Posted 04 March 2015
President Higgins visits the National Folklore Collection at UCD
The President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins has visited the National Folklore Collection - Cnuasach Bhéaloideas Éireann - at University College Dublin to view some of the materials collected by scholars in both Irish and English dating back to the early 1900s.
Housed at University College Dublin, the collection was inherited from the Irish Folklore Commission in the 1970s. It is one of the largest collections of its type in the world and contains around 2 million manuscript pages, 12,000 hours of sound recordings, 80,000 photographs, and 1,000 hours of video material.
The President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins views materials from the National Folklore Collection with Prof Ríonach uí Ógáin, Director, National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin
While visiting the collection, President Higgins, who as President of Ireland is the Patron of the National Folklore Collection, said, “I am very happy to have this occasion to acknowledge the significance of our National Folklore Collection, and to praise the great work carried out by Professor Ríonach Uí Ógáin and her team. It is for me an honour to be patron of such a wonderful cultural repository.”
“This archive performs an essential function, I would suggest, in ensuring access to our forebearers’ intensity of vision and imagination, to the diversity of their beliefs and practices, and their extraordinary inventiveness. It enables us to approach that unique combination between the particular and the universal that is characteristic of vernacular culture,” said President Higgins.
The President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins and President of UCD, Professor Andrew J Deeks pictured at University College Dublin
The President of UCD, Professor Andrew J Deeks, who accompanied President Higgins on his visit, highlighted that there are ongoing initiatives to digitise repositories in the university’s care that will greatly increase the global visibility of these crucially important Irish ethnographic materials.
After visiting the National Folklore Collection, President Higgins addressed an international symposium entitled “Believing in the Tradition Archive” hosted by University College Dublin.
The one-day symposium brought together theorists and practitioners to work through the three main areas of a tradition archive out of which new thinking will emerge. These areas are preservation, dissemination as well as augmentation and the symposium will also include discussion on further collaboration, dialogue and critical debates.(Produced by UCD University Relations)
