C'mere til I tell you: The power of the Irish storyteller

Everyone loves a good, well-woven yarn and us Irish are some of the best storytellers in the world with centuries of seanchaí to show for it. We’re also credited for having invented Samhain or Halloween, a time of year rooted in the storytelling calendar when darker evenings brought people together to hear tales, writes Orla Neligan

Sat, 29 Oct, 2022 - 20:59

Orla Neligan

There’s a story I was told as a child by a wonderful man called Paddy, a roguishly handsome Kerry fisherman with hazelnut tan and blue twinkly eyes who stitched tales together with great lyricism.

“C’mere til I tell you” he’d say, perched on his stool, cigarette dangling from his lips, which he moved from side to side with his mouth as he spoke, replacing it regularly from a pack tucked into his rolled-up shirt sleeves.

The story goes that late one night when he was driving out the Killarney road he came to an old oak tree at Moll’s Gap at which point the passenger door opened and the ghostly figure of a woman got in and sat on the seat beside him. He drove for several miles until they reached another big oak tree when she got out.

In the years that followed that story haunted me. Each time we drove through Molls Gap I would scour the countryside for oak trees, holding my breath until we got beyond the lakes. It’s a story familiar to native Kerryman and storyteller Batt Burns.

“Not quite the same but I’ve heard variations of it,” says Batt, who tells me I’m lucky to have sampled a bit of tradition and that being ‘haunted’ means the story has done its job.

Batt, now in his 80s, lived with his grandfather growing up, a traditional seanchaí – those who passed on folklore, traditions and customs from the past while also being wickedly entertaining.

They were the original storytellers, often travelling from village to village to tell tales of Fionn mac Cumhaill and Daniel O’Connell, of fairy forts, banshees and ghost stories, and occasionally an embellishment of a recent bar fight at the local watering hole.

Seanchaí thrived for centuries, their stories especially popular during winter when people would gather in each other’s houses to hear tales until the early hours.

Halloween, in particular, holds a key place in the storytelling calendar, rooted in the Celtic festival of Samhain when the light of summer yielded to the darkness of winter and imaginations flourished in the shadows. Storytelling back then was rooted in its original transmission form, through the older generations by the fireside in the evenings or out in the fields while they worked.

It was a time before technology when words were entertainment, a source of communication, and company, which for many older people in rural Ireland was a lifeline, until it petered out in the 50s, replaced by radio and television.

Eamonn Kelly was one of Ireland’s best-known and loved storytellers who managed to bridge the gap between farmhouse and technology, his tales crafted for radio in the 50s and 60s.

“Our houses were the epicentres of storytelling,” notes Nuala Hayes, an actor, storyteller and member of the Storytellers of Ireland.

“Now TVs are the epicentres of our houses and we’re being bombarded by news and ‘stories’ from all over the world which makes it hard to compete.”

According to Nuala, it’s the most democratic of art forms and yet it’s neglected, seen as a poor relation of music or drama.

“If it survives it’s by accident,” says storyteller Eddie Linehan. “The interest of Americans has done more for it than we have as a country,” he continues.

Eddie, now in his 70s, is one of Ireland’s most prolific tellers, collecting stories since his time as a phonetics student in his 20s.

“We’re in a post-tradition Ireland where our traditions are completely lost on populations of people in cities and towns. What is so interesting about storytelling is that it brings Ireland to life in a way a book cannot.”

But you can’t keep something alive for its own sake and risk killing its spirit; it needs to have the freedom to grow and while the original seanchaíthe are a dying breed, there is resurgence of the oral tradition and ‘tellers’, whether poets or musicians, who are creating a new oral tradition.

Batt still heads up the Sneem Storytelling Festival but is passing the gauntlet to the younger generation, one of whom is his son, destined for storytelling greatness. According to Batt, the original form of transmission is the only way to keep it going but it’s a skill lost on many of us. Of the hundreds of recordings Eddie Linehan has made, he cites five or six as being ‘true’ storytellers.

Author, storyteller, lecturer and broadcaster, Eddie Lenihan

The Irish love to talk, in fact, we are often described as great storytellers, but there’s true skill in recalling a canon of stories, characters and context, capturing your audience and keeping them there for an hour or more while giving your story momentum.

“I always tell a story I’ve heard,” says Eddie, “never from a book because I like to give recognition and respect to the people who have told me those stories, most of them are dead at this point and it keeps their memory alive.”

While Nuala writes her own stories she is also intent on keeping the oral thread going and, in particular, stories that Peig Sayers told.

“Not those familiar to most of us from school curriculums but stories many of us have never heard such as the one about a powerful man in Kerry who was building a big house, constantly adding to it. Everyone knew he was married for years and had no children and yet he would tell everyone it was for the generations to come. Everyday after dinner his wife would swim in the sea by their house. One particular day she went down for her swim and saw a figure of a man beside her, she got a fright and ran out of the water and collapsed. When she woke up there was nobody there so she picked up her clothes and never said a word to anyone. A few months passed and she discovered she was pregnant. Everyone delighted in the news, including her husband and in time a great sturdy boy arrived who grew up to be a successful man. He had everything he wanted: plenty of money, horses and land but there was one strange thing… he never slept a wink .... ” Nuala pauses for effect.

“Go on,” I tell her.

“I’ll leave it there,” she says, much to my frustration. “You take it where you want it to go,” and laughs.

(When Peig Sayers told this story in her 80s in hospital one of the nurses asked “was he not tired?” to which she apparently replied. “Sure if he was tired he would have slept.”)

Cork man Pat Speight refuses to call himself a seanchaí. In fact he doesn’t believe there are any seanchaí left in Ireland today.

“Originally it came from ‘seanfhocal’ – old proverbs of wisdom but that’s all changed nowadays. Storytelling is merely entertainment but it has always taken great talent,” he adds.

Years ago the seanchaí were ordinary, local people, for example, fishermen, farmers, carpenters, thatchers, who had a gift for telling a story and recalling names of the fields or who was related to whom in the town. People went to them for information as much as for stories.

“As a child growing up in Cork,” says Pat, “all of my aunts and uncles would arrive every Saturday night and everyone was expected to have a party piece. I don’t normally sing and what I sing I don’t sing normally [laughs] but I was always interested in folklore so I told mighty stories about Fionn mac Cumhaill instead.”

And like most performers he got bitten by the bug. “There is nothing between you and the audience except the story,” says Pat.

“There is no competition, no ego, just the passing of the story. You feel as though you’re dancing with the audience and them with you.”

For every storyteller, it’s an organic process, nothing is prepared and the stories chosen depend on the audience but for most, there must be some humour and usually following the old formula, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

“I have discovered the most unlikely stories in the most unlikely of places,” says Eddie recalling a few gems from a bachelor farmer with a razor-sharp memory in an old grubby kitchen in the Midlands.

“It’s these stories from long ago that are dying out,” says Eddie. “Everyone can tell a story but not everyone can really ‘tell’ a story. These tales are like a poor man’s play or novel: no lines, always done from memory and immediately adaptable at a moment’s notice; there’s great skill in that.”

We as a nation have always been in love with words and, let’s face it, we spin a good yarn especially since no story is ever told the same way twice; that’s the beauty of Irish storytelling.