The island folklore of Oileáin Árann has been collated on a new website by residents of Inis Mór, working with a number of academic partners.
Bailiúchán Béaloidis Árann, the Árainn Folklore Project, has been “more than twenty years a-growing”, according to the project’s digital curator, Deirdre Ní Chonghaile.
The website includes hundreds of photographs and over 100 audio recordings, as well as some videos collected over the past two decades.
All of these are enriched with detailed information, identifying the individuals and places appearing in them, she says.
The website’s search capacity extends to a variety of elements, with transcriptions written by island women accompanying the sound recordings of interviews.
Bailiúchán Béaloidis Árann is the only major collection of island folklore to be created by Inis Mór islanders themselves, Ní Chonghaile says.
Over many years since 2000, Bailiúchán Béaloidis Árann has earned support from major figures of the Aran canon, including photographer Bill Doyle, writer and cartographer Tim Robinson, and linguist Dr James Duran, she says.
It has also produced “two fine books”, Árainn: Cosáin an tSaoil (2003) and Ár nOileán: Tuile is Trá (2004), she says.
Bailiúchán Béaloidis Árann had two primary objectives: to preserve island folklore for future generations of islanders; and to ensure that the islands’ folklore would be accessible. The new website “enables islanders to combine those two objectives”, Ní Chonghaile says.
Collaborators on the project are Gaois, Fiontar and Scoil na Gaeilge, Dublin City University, and the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin, the co-creators of the website dúchas.ie.
Funders included the LEADER scheme, the Heritage Council of Ireland, and the local co-op Comharchumann Forbartha Árann.
“Though the entire collection awaits a permanent home at home in Árainn, we remain hopeful its day will come. In the meantime, people will savour and delight in this new resource, which demonstrates so well the faith and creativity of the women who created,” she says.
The website was formally initiated by Dr Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh, director of the National Folklore Collection, in Kilmurvey House on Árainn on Friday (Jan 6).