Government supported website provides images of Mayo's past
MORE than 10,000 historic pictures from Ireland’s past, including many from, Mayo have been added to a folklore website, Fine Gael Senator for Mayo, Michelle Mulherin, has said.
The new redesigned duchas.ie website and photographic collection was launched in Dublin by Government Chief Whip and Minister of State with responsibility for Gaeilge, Gaeltacht and the Islands, Joe McHugh TD.
The photographic collection, which was also launched as part of yesterday’s event, is the latest resource to be added to the site. c.10,000 photographs from the Collection have been digitized, catalogued and made available for the first time on duchas.ie.
Senator Mulherin said: “This is an incredible new resource for Mayo, providing a fascinating insight into our past.
“A large number of the photographs date from the early 20th century. The Collection contains photographs taken by professional photographers and by collectors working with the National Folklore Commission, amongst others.
“The photographs are classified under 14 different topics including: festivals; holy wells; settlement; the community; folklore collection (of course); and games & pastimes. Visitors to the site can get a sense of the work of the Commission in photographs of well-known storytellers such as Seán Ó Conaill, Peig Sayers and Tomás Ó Criomhthain.
“There is also a wonderful collection of photographs taken by Michael J. Murphy while he was collecting folklore in counties such as Antrim, Armagh and Louth.
“Although it’s fair to say that there is a particular emphasis on country life, towns and cities were not neglected. The majority of urban photographs relate to Dublin and especially to the folklore collection initiative which took place at the start of the 1980s. It contains an interesting record of the people, places and various aspects of life in the capital city.”
“In addition to this, material from each of the 26 counties that took part in the Schools’ Scheme in 1937-39 is also available on the website. Meitheal Duchas.ie, a transcription project, began in Spring 2015 and is one of the most successful crowdsourced projects of its kind in the world. Some members of the Meitheal from Ireland, Canada and the United States were in attendance at the event yesterday.
“Fine Gael places enormous importance on our national history and heritage and on the preservation of all our folklore and historic photographs. Putting all these resources online so everyone has access to them will allow people here in Mayo to witness our past from their laptops and mobile devices. It really is a fascinating insight into our past and I have presented some pictures here showing Killala Round Tower in 1955, and people working on our beautiful River Moy in 1946.”
Speaking at the event, Minister McHugh said: “The first version of duchas.ie enabled the online public to engage with this country’s heritage through the writings of 1930s school children, as gathered in the Schools’ Collection.
“This new version of the website, and the Photographic Collection, will provide a new perspective on Ireland’s rich and varied heritage with thousands of photographs from different times and places made easily available via the browsing facilities. This new collection will add to the value of duchas.ie as a digital heritage resource.
The site is popular both with Irish people and the Irish diaspora. Users are located in Britain, the USA, Australia and Canada, as well as in many other countries.
For specialist researchers in the fields of folkloristics, local history, archaeology, genealogy, linguistics, and a range of other disciplines, duchas.ie offers considerable research potential. The site can currently be searched by place, by person and by topic, and it has material from almost every parish in Ireland.
The Dúchas project is the result of a partnership, beginning in 2012, between the National Folklore Collection in UCD, one of the largest folklore collections in the world, UCD Digital Library and Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge, the Irish-medium teaching and research unit in DCU.
The objective of the project is to digitise the National Folklore Collection and make it available to the public online. The project is co-funded by the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, with support from the National Lottery and by University College Dublin. The project has also benefitted from the financial support of the National Folklore Foundation.