Deirdre Ní Chonghaile - "Tomás Ó Máille and Sound Recording in the Modern Irish State"

Tomás Ó Máille (1880-1938) was the inaugural Professor of Irish at University College Galway. Born in 1880 in the Maam Valley in Connemara into a prosperous, Irish-speaking family, Tomás trained in Dublin, Manchester, Liverpool, Baden, Berlin, and Freiburg where he was awarded his doctorate in 1909. He was associated with the West Connemara flying column, and his brother Pádraic (1876–1946) was a member of the first Dáil. Belonging to the coterie of radical intellectuals and political and cultural leaders of the War of Independence, Ó Máille’s achievements are rightly considered alongside those of his fellow revolutionaries, his friend Patrick Pearse and fellow academics Thomas McDonagh and Éamon de Valera.

A folklore and song collector, newspaper editor, linguist, and teacher, Ó Máille was in a pioneer in many ways. His greatest foresight was his commitment to the newest technology of his day – audio recording. From 1928, he created over 500 recordings of speech, storytelling, and song from Irish speakers throughout Connacht and Clare, which can now be heard at https://www.universityofgalway.ie/tomasomaille-ga/. Ó Máille also assisted the recording work of other collectors and scholars including Wilhelm Doegen whose Irish recordings are hosted by the Royal Irish Academy at https://www.doegen.ie.

This lecture marks Prof. Ó Máille’s contribution – unparalleled in scale and ambition – to the audio heritage of Ireland and coincides with the bilingual exhibition Culture & Citizenship: Tomás Ó Máille touring Ireland throughout 2023.

Deirdre Ní Chonghaile is a writer, musician, broadcaster, and curator from the Aran Islands, Co. Galway. She works with artists, communities, and institutions on cultural heritage projects, specializing in Irish language and music archives. She read Music at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, worked at the University of Notre Dame and the Library of Congress, and has taught part-time at the University of Galway. Described as “one of the most important and fascinating books about Irish traditional music in recent memory,” her 2021 monograph Collecting Music in the Aran Islands: A Century of History and Practice won the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture from the American Conference for Irish Studies. Her next book will be an edition of over fifty traditional songs composed in the Aran Islands from the nineteenth century to the present day. Her exhibition on the pioneering Irish language scholar, newspaper editor, and folklore collector, Prof. Tomás Ó Máille, runs at the Royal Irish Academy in Spring 2023. In January 2023, she was appointed Associate Research Scholar at New York University where she is working on a digital edition of the Irish-American bilingual newspaper, An Gaodhal, training artifical intelligence to read the cló Gaelach.

Notes & Narratives will take place at Na Píobairí Uilleann, 15 Henrietta Street, Dublin 1, starting at 8:30pm on Thursday 18th May 2023. Admission is €10 (unwaged / student / retired €5). For those unable to attend in person, it will also be live streamed for free through our channel NPU-TV.

Na Píobairí Uilleann presents Notes & Narratives – a series of monthly performance-based lectures on traditional music, song and dance by some of Ireland’s finest traditional artists.

Supported by The Arts Council.