1. Background

2. Rural life

3. Significance

4. History
     Cultural attitude  

5. Dialect

6. Plot summary

7. Reception

8. Bibliography

Background

Séamus Ó Maolchathaigh was a resident of South Tipperary county in central Ireland, which has been abolished since June 2014. The region contains several mountain ranges, one named Knockmealdown that borders Waterford.^[8] The terrain is largely secluded from other counties, contributing to the isolation of Maolchataigh's hometown and the survival of the Tipperary dialect of the Irish language until the twentieth century, which is now endangered as an entire language.

The book is a written memoir of his daily life, and has been hailed for its historical significance because it is a written source of an Irish language dialect that also gives insight to old rural Irish life.^[9]

Rural life

The region between Tipperary and Waterford has not changed much since the death of its dialect and the publication of An Gleann Is A Raibh Ann. Much of Tipperary consists of fertile land, and is known by the name of "the Golden Vale" as one of the richest agricultural areas of Ireland. Primarily, occupations and daily life consist of dairy farming, cattle raising, horse breeding, quarrying, and processing of meat and flour.^[10] National pride is strong in Tipperary, with the region being referred to as the "Premier County" by editor Thomas Davis in the 1840s as a tribute to the nationalistic feeling in Tipperary, with the saying that "where Tipperary leads, Ireland follows".

Significance

History

The dialect of Tipperary was predominantly spoken in this Irish county for nearly five hundred years until it slowly dwindled to extinction in the early twentieth century.^[11] An Gleann Is A Raibh Ann is the last remaining fragment of this dialect, with the story also encapsulating the workings of old Irish life prior to the contemporary era. Since the language was written down and able to be preserved, it was translated into standardized Irish in 1960 and distributed to the general public. Information about old rural Irish life was made available to native Irish citizens, as well as exposure to a traditional dialect of the language.

Recently, the book was retranslated by linguistic researcher Michael Desmond in a project named Oidhreacht An Chaisleáin Nua in an effort to transcribe the manuscript of this book. A literary festival, by the name of Éigse Shéamais Ui Mhaolchataigh, centered around the book was held in which the transcription of the book was made available to students and scholars of the Irish language. It received praise, being noted as an effort to revive the Irish language in this area.^[12]

Cultural attitude

This book also largely appeals to the Irish public because, generally, Irish people are interested in the history of the older, endangered language of Irish. Dialects, information, and speakers of Irish are highly valued in Ireland, especially since the traditional language is an endangered minority and represents national pride. Helen McGrath, one of the founders of the festival, notes, " Locals are really interested in the language and to some degree there is still a lot of Irish in the local dialect. "People used to come here from far and wide when this place had Gaeltacht status until the 1950’s and they would stay here with locals to learn Irish. There was money to be made by keeping girls and boys in the village back then”, she says."Now there are no households where Irish is the primary language but there is still an interest in the language and you hear it in conversations." ^[13]

Much of old Irish was passed down through oral traditions rather than literary, making it difficult to preserve. This, along with the effort of the British government to limit speakers of the language contributed to its endangerment and death of various regional dialects. "The situation is more complex still given the loss of language and culture, the widespread dispersal of people through mass emigration and the silencing of the Irish-language sources – all of which ensures only a very hazy picture of our past." ^[14]

An Gleann Is A Raibh Ann therefore is significant to the history of Irish because of its engagement of social history with old Irish dialect that gives insight to unperturbed, authentic Irish life before the twentieth century.

Dialect

There were native speakers of Irish in South Tipperary until the middle of the 20th century. Recordings of their dialect, made before the last native speakers died, have been made available through a project of the Royal Irish Academy Library.^[15] One such speaker that was studied, Séamas Ó Liatháin, was from the same town of Tipperary and was the last generational speaker of this dialect along with Séamus Ó Maolchathaigh.^[16]

Plot summary

The book delves into the daily life and autobiography of Séamus Ó Maolchathaigh, who lived from 1884 to 1968 on the border between Tipperary and Waterford, in a mountainous area of the Knockmealdowns.^[17] Ó Maolchathaigh's parents were both Irish speakers from Newcastle, South Tipperary. His father was a farm laborer named Thomas Mulcahy and his mother was Margaret Burke. After receiving his education in a traditional school in Newcastle, Ó Maolchathaigh went to a college in De La Salle, Waterford, to train in education. He then returned to New Castle, Tipperary, where he spent 44 years working as a teacher in Grange National School.Apart from this, he published short stories and essays in newspapers and journals such as Scéala Éireann in his dialect of Tipperary. He also translated a number of French plays into Irish.^[18]

Ó Maolchathaigh wrote extensively about the daily workings of his rural life, including entries regarding family and friends, and tending to animals on farm as characteristic of rural Tipperary life.^[19] Apart from this however, he also wrote deeply about subjects that were uncharacteristic of literature at the time, including crime, greed, mental illness, suicide, and murder. Specifically, during the Irish famine, he mentioned the concept of Irish hitmen who were willing to remove people from particular landholdings in exchange for money so that others could take over the land. In other parts of his narrative, he discussed poverty, and describes wanderers and beggars who lodged with local people up until the late 1940s. Some of these people, he noted, had physical or intellectual difficulties and who managed to avoid institutionalization by the government. He noted that this because increasingly common as the 20th century progressed and the new nation-state developed.^[20]

Reception

The book was received with strong, positive reviews, particularly among scholars of the Irish language. He was considered both brave and radical for his time because he objectively mentioned such “taboo” subjects of suicide, mental illness, and greed for land and murder. Apart from this, the larger significance of his memoir was noted, as a historical Irish literary work that preserved the last remnants of an Irish dialect and workings of rural life in an Irish-speaking community.^[21]

One English translator of the book likens the significance of this work to humanity and restoring confidence in fragments of history. {{Quote|text=The crisis of historical confidence that the last century wreaked on us. We no longer believe in objectivity; we don't trust the history books to tell the story of ourselves, whether because it is too disturbing or merely too mundane. But we are desperate for that story to be told, so we look for our lives that intersect with bits of history that affect us. The great power of this memoir is that, when it works, it touches a common humanity we fear that no longer exists.|author=Liam Harte |source=Modern Irish Autobiography, Self, Nation and Society (2007)}}^[22]

The work has been translated to standardized Irish in 1960, and then went onto be translated into English and made available to a much larger audience larger than only the Irish-speaking public. It is available on Amazon, Google Books, World Cat, and other platforms by consumer demand.

Bibliography

• A Million (song)
• A Million Stars
• A Million Stars (Luminița Anghel song)
• A Million Suns
• A Million Thoughts and They’re All About You
• A Million to One (film)
• A million voices
• A Million Voices
• A Million Voices (Polina Gagarina song)
• A Million Voices (song)
• A Million Ways to Die in the West
• A Million Ways to Die In the West
• A Million Ways To Die In The West
• A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014 film)
• A Million Ways to Die in the West (film project)
• A Million Ways to Die in the West (novel)
• A Million Ways to Die in the West (soundtrack)
• A Million Wild Acres
• 'A Million Wild Acres'
• Amilo
• Amilo (disambiguation)
• Amilo, Varanasi
• Amiloxate
• Amils
• Ami Maayani