‘September’ means back to school and as our young ones (some with heavy hearts!) return to classrooms around the country, Mary Caulfield takes a look through ‘The Schools’ Collection – Bailiúchán na Scol’ and explains why the collection of the oral traditions of the Irish people is a work of national importance

Except for a remote and similar example in the little Italian republic of San Marino, the scheme has no parallel in European education.
(Irish Times, February 1939)

When I volunteered to transcribe part of the Schools’ Folklore Collection, I expected a tedious slog. There were lists of prayers, proverbs and placenames, numerous accounts of hidden treasure, legends from the past and much more. Very quickly I realised that behind these stories is the history of a landscape, the hardship of the time, the story of a people, materially poor yet culturally rich, who had a wealth of oral material waiting to be recorded.

This worthwhile project was initiated in 1937 when the Irish Folklore Commission in cooperation with the Department of Education and the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation set about recording a collection of the oral traditions of the Irish people.
In a guidebook for teachers the urgency of the project is made clear. The collection of the oral traditions of the Irish people is a work of national importance …

The task is an urgent one for in our time most of this important national oral heritage will have passed away forever.
The result of the project was the creation of more than half a million manuscript pages referred to as “The Schools’ Collection”.
This is now digitised and in the process of being transcribed by volunteers, from the original handwritten form to more modern script, making it easier to read.

Three groups of people were involved in the work; children, senior pupils from fifth or sixth standards referred to as “collectors”, older people who narrated the stories, referred to as “informants” and teachers who coordinated the work. These three groups were unpaid participants so it is fitting that the work of transcribing the material is done by volunteers.

As I delved into the work of transcription, concentrating on schools where Irish was the spoken language, I thought more and more about these three groups, the people behind the project.

First of all the children, they were asked to go home and ask their parents, grandparents and neighbours for stories in relation to a specific range of subjects. A total of fifty-five headings were specified, ranging from weather, old customs, to cures and stories of hidden gold and heroic deeds.
The stories were written down by the children, brought to school, checked by the teacher and entered in a large official journal supplied by the Department of Education.

These were the days of inkwells in desks where transferring the ink to paper without blotting the page was a skill in itself.
What a quantum leap from the pen and ink of the time to the ‘touch of a button’ technology of today.
What came across was the high standard of Irish achieved by those young people, evident in the scope of vocabulary and the accuracy of grammar.
The clear careful scripts were written by young hands in the cold classrooms of the 1930s. In some cases these same hands carried sods of peat, walking long distances to school while deriving little benefit from the resultant fire.

A note from the Folklore Commission warns present day users about “content which may cause offence or distress”.
One cannot help but think of the young children exposed to the content. Behind some of the stories is a sense of the poverty and hardship of the time and there are quite a few entries under the title, ‘An Droch Shaol’ (The Hard Times).

One young boy couldn’t afford to buy a football as “there was very little money in our village”. He and his friends improvised by ripping an old pair of woollen socks, rewinding the wool into a tight ball and sewing it together with cotton thread.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own

Photo credit: Aidan Herdman shared to the Museum of Childhood Ireland: www.museumofchildhood.ie