Colm O'Regan: You wouldn’t think much happened in Ireland before Italia 90 but they did some things right
It’s calming to be doing something. I’m fretting mad about work drying up and needing to “make use of the time” given to us by the Shutdown, writes Colm O’’Regan
It’s one of those Irish words that feels like it has meaning coiled into it like a hidden dimension. DÚCHAS. Pronounced TH(as in then) — OOOKHH-USSSS . It means heritage or instinct but also how that heritage/instinct informs who you are now. It’s a powerful Richard-Harris-in-The-Field of a word. A Grainnuaile of a thing. If it is said by someone who has trained in the Abbey Theatre, made puppets for Macnas or the original Leigh Anois Go Churamach Na Treoracha Agus Na Ceisteanna a Ghabhann le chuid AAAAA-Man, it has magical powers.
It gets misused. That proverb “Briseann an dúchas trí shuile an chait” or “The heritage of a cat comes out through its eyes”. The kind of thing old-school headmasters would say to children as a slight against the family if they were Townies.
But dúchas also means very positive things and right now on dúchas.ie they have a project called meitheal. Meitheal is the Irish for a work-party. And by work-party it’s not pints down the front of your Ralph Laurens blue shirt. It’s a group of workers on the side of the road or in a field. This Meitheal is to transcribe pages and pages of ‘The Schools Collection’.
You wouldn’t think much happened in Ireland before Italia 90 but they did some things right. The School’s Collection comprises hundreds of thousands of manuscript pages and was gathered between 1937 and 1939 by half a million schoolchildren in Ireland. They went out with their copybooks and recorded all sorts of yarns — folk medicine, sports and pastimes, mythology, human life, nature, history and religious traditions — from their family and neighbours. It’s apparently so important an archive, it’s registered with UNESCO. And UNESCO don’t be including any old thing. Just some old things. There are still a few hundred thousand pages scanned in copybooks and Dúchas want volunteers to type it up. And for the last few days I’ve joined in.
Priest stumbles on a house & asks the owner, James, did he go to Mass. The questions continue.
— dúchas.ie (@duchas_ie) March 29, 2020
Priest: "When did Christ die?"
James: "Oh! is he dead. If I knew that I'd have gone to the funeral."https://t.co/JYMq2umL1u
It’s a sort of therapy — writing down what a school-child’s uncle told her was the name for sprouting spuds or what the Divil said to the man at the cross-roads. It’s calming to be doing something. I’m fretting mad about work drying up and needing to “make use of the time” given to us by the Shutdown. I’m trying to think of the Next Great Novel or a podcast that will find some niche not already covered by the other nine million podcasts and have people absolutely agog. And I’ll stand back and just hold out my jumper while the coinage pours into it from the Internet.
But nothing’s happening. I’m about as useful as the proverbials on a bull.
So now, if I’m feeling useless and have ten minutes in between answering a child’s question about “Daddy what colour is air?”, I join up for the meitheal and transcribe a page written down by another child (with immaculate handwriting) 85 years ago.
It’s also therapeutic to be part of a meitheal. A few thousand of us beavering away toward a common goal. It’s not exactly like the original meitheal. There isn’t a child running up to me and hopping onto a moving combine to me a bottle of Harp and a bun. But still.
What else could we all be doing with ten minutes in between child-care that will benefit the world while we’re stuck at home? Putting strangers receipts into spreadsheets for their expenses, deleting others’ crap photos out of the Cloud, deleting comments off Facebook. What’s a modern meitheal?
