Know Your 5K project helps us discover our local hidden heritage

Over recent months, primarily due to lockdown, many of us began to see our immediate local area with new eyes, discovering treasures we’d overlooked before. We talk to four people – out of over 100 – who contributed to the project and who shared discoveries and insights about the hidden heritage of their locality.

Stephen McDonagh with a photo of the piper Pádraig Ó Briain at the site where the piper was born at Labasheeda, Co Clare. Picture: Bruce Dietz.

Passionate about Irish history and heritage, secondary schoolteacher Stephen McDonagh, 35, spent lockdown in Labasheeda, Co Clare with his parents, who were cocooning. During the lockdown, Stephen worked for his community, monitored the lesser horseshoe bat for the National Parks & Wildlife Service, and applied for teaching jobs.

“I’m from the same townland as the piper, Pádraig Ó Briain. He’s the subject of one of the most famous 19th-century paintings, done by Joseph Patrick Haverty, a copy of which hangs in the National Gallery. The site of the house where he was born is just 100 yards back the road from my house.