Write a commentAine Ní Neachtain a PHD Student of Folklore and Ethology, at UCC gave a memorable presentation at last years Michael J Murphy Winter School touching on every thing from tradition to climate change, from collecting memories to the power of large centralised institutions. The Winter School returns next month to Ti Chulainn in Mullaghbane with many well known speakers taking part.
Entitled “Tradition as an Anchor: The Relevance of Michael J. Murphy’s Legacy in 2015 and Beyond” Aine's presentation was an attempt to demonstrate how we can take inspiration from Michael J Murphy, both in his approach to life, and by reflecting on some of the concepts behind the traditions he recorded, and by using this inspiration to deal with major challenges like acculturation by global corporations, environmental degradation, and climate change.
Speaking on Michael J she commented “Michael J Murphy was an extremely artistic, independent-minded man, who was very gifted in the art of folklore collection, and he believed strongly in the value of the work he undertook. He saw the greatest value in the material as being of use to future generations when they wanted to study how society develops, and what are the unconscious things which inform our actions. The journal he submitted to the Irish Folklore Commission along with the collected material provides a very well-written insight into his life and times in South Armagh up to 1983 when he retired.”
Aine's presentation can be read in full below.
2016 Winter School
The 2016 Michael J. Murphy Winter School in Ti Chulainn Cultural Centre, Mullaghbane takes place this year November 18-19, 2016.
The theme of this year’s Winter School is ‘The Independent Mind’. This is to pay homage to Michael J. Murphy, the celebrated folklorist, writer, photographer, broadcaster and socialist republican, as probably the most independent mind ever to come out of South Armagh.
With this theme in mind it is absolutely fitting that the school will commence on Friday evening, November 18th, with Fr. Peter McVerry. Peter McVerry, whose roots are in Newry and South Armagh, is the foremost independent thinker in Ireland. He has stood out for decades against the treatment of the urban poor and disadvantaged and has continually agitated against successive governments for their indifference.
On Saturday, November 19th, the theme will be further enhanced by the contribution of people who have courageously followed their own independent minds.
Niall Murphy, All-Ireland Champion musician from the Camlough area, will speak about his decision to follow a career in music. He will illustrate his talk with examples of his music.
Three well-known political and social commentators, who contribute regularly to the columns of ‘The Irish News’ and a variety of other publications and media outlets, will give individual contributions and will then take part in a forum. These distinguished independent minds are Fionnuala O’Connor, Brian Feeney and Patrick Murphy.
Also at the weekend the winner of The Michael J. Murphy Short Story Competition will be announced. The competition is open to all over-18s and the closing date for receipt of entries is November 1st. Please post hard copies of entries(with your name, address and contact telephone number) to: The Secretary, Cuimhneamh, Ti Chulainn, Maphoner, Mullaghbane, Newry, Co.Armagh.
Tradition as an Anchor: The Relevance of Michael J. Murphy’s Legacy in 2015 and Beyond
Introduction
Following a brief outline of the work of the Irish Folklore Commission and Michael J Murphy’s role, I will propose how this one extraordinary ordinary man can be an inspiration to us, today and in the years to come, as communities all around this country face very serious challenges to our way of life and our environment.
During the course of more than 40 years’ service as a professional Folklore Collector, Michael J Murphy (1913-1996), of Dromintee, Co Armagh, amassed a collection of more than 30,000 pages, including some 4,000 pages of journal, and 1,100 photographs, now housed in the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin. His collection relates mainly to the Border communities, the Glens of Antrim, and Rathlin. He worked like a detective, skilfully and sensitively piecing together the oral history of his people. Folklore Collection was only one aspect of Murphy’s work. He was also a prolific prose writer, dramatist, broadcaster, and correspondent. He was never hesitant in speaking and writing about bigotry, inequality, and social injustice. Indeed, he was very often ostracised as a result of his outspoken-ness, a penalty he accepted with sanguinity.
The life of the collectors
The concern of the Irish Folklore Commission was that, with the failure of the Irish language, and the advent of modernity, the rich deposit of oral literature and knowledge which had developed organically over hundreds of generations in the minds of ordinary people would disappear forever. The collection campaign throughout the country resulted in one of the largest and most respected collections of oral and ethnographic material in the world, now housed in UCD. The brief of the collector was to find members of the community who were storytellers and raconteurs, arrange to visit them in their homes or elsewhere, and to record and transcribe their stories and accounts of traditions associated with hundreds of topics. The material, along with an accompanying field journal, was then forwarded to UCD for archiving.
The work involved long hours of concentration, ingenuity, skill, and oftentimes considerable hardship, away from home, in damp, cold conditions. Michael J Murphy’s most difficult task was convincing people of the value of their traditions, and all his life he suffered a certain amount of ridicule because of his interest in folklore and his occupation. People were quite reticent at times in parting with the material, especially if it was being recorded, or if they suddenly remembered that it was being submitted to a Govt. Agency. However, he had a knack for extracting material which people wouldn’t normally dream of revealing to someone to whom they were not intimately connected. The following short extract from an article he wrote for the Irish Independent on 8 August 1946 entitled Man Who Followed the Fairies explains one of the ways he overcame the reticence of his sources:
But close as the fairies are to the feelings of our old people, they naturally suspect (for country folk are curious only after being cautious) the stranger asking about fairy tales. You might be a Pension Officer in disguise… until your idiom and sympathetic insight into the secrets of the social life of the Irish fireside assures them you’re of their kin.
The field journals
The function of the field journal was to contextualise the collected material, as well as keeping Head Office informed about the day to day activities of the Collector. A large portion of Michael J’s journal is a highly personal account of what life was like for him, his family, and the community in which he lived. Michael J. made a conscious decision not to edit nor re-read his journals. The result is that the reader comes to know him, and his storytellers; we can see them in our minds eye, seated by their firesides, or in a quiet corner of a pub.
Murphy’s Field Journal reads like an Auto-ethnographic document, i.e., a document of self-reflection which describes and questions his personal experience, and connects his experience to the wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings of his community.
The following few lines from his journal, written early in his career, 1949, might explain what I mean. He is writing about harvest traditions, but it can apply to any tradition:
I know the tradition is dying, but I doubt if such a tradition, with such an ageless heritage can really die. A sound tradition is like a seed: It goes underground in apparent death, but bursts forth a thousand fold – in green, in stalk – and back to the original.
Somewhere there is a pattern shaping which will earth the seeds of the traditions I and others are collecting. A sower will arise – many sowers perhaps. One will be the inspired hand, and the old seed will produce anew.
If I thought that none ever would, I wonder would I go on with this work?
Nearly 25 years later, he is still questioning, thinking it out, as we can see in this extract from the Journal of 28th Sept 1974.
…some times when I retire into a corner to rest, I wonder and wonder about this quest on which I am engaged and it doesn’t now seem quite real to me. Identity again? Theme for the philosophers today more than ever. And I feel it is a wonderful thing I’ve done, and then feel I’ve done nothing really.
Traditions as our memory bank – How is Michael J Murphy’s work relevant today?
Time was when tradition was quite a slowly evolving thing, and was shaped from within communities. If we take it that traditions are the memory bank of a community, its shared social traits, then we can say that our traditions hold the myriad pieces of information which are transmitted to us in our mothers milk, what is right and wrong, how situations should be handled, how we mark time and occasions, and how our community operates.
We are now part of a global community, and very much under the influence of outside forces. We are constantly challenged to decide what is good and for our good, and what is detrimental to our wellbeing.
For instance, one topic which concerned Michael J was the rural depopulation of the 1950s; he referred to it in his journal as an insidious seepage and a menace, because he could see that it killed local communities. He had advocated in an article that whole town lands should arise and descend like a flock of crows on municipal and parliament buildings and squat until something done. Effectively, he was saying that the solution lay among the local people, with a strong sense of place, demanding change. This is the very same type of peaceful protest which has been the genesis of so many instances of radical social improvement that have occurred throughout the world.
The threat from the loss of people to local communities is as strong today as ever it was in the 1950s. Yes, we still have a tradition of emigration, but we also have a form of brain-drain which results in our young men and women working extremely long hours in enormous, centralised corporations and government bureaucracies, the sizes of which, to our grandparents, would have been unimaginable.
The power of large centralised institutions
For instance, it is considered a privilege to work in one of the high tech multinationals, sited in areas bearing nicknames such as Silicone Dock, and Silicone Cork. Having one of these corporations on one’s CV is a sign of success. The perks are wonderful; comfortable work surroundings, free canteen, doctor, gym, laundry, entertainment, etc. One works in an environment where it is being suggested that individual ideas matter, that everyone is an innovator, where every possible distraction from production is removed, plus one has the possibility to acquire company shares – well, who would think of questioning that? After all, one doesn’t have to think about where one’s food is grown, have to visit neither the butcher nor the fishmonger, cook a meal, sit down with family, suss out a good local gym, go to the local GP. One doesn’t have to make many decisions really, other than how to innovate, i.e., create or sell new product for the company. Why, Harriet Minter reported in the Guardian on 15th October, 2015, that at least two multinationals are offering to help towards the cost of their female employees freezing their eggs, in order that childbearing can be postponed indefinitely. What a perk!
These companies make a big deal about only hiring the best and brightest. They are all about ‘bringing our whole self to work’ now, which, as I understand it, is a philosophy wherein one is encouraged to be themselves, to celebrate one’s diversity, and not to hide one’s vulnerabilities. For instance, Tim Cooke, the current CEO of Apple, recently spoke publicly about being gay, in the context of ‘bringing your whole self to work’. All barriers are down and personal and work lives merge into one.
But when one sees a few thousand people on the factory floor, clapping and cheering frantically for their CEO, as happened in Apple in Cork recently, one has to ask if there is another side to this ‘bringing your whole self to work’ business, and could it be possible that these huge corporations, by the sheer force of their acculturation, are swallowing our best and brightest whole.
It doesn’t matter if you are being systematically deskilled, because everything is taken care of once you continue to produce for the multinational, once you stay ahead of the next brightest and best batch of workers being produced by our universities, who are getting better and better at tuning into the skillsets required by big business. You also probably won’t continue the long commute to your rural community, doesn’t make sense when you spend so little time there anyway. Your local GAA team will have to find another centre back, you don’t have time for mundane things, and as a matter of fact you forget how to do mundane things. Your sense of place is now rooted in the huge organisation for which you work, your community is your colleagues, and that’s great because even when you and your colleagues are having lunch together, or dinner in the canteen in the evening, or when you are partaking of the free beer on Friday night, you can continue to exchange ideas for innovation – how convenient for your Multinational!
I would suggest that if we want to bring our whole self to work, then we should be bringing our tradition of rebelliousness, our tradition of healthy scepticism, our tradition of working to live and not living to work. The multinational will still make money, no worries about that, but they won’t own our brightest and best, body and soul. One’s identity as an employee will be just that, and that identity will not blot out every other possible identity.
One need only look at some of the promotional videos on Youtube expounding the wonders of working in Multinational world, to see the point. The ironic thing is that these videos commonly use the words and images of tradition and folklore to motivate their workforce. It makes perfect sense, and communities should take a leaf out of their book when they decide they want to achieve a goal – draw on our traditions, get together in community groups, and the most amazing things can be achieved. This would not represent regression; it would be doing like Michael J Murphy did; question ourselves, question what we’re being told, open our eyes, and be nobody’s fool.
Shell to Sea
Why might it matter that huge centralised organisations do own thousands and thousands of people, body and soul? The fact is that they risk becoming more and more deskilled, and detached from the communities which are typical of Irish society, be it in rural or urban settings. Would it be surprising that they are too pre-occupied to defend their community, landscape, and environments from inappropriate development, from polluters, or from the effects of climate change? As a matter of fact, they may become part of that outside group, as an employee in a large Govt. department, or as a member of the Multinational community, who, when looking out over a rural landscape, sees only a wilderness. Why waste money out there on post offices, schools, local hospitals, health centres, and Garda stations? Why not put up a windfarm, or run a string of pylons, or maybe there is oil and gas under them der hills?
If we don’t know the story of the mountain, the valley, the river, the bog; if we seldom engage with it; if we whizz past it at best, or have completely left the area at worst; how likely are we to pit our best and brightest, most innovative ideas against challenges which would destroy it forever?
We need look no further than the experience of the people of Ballinaboy, Co Mayo, an unspoilt and beautiful area of natural beauty, where State power and Corporate power have coalesced to trump the objections of local communities. We saw how Shell’s private security contractors in tandem with the Gardaí Siochána oppressed the community for objecting to the destruction of their natural environment, and the threat to their traditional pastimes, by the imposition of a refinery and gas pipeline in their locality. The State agency, Caoilte, sold land tracts to Shell in a soft deal for the siting of a refinery, and Shell, by throwing beads to the natives, has divided the community irreparably for generations to come. The full reality can be appreciated on the ShelltoSea short video.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiTG0Bs3zOY
Climate Change
Aligned to issues such as the Shell to Sea problem is the fact that, according to Laura Burke, Director General of the EPA, in Ireland we live as though we have 3.2 planets at our disposal. The global environmental crisis is as a result of developed countries’ excessive consumption. Basic foods and goods are travelling vast distances. The reality is that we are consuming these foods and goods at a voracious rate; therefore we are all a part of the problem.
This is not a pleasant problem to discuss, and even though defining the problem is quite easy, taking the medicine is not one bit easy, not so much because we are individually unwilling, but more because we are being discouraged to take the medicine at every turn by governments and big business, who we have to admit are in a very unhealthy co-dependent relationship, while at the same time we are being encouraged to trust them to cure all ills. After all, these big institutions provide the jobs which help to keep politicians in power, and the politicians in turn facilitate every excess of the big institutions in order to keep the gravy train rolling.
What would Michael J Murphy say about all this? I have no way of knowing, but there are some things I can say about him without much fear of contradiction which might inspire our future actions:
He was deeply rooted in his community, and he appreciated their nobility.
He questioned himself constantly
He questioned authority constantly, and had a healthy mistrust of it.
He recognised the disconnectedness of centralised institutions.
He used his creative skills to make a social comment.
He was prepared to be unpopular
He valued meditation in the form of sitting by a fire talking, going up on the mountain to think.
He recognised the value of the past to the future
Michael J might emphasise the notion of a sense of place; that feeling of belonging, and being connected deeply and personally with our social and physical landscape. That is the feeling which ultimately motivates us to protect what we hold dear. Intimate knowledge of what surrounds us is a prerequisite to loving our place.
Tradition as an anchor
What we are being offered on the one hand glitters, with the lure of good wages, which enable us to consume all those lovely products. We can be part of a team which Changes the World by our contributions to technological advancements. And, if we hold out for another while, someone else will come up with a solution for global warming, and everything will be hunky dory.
On the other hand, should we not do, as Michael J did all the time, sit down, reflect, think things out, and realise that we are being codded, and are codding ourselves? We do see the train bearing down on us, and we have to act to save ourselves.
This is where tradition can act as an anchor: If we go back to our memory bank, we can identify our strengths, draw on our innate knowledge of social contracts with the world, which tell us that not everything is ours for the taking, that other people have age-old rights which we mustn’t contravene; in this case the right to live in the community of their choice safely and long term. Our tradition informs us what is right and wrong, what has always been right and wrong, and pricks our conscience to do the right thing. Our tradition informs us how we should assert ourselves, how we should rebel against oppression, how we might imagine solutions, how we might sacrifice for the sake of others, how we might worship and respect nature.
These messages are all in our tradition, and Michael J Murphy spent his whole life tending to them lovingly, as one would tend to cherished elderly relatives, highlighting them as the repository of ancient wisdoms.
Our tradition abounds in stories of heroes standing up for what is right, overcoming impossible odds, outwitting giants, keeping ourselves optimistic and spiritually vibrant.
I would suggest that this is the time to draw on all of this innate knowledge.
I’d like to finish with an extract from an article which Michael J submitted to the Irish Press on Monday 16 June, 1942, Irish Press entitled:
Method in their Myths.
‘Tradition can be either a dead weight on a nation or an incentive to constructive thinking, and should be part of our education if only to make the spirit fight it. A convulsion of Time has shuffled our values; and our future depends on whether we do the sifting and allocation ourselves or permits others to do it for us, as before.’
Delivered at the Michael J Murphy Winter School held in Tí Chulainn, Mullach Bán, Co Armagh, on 21st November, 2015
