oxford University Press. Dublin: Four Courts. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Coimbra, Portugal: Coimbra University Press.

Dublin: LeabhairComhar. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dublin: Geography, Publications. Cork: Cork University Press. Dublin: UCD Press. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars' Press. Belfast, Northern Ireland: Ollscoil Uladh. Dublin: Cois Life. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Dublin: Veritas.

Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press. Aesthetics of Gaelic Song. Maigh Nuad: An Sagart. Press: Cork University. Dublin: Geography Publications. Folk Life Volume and 52 Colmcille's Well, Ardsbeg, Co. Donegal' Donegal Annual , 66 1 Singing Storytellers , L. Singing Storytellers Conference , L. Reifying the Work of Joe Heaney.

Creativity at the Edge; the role of the arts and creativity in sustaining rural and Gaeltacht communities - beyond economic critiques , Mahon, M. Joe Heaney in Sydney. Culturally specific expression and the construction of Local Identity , Dept. Perspectives on the Aesthetics of Gaelic Song. Festival of Ireland. Play's The Thing. Representations of Tragedy in the Absence of Theatre.

International Drama Conference. International Council for Traditional Music conference. Rio de Janeiro: Conference Paper [Details]. Cultural Process in a Gaelic Folksong. University of Limerick: Conference Paper [Details]. Folk Life: Journal of Ethnological Studies. Leeds: Editorship of Journals [Details]. Invited Lectures [Details]. Transformations of Indigenous Performance.

Cultural workers, precarious livelihoods, sustaining rural futures.