Magic and enchantment – ​​Pádraigín Riggs on the traveler and storyteller Tomás Ó Cathasaigh – The Irish Times

In 1936, the Irish Folklore Society published a collection of short stories entitled Ocht Sgéalta ó Choillte Mághach. This little book consisted of eight stories, told orally by Tomás Ó Cathasaigh of Kiltimagh, Co. Mayo, and edited by An Craoibhín Aoibhinn (Douglas Hyde), who collected them from the storyteller.

Three years later, the Irish Texts Society published a much expanded collection of Ó Cathasaigh’s stories, this time with an English translation and again edited by Hyde.

Only one of the previously published stories is included in the Irish Texts Society volume – described by the editor as “…sui generis and unlike anything I have ever encountered.”

To date, little is known about Ó Cathasaigh’s life. Hyde describes him as 80 years old in 1936, the year before his death, but the entry in Ainm.ie he gives 1861 as the most likely date of his birth, based on evidence from the 1901 census which would put him at 75 years old. According to the same source, Tomás was married to Bridget and they had five children. Both parents spoke Irish and English but could not read; the children only spoke English. Hyde claims that Tomás was able to write English “honestly”.

What is unusual about this storyteller, whose repertoire was in Irish, is that he came from a traveling community.

Hyde’s main source of information about Ó Cathasaigh was a letter written after Tomás’s death by Annie Doyle, then a student at St Louis Convent in Kiltimagh.

A fragment of the letter (translated by Hyde) reads: “The tinker was Tummaus and his clan before him, but his mother settled in this city. When Tummaus was a young man, he married an out-of-town girl and engaged in tinkering, making tinware, and buying mules and the like. He did well financially and bought a house. Then he was a bailiff on the river near the city for a while to put an end to the salmon fishing, but the people didn’t trust him.” (That means they didn’t trust him). She continues, “He was a very charming and wise man and listened to his stories around the house every night.”

However, he was believed to be associated with the Fenians and had revealed some secret information about them. (If he had only been born in 1861, this would seem unlikely.)

Whatever the reason, Annie Doyle claims that he was banished from the city and the local people thought he was dead until the book Ocht Sgéalta ó Choillte Mághach was published. He was famous for always emerging victorious from the various incidents that occurred around him, hence the expression in the Mayo language: “You’re as charming as the handyman O’Casey.”

Tomás told Hyde that he got his stories from his grandfather, Seán Buidhe Ó Raghallaigh, who was born near Castlebar and is said to have spent 40 years with Colonel Martin (“Humanity Dick”) in Ballinahinch.

Hyde tells us that Seán Buidhe, who was almost fifty years old at the time of his death, “came to Coillte Mághach or Kiltimagh and settled about three miles from the town. He told his stories at night around the fire, in his own home, and Tummaus was there, and he, as a young boy, listened to him and “collected them himself.”

When Hyde met, around 1935, Tomás was living in Co Sligo after spending some time in America.

When his wife died he had no one to speak Irish to as it was not spoken in Sligo at that time and English therefore had an increasing influence on him.

Hyde notes that he spoke Irish in Mayo “almost the same language that I myself spoke when I was young in County Roscommon”, but describes it as “a little broken and broken.” . . striving for simplicity.”

Although some of the stories in this collection contain elements of magic and spells, with clear traces of antiquity, many of them are about natural events. Hyde comments on Tomás’s ability to embellish his material so that the incredible events in which he himself was allegedly involved seem completely believable.

A volume published by the Irish Text Society in 1939, Sgéalta ó Thomás Ó Cathasaigh (Stories of Mayo as Told by Thomas Casey), will be the subject of the Society’s annual seminar on November 9 at University College, Cork, which will discuss the following topics: Ó Cathasaigh life and language, the origins of its stories in national and international contexts, and its repertoire between settled and traveling communities. Details of the event can be found on the website irishtextssociety.org “Twenty-fifth Annual ITS Seminar.”