Galway City Co Galway Female Reading

Reading

The Rainbow Passage

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Galway City Co Galway Female Conversation

Conversation

Well I actually grew up and was born in Galway in the city and I grew up, not far, about two miles away in Dangan. So I actually studied in the university here in Galway. And I’ve lived here in Galway most of my life, apart from living in Germany for a few years working as an au pair and a chambermaid down in Bavaria. So I met a lot of Americans there actually.

Male: How did you end up in Germany?

Well I studied German – I took up German in university I did an arts degree so I did geography, archaeology, philosophy and German for my first year and then I continued with geography and German. So then obviously to improve the language I went to live in Germany for summers and then the longest period was as an English assistant, if you’d believe that, a language assistant in a school there.

Male: So you were teaching some English while you were even working on your own German?

Well for the last period I was there it was a year in a secondary school and I was back up in a classroom just in case the teacher wanted to ask questions about language. So they liked to employ or draft in people from all the English speaking countries around the world, not just England but from Scotland, which would be a totally different accent and America – I think there were some American girls there – I’m not sure. It was mainly Europe. Well actually I remember going to England, to Cambridge University to do a bit of research. I had started a Master’s Degree after my BA, a number of years after – I didn’t continue it but while I was in the process of doing it, I went to do a bit of research in the University in Cambridge and this is an example of language and how people can’t understand each other, even though they speak the same language – so the taxi man said, I gave him the directions of where I wanted to go to and he said, I said Bishop Bateman Court, Bishop Bateman Court, or so I thought and he said ‘what – Bacon and Pork?’ Well he was actually quite rude but...he was either making fun of me or you know I do have quite a strong Galway accent I’m told, which is the west of Ireland. So I’m working here in the Arts Office in the University. It’s extremely interesting. You get to meet all sorts of people and really interesting artists. So I do admin, but not only admin – I do event, event management and set up exhibitions and advertise and promote all the exhibitions and...

Male: In a variety of arts?

Yeah, visual arts and yeah...

Male: Is it mostly visual arts or do you also have?

It’s mostly visual arts, yeah.

Male: Have you had any that have been especially intriguing in the last few years?

We had a really nice Italian man who’s based in Berlin and he came here with his American girlfriend, Amy, and he, for part of our Spring Festival, which we have every year, he created a sculpture called The Tradition of Change, which is basically made from scrap metal from a scrap yard here in Galway and he constructed it into this beautiful harp. Fantastic! But you’ll have to go to see it – I can show it where it is. It’s absolutely beautiful.

Male: Is it here in this building then?

It’s on campus outside, yeah. It’s about a five-minute walk from here.

Male: How wonderful. Have a number of these things resulted in something that the university has kept?

Yes. Often we would purchase something from the annual festival or from the exhibitions we have. During the year we have about four or five each year. So we have one coming up in October – it’s a joint venture between an Irish guy, a Galway guy and a Dutchman – Shane Burk and Jerome van Dooren. So it’s, well it’s similar in that the color is black and white and they’re both photography but in different ways. The end result looks quite different and it’s...

Male: Are they working on, off of say like a single photograph that develops into, that they each treat so differently or...?

No...no, no, they just happen to be exhibiting at the same time but as it turns out they both expressed an interest in exhibiting here over the last year and a half. So now is the time when we can schedule them in and as it happens they’re quite similar in some ways, you know. So it’s both been made - the black and white is the visual you see first – it turns out that both of them are into architecture and landscape and...it’s yeah.

Male: Now is there any chance that they’ll do anything specific for this exhibit?

Well, we hope to purchase one of each piece but also the Dutch artist is going to do a commission upstairs in this newly refurbished building on one of the circular walls. So that’s a separate commission. He’s going to test out how it would work and look in September and then he will actually take part in the annual Spring Festival next year.

Male: Oh, that’s great!

So, it’s interesting.

Male: It is. It’s very interesting and what a wonderful job to get to work on all of these projects.

Yeah, yeah and I work mornings only, which is useful too because I have a family. So it’s a good work-life balance.

Male: It is. It’s very good. Do you still live in Galway?

Yes, I do. Yeah. We’re currently building a new house, which has lots of headaches but it’s fun - we’re in no rush and we’re picking out tiles and floors and all of that practical stuff. Yeah, yeah, it’s nice because we’re taking our time and some prices have come down with the recession so you’re able to ask for a better price and sometimes you get it and yeah, it’s good.

Co Galway Female Reading

Reading

The Rainbow Passage

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Co Galway Female Conversation

Conversation

My father and mother played this every night and we would dance in the kitchen and all the lads would come in from the little locality – I was born in the west of Ireland – and we would dance and dance to keep warm. And this was music that was native to every household, so to speak, but then there were households where there was a larger kitchen and that was us and we would dance – I’m going back now to the forties – and it was our form of entertainment. We had no electricity, we had no radio, we had no running water. It was very, very plain, ordinary living but very delightful. I grew up in a small town in Galway, County Galway in the west of Ireland and while it’s Galway County it is not on the Atlantic Ocean – it’s more, it’s...the County’s flanked by the River Shannon on the east side and on the west it’s...it spills into the Atlantic Ocean and about this County there is a great deal of poetry and history to it because it’s wild and unspoiled and...unless you want a great big long history lesson we’ll have to let it go at that but I grew up – I was one of eight children.

My mother was a dressmaker by trade and my father was a shoemaker and because our house was large and it was kind of the meeting place, it had - it was a big hotel that was changed into my mother’s shop and my father’s shop – it was the place where people congregated. They’d bring their bicycles in for safekeeping during World War II so they wouldn’t get stolen and so therefore a lot of people came in and out of our house. So we were accustomed to having people – my mother used to say, “Don’t stand there like a dunce – have something to say for yourself. When I introduce you to somebody, don’t stand there – find something to say.” I would say, “Mamma, what am I going to say – I don’t even know her.” “Oh, go on. Ask her about the baby, ask her how old is the baby, ask her is it raining out your direction and are there any, are there any deaths or marriages.” Just, you know, plain, honest to God talk and she’d say you’d have no bother because people like to talk about their babies and so this was what my mother said, “Don’t let me catch you standing there like a dunce in front of an adult – ask to hold their baby or their umbrella or their bag or their shawl or whatever.” This is back during World War II when goods and services were very, very scarce and if you had a tin kettle it would eventually burn out but you wouldn’t throw the kettle away simple because the bottom was gone out of it. You’d put a new bottom on it. The tinker would come with some tin and he’d put a new bottom on the kettle and you might have heard the slogan a tinker’s dam. Well a tinker’s dam was a kind of putty that they’d put on a particular hole that they were patching and in fact they had little things that looked like band aids but they were made out of tin and they’d put it into the hole in the kettle and it would go through the hole and kind of attach itself on the inside and then on the outside it would be attached rather like a Molly bolt but then they’d put this putty around it to seal it.

The putty was made out of a certain kind of clay that we’d find in the rivers and it was called a dam and if something “isn’t worth the tinker’s dam,” by the time the tinker had left town the thing was leaking again. So that’s the...they were very, very adept tin smiths and they had wonderful tools and we used to sit and watch them and they would beg and they would sing on the streets – they would sing the ballads on the streets. They used to come to the schools and we used to teach them the catechism and teach them general stuff but they wouldn’t stay in the locality long enough. Now they’re required to go to school and they have houses and they have wagons. They used to live in wagons and they were, they were regarded as sub-standard – we were very much afraid of them and if you were bad our mothers used to say “Keep that up now and I’ll give you to the tinkers” and then my father would say, “Oh, the tinkers wouldn’t have her.” 

‘I’m going to the store for to buy some tobacco.’ Now to say ‘for to’ is very, it’s very – it’s most ungrammatical but it is directly the translation from how the Gaelic is structured. I’m going to the store. [speaking Gaelic) is the Gaelic of it. [speaking Gaelic] tobacco – the purchase. [speaking Gaelic] is ‘for to,’ so it has taken years and years to make the translation more grammatically correct but to the Irish ear it is correct. A lot of the words in the English language come straight from the Gaelic and there’s nothing wrong with that but years and years of translations and then there was no mixture with any other, any other cultures except the English and they were persona non grata. We tolerated them but we were to ourselves...the community... ‘Thank God we’re surrounded by water’ is one of the slogans.

Galway City Co Galway Male Reading

Reading

The Rainbow Passage

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Galway City Co Galway Male Conversation

Conversation

I’m from right here, from Galway City and I grew up about ten minutes’ walk from here in Newcastle Road. I’m an only child, my dad was a lab technician in pathology in the local hospital. So some of my earliest memories are being brought along – don’t worry, not to post-mortems but to...to like the offices around the hospital where they used to keep specimens and things like that. So when I was a small child I used to walk down these corridors but then my dad would tell me “Oh, you know they are different specimens,” but it was kind of puzzling cause they’re unrecognizable when they’re dissected. So the image you’d have of a human heart, and it just looks horrible like but I was just kind of puzzled by this and there was also this experimental medicine part where they had all these guinea pigs so he’d bring me to see the guinea pigs so I thought it was very cute, you know but. Want me to tell you a little bit about acting or how I got into it?

Male: Yeah, I’m curious about this project as well.

Well, I first started acting about, I suppose seven years ago and I write as well and publish a couple of poems and short stories and things like that but it was kind of – I was interested in the arts – I always read a lot and kind of on the spur of the moment I just saw this ad for a play, which was on here actually and it was about the life of W.B Yeats – it was about W.B. Yeats and it's... So that was the first role I ever played and since then I just kind of live for it really and caught the bug and then I went back to college here at NUIG and studied arts – I studied classics and history. I didn’t study any drama – well I did in literature, in English literature but then I got involved in the College Drama Society and that’s kind of when it really took off and that’s how I met Jack, the producer on this project and then he and some friends of his got me involved in film – I’ve done a couple of short films and he was the one who got me involved in the play about which this film is based. So that’s how I came to be part of it all.

Male: Is this a full length?

Yeah, well it runs to about an hour and twenty minutes. So, it will have to...

Male: It’s a big undertaking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The play was about an hour but this is a kind of an expanded version but the play was fun to do because it was – I played a different character in the play to the one I’m in the film. So I’m playing the younger version of the German Colonel. So in the play I played the Major, the US Major who was interrogating the Colonel so I have to kind of mess around with accents which is a bit of a...

Male: How was it taking on an American accent?

Well at first I was very worried that I was, it was just going to sound comical but eventually I got into it because Jack just wanted a kind of very subtle, not very pronounced German accent, or American accent – just something that...so he showed – he got me to look at a film starring Gary Oldman where he does a – he plays a kind of a psychopathic gangster – I actually forget the name – was it Lola or something like that – but it was made in the late nineties I think.

Male: I can picture him in the film and I can’t remember...

Yeah, yeah, he has a white suit on it, in it and he’s sort of yeah, but he said that accent and when I saw it I said, “Aaah, okay, yeah” because it was, it was obviously he’s a – I think he’s English, isn’t he – I can’t remember, but it helped a lot anyway but because I don’t really have all that much experience in doing difference accents to just my own but it’s good you know because you need that kind of experience if you’re going to expand or whatever, you know.

Male: Right. And what are the plans with this film, do you know?

Well, we’re just going to promote it as much as possible and send it out to different festivals and send it out to whoever’s willing to take a look at it and...and that’s what you have to do I suppose when these things are shown, hopefully at film fairs, they get more attention and interest and people might come up to you and say, “Oh, I liked what you did with that – could you show it here” or “I’d like you to be involved in X, Y and Zed.” So it’s kind of a, sort of an evolution of hope really that you, you know, I mean it’s not like you just make it and it’s going to be released in the cinemas next whatever.

Male: Is this your first time doing some film work?

No, I’ve done a couple of other short films. I haven’t done a massive amount but I did a very enjoyable one here last year, which was just a one-day shoot but it was called Man in the Shed. It was based on a Nick Drake song which was kind of about this guy’s rejection by this woman that he was really interested in and then they kind of turned it around at the end and the actors were revealed to be actors backstage. So it’s kind of like that conceit which was nice… but also as well like it simply, it’s like, it’s interesting to kinda go between film and stage because I’m rehearsing a play at the moment. So that in itself is a little bit more pressure than film because with film you have time to relax a bit and to step back because takes are limited and you know you can – it can be frustrating as well because the weather or whatever, or the sound or you know – but I definitely find film easier and more relaxing. I think I do love the stage, I love acting and not just because I’m a shameless exhibitionist, but because it’s just fun like you know.

Male: That’s not the only reason.

No, that’s not the only reason – no, but it’s, it’s like I often think it’s kind of an odd thing to want to do, to expose yourself in front of hundreds of people pretending to be somebody else for the entertainment of others. I don’t think there’s many things that you can compare in life to that. So it’s sort of an unusual thing but it’s become part of, part of our culture somewhat and it evolved from something which, which was apparently religious in origin in ancient Greece – it started off as a religious ceremony and then one member of the chorus stepped out and he became an actor. So, you know, I mean – but we can – I presume we can only kind of guess at how audiences would have reacted in the ancient world. It really was kind of different – like I remember reading recently that around the period of the Restoration in the seventeenth century, like they used to even have the audience members would be on the stage, they would be kind of craning over. So, and that is just so alien to us because we have this kind of stilted view of drama that sometimes anyway that the audience should kind of sit respectfully, silently and the actors should perform but I mean in the past, certainly in Shakespeare’s day it was just a, it would have been a nightmare for actors at times like.

Galway City Co Galway Female Reading

Reading

The Rainbow Passage

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Galway City Co Galway Female Conversation

Conversation

I did a degree and a masters here. I did my degree in geography and Irish and then a masters in Irish and then I did a post-grad then in Queens University in Belfast in primary school teaching through Irish. So I’ll be doing that hopefully come September, if I can get a job. 

Male: Where are you looking? Around here?

Well, no. It’s kind of like gold dust to try and get a job in Galway – it’s not going to happen but I was late – they have a teaching council here and you have to register because currently there’s a four month’s delay in registering. So I’ll probably have to go to Dublin – that’s kind of the only, the only place now really at this time so.

Male: So is Dublin a place that’s really needy for...?

Yeah, it would be. I think it’s just with the urban sprawl and everything most people, most people tend to kind of need the jobs, need the extra teachers over there like, and there’s a lot of kind of disadvantaged areas as well so they’ll take in a lot more teachers that are just starting off as opposed to ones that are set up with their families and their ten kids so.

Male: And the, you know the same is true in any city I think that it’s harder to find the people who are willing to work in those inner city schools.

Absolutely. Yeah. Like even when I was in Belfast as well it was real inner city schools that we were working in because I was still doing my training really. So, yeah it was tough enough like you know you’re really faced with some challenges when half the kids’ parents are in jail and stuff like that. So it can be quite difficult like. We’re very nice and kind of secluded almost here in Galway you know, you don’t see a lot of that, you’ve – everyone just kind of has a good time and everyone enjoys each other’s company here but when I went up to Belfast and especially where I was living, it was on the Falls Road, so it was the real Republican area, but ironically it’s the only place in Ireland that you can do a post-graduate in teaching entirely through Irish so I had to go up there, but it was different because the area that I was in, it was the place where Bobby Sands - they held a candlelight vigil for Bobby Sands when he died in prison and they had this one wall as well at the end of my street – they named it the Murder Wall and it was just, it was a big wall – I’d say from about that tree to that tree – like it was a long, long wall and it was just covered in faces of people who had been killed during the Troubles but instead of saying like died as a result of a bomb or anything like that, it was just “murdered” was written under every single person. So I did this exercise in school with the kids one day and I said right, we’ll do a model of the Beechmont area that you’re living in – you pick landmarks and depict them as they are in clay and then the next week we did this thing where they could change any landmark they wanted, turn it into whatever they want. So I was kind of expecting them all to make like cinemas and bowling alleys and all these kind of fun stuff or football pitches but the kid who was working on the Murder Wall, he turned around and he had the same slab size that he’d used when he was depicting the Murder Wall but instead he called it the Happy Wall and he just made loads of smiley faces for the whole wall and I was like I was just totally gutted. I mean this is a kid that was like ten years old and that was the kind of imagination he had, you know. When you really think about it like, and it’s the only thing I noticed though was that’s it, it’s only really in these real areas, like in the Falls and on the Shankhill and in Ardoyne and in the village and kind of places like that that would be really centered either really Protestant or really Catholic seemed to be the two, the two kind of areas. Like aside from that if you go into the city like you know, like, with ___ there’s no hassles at all, nobody really minds what you are or where you come from or anything like that but even being from Ireland I was like, being from the Republic, I should say, I was like you know thinking I’d be sound in the falls, nobody would give me any hassle but no we were referred to as free staters or Mexicans. It’s below the border.

Male: Really?

Yeah. So “Where you going, you Mexican?” and all this kind of stuff – we were like what? Yeah.

Male: How bizarre?

Yeah, I know. It was, it was quite bizarre like but it was really interesting. I’m so glad I had the experience, like coming back now it’s just like a different world. I was craving to get home at weekends and I don’t drive so I had to take busses. So it took me seven hours getting home from Belfast and you can do it in three and a half if you had a car like. So it’s taken seven hours but I did not care – I would have, I would have gone twelve hours if it meant I could get away from it. But I was...

Male: It’s going to make Dublin seem easy.

I know, that’s the thing. I was like Dublin – ah! Never mind the sound of that, like not a bother. Our next door neighbors, they moved in two weeks after we moved in and their whole family were originally from the same area – that’s usually what they do – it’s like their brothers and daughters will marry off with each other and they all set up in the same place like and so they moved in and we had absolutely no hassle from them the whole year long and on the last day, the two girls I was living with were also who had also had been in college in Galway and we all got a place in the same course so we all lived together and on the last day of our graduation, all our families were over and everything and the mother came in from the house next door and she’d gotten each of us – do you know the Avon catalogue? Yeah, she had rang Avon and had ordered jewelry for each of the three of us and she got a big giant box of roses and all this just to say thank you for being really good neighbors.

Male: Wow! That’s really sweet.

I know. That was like oh we dumb, like dumbstruck and she had, she’d done like a wee kind of homemade card as well and had set it up with little just wee stickers she’d stuck on it and everything. She was adorable. She was so sweet, like it was really sad leaving in that kind of sense, you know. But they look out for each other there you know.

Male: Yeah. How long were you there? Six months?

Nine months I was there. Yeah, was it nine? – I was there September until June. I just moved back at the end of June then.

Male: So it has been a little bit of a shift being back here, hasn’t it?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was quite different, like it was quite different and I didn’t know, my mother had told me bits and pieces because my mum’s originally from Donegal, from Letterkenny, so she would have been kind of telling me wee bits and bobs about it when she remembers being young and going into Northern Ireland for the days and my mother was freaking when she found out that I was moving to Belfast cause she still had this really old mindset of the place, like. Now fair enough there was constantly bomb scares and stuff like that but there was no hassles – it was just the mindset of the people, you know – this real kind of post-conflict mindset but it was fun though at the same time. Like I don’t know, did you hear a few years ago when they tried to do a “Love Ulster” parade in Dublin? Yeah, it was just the most ridiculous thing in the world, like nobody understands why it happened but they had marchers come down from Northern Ireland to Dublin in a “Love Ulster” parade through the streets of Dublin and there was just riots – it’s on YouTube – you should YouTube it when you get back and just put in “Love Ulster Dublin” and just absolute riots took over. Like, there was no need for them to be in Dublin, like it was...it was just completely pointless and all it did was raise all these tensions again in a place that had nothing to do with them whatsoever and it was just again it was just intimidating like you know...it was crazy.

Male: Ulster now, although it means that area of counties there, it’s mostly used by Protestants as a term now, isn’t it? So it’s kind of become politicized?

Yeah, it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah cause... It is, yeah cause I didn’t know that and when I went up I kind of managed to have a little a bit of a run through of like how I was meant to address where I was living. So if you say, like you could say in the North and that’s fine, that’s fairly neutral or you could say the six counties and that would be fairly neutral, kind of – like if you’re based there and you’re talking about it. If you say down South, it could be a little bit, you’re showing that you’re rooted in the North so there would be some kind of more leaning towards you being Protestant if you kind of referred to down South or the Republic as well. It’s, it’s, yeah, it’s really difficult to try and, try and talk to people and explain to them like about the different things. It’s all down to terminology.

Male: What if you said you’re from Ireland?

Yeah, if you said you’re from Ireland, they would, the Catholics – most of the, all of the people that were on my course from Northern Ireland, they were all Catholics. So they would say, “Oh, we’re from Ireland” or the odd time they would say Northern Ireland as well – Ireland or Northern Ireland but they would never say, “Oh, I’m from Ulster” or they would never say, “Oh, you’re from the Republic” or anything like that. It was all very Ireland just as a whole.

Male: All one. 

Yeah, yeah – all one. Yeah.

Clifden Co Galway Female Reading

Reading

The Rainbow Passage

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Clifden Co Galway Female Conversation

Conversation

I run this café. We have a bakery. We have four dogs. We live in the middle of the country. I don’t really, apparently, have a strong Galway accent, so I’m not sure. But I will have an Irish accent. Okay? For accents. The square up there, de Gaulle’s, there is a plaque for de Gaulle. De Gaulle visited Sneem in nineteen sixty-nine, so fifty years ago this year. There’s also a plaque from the Chinese. There is the sculpture garden. There is the Church of England, Church of Ireland across the road from you. There is… Just down at the river. You can go down there and get a good walk. What accents? Around here? Very, very strong. Very difficult to understand, even for an Irish person. And mine isn’t it. As I said, I’m from Galway, so it’s a hundred and sixty miles up the coast. If you want to hear a very strong accent, but you don’t have time, there’s a guy who works up in the local builder providers, and I can understand the last word he says in every sentence and that’s it. It’s… If you talk to some of the very older people here, you’ll find the accent is… You’ll wonder if they’re actually speaking Irish. But they’re not. They’re speaking in English but the accent is just so, huh huh huh.