It's one thing to see old pictures and read tales that reinforce perceptions of Sayers as a doom-sayer, especially when set against excerpts of others' work satirising her life and legacy.īut when Ní Uallacháin steps into the archives at the National Folklore Collection at UCD, history springs to life. A constant of the documentary, in fact, is questioning her suitability for the syllabus in the first place - a decision attributed to the early Irish governments' attempts at placing an established Irish canon in schools, as well as selective interpretation on her son Maidhc's part when writing stories down. It was never Sayers' intention to be placed on the curriculum in the first place, of course. Certainly we must strive towards a sympathetic understanding of the lifeworld of authors from different places and times but in the end the only true tribute we can pay them comes from within our own experience and our own minds and hearts.Many people of a certain vintage point to her writing as a deterrent from learning Irish ("That bitch ruined my life!", exclaims one person, in a story). In my view literature is kept alive by being encountered, thought about and felt by real people now. So I must emphatically disagree with Fr Moore's argument that to do justice to the writing of the past we must suspend our own judgements, our moral and ideological perspectives.
Are we to deny her inalienable protest against the circumstances of that life? All her life, to judge from these texts, she continued to question and struggle to accept what she saw as the divine arrangements which permitted such grief and heartbreak. Her life story gives luminous witness to the ordinary fate of the poor, and in particular to the lives of women - many births, multiple infant deaths, early widowhood, loss of her grown family to emigration or death - in an age of bare subsistence and a place of physical exposure, danger and isolation. I have also come to revere her as a representative figure in Irish history one of a whole class of unregarded people who toiled lifelong, she yet kept her dignity and that gift of intense consciousness of life which marks an artist and a bearer of verbal art. Indeed, a central part of my argument was that this specifically literary achievement has been somewhat undervalued, having been understandably eclipsed by her other identity as oral storyteller. If Fr Moore had been present he would have heard how warmly I share his admiration and respect for Peig and for the skill, intelligence and beauty of her writing as narrative art.
Do we not owe both these people, and all those others whom these books so vividly represent, the honesty to acknowledge such feelings? Or are we to pretend that Blasket life was an idyll? This is that Peig in her youth sharply resented the economic circumstances of her life, and still felt strongly enough about this in her old age to communicate the feeling to her son Micheal O Gaoithin when together they put together the volumes of her autobiography. I did indeed point to an element in Peig's thought which anyone who reads the three books in question (not just Peig, but also Machtnamh SheanaMhna and Beatha Pheig Sayers) can see for themselves, though it was not generally emphasised in the received version of Peig's life as enshrined in our national ideology for so many decades. For the record, I did not say that Peig Sayers was a feminist.
Sir, - Fr Pat Moore writes critically (April 6th) about my discussion of Peig Sayers at Comoradh an Bhlascaoid.
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