Loch Garman Co Wexford 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.

Loch Garman Co Wexford Male Conversation

Conversation

I'm nineteen years old and I'm from Wexford in the southeast of Ireland. I am grew up in the south of Wexford, County Wexford in the southeast of Ireland. And I'm a second year university student and I'll be going into my third year this September. I'm a language student. I'm studying French and Japanese, and I'm going on a year abroad to Japan this year. So it's really exciting. So I hope this year abroad will allow me to develop better language skills and hopefully then I'll become fluent in Japanese, hopefully.

I am a university student. I'm in my second year and I'll be going into my third year this September. My major is French and Japanese and I'm going on a year abroad in this October for eleven months. So I'll be coming home in sometime in August but the day I'm coming home is not confirmed yet.

My hobbies include jogging. I try and go for a jog at least every day except maybe for the weekend. And I also enjoy reading. I love mystery novels, kind of like detective novels. A lot of the ones I read are from Japanese authors but have been translated into English. I used to do swimming and Karate, but I gave those up when I came to secondary school. I suppose I watch a lot of television as well. I really like foreign films, mainly Asian ones again. But I also, of course, watch a lot of American films as well. I'm not really a serious person. Like I can't really keep up with them. Like I get kind of bored halfway through. So I really don't watch mini series. I don't usually go to the cinema that often, though I just watch them on television usually.

I would call myself a morning person. I don't really like staying up late so I kind of go to bed at a reasonable time and I get roughly about eight or nine hours of sleep, and maybe ten on weekends. So going to late night parties isn't really my thing.

New Ross Co Wexford 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.

New Ross Co Wexford Female Conversation

Conversation

I was born in County Wexford, which is in the very southeast of Ireland. Matter of fact, I was born in hospital in Waterford, which is next door. My family lived in a small town called New Ross. My-- The rest of my family lived in the countryside. They were farmers; they had businesses. So I grew up very close to the sea and that's one of my major memories of that time, was of growing up by the seaside, going-- spending long days on the beach when we were kids. The whole family would pile into the car. We'd go down and spend the day on the beach. We'd bring a picnic, which in those days would be ham sandwiches, we would be bring flasks of tea, we'd bring lemonade and what we called-- we never called it soda-- We-- We had orange. What we called orange, which was a fizzy kind of soda drink.

I was also-- I really loved animals. As I say, my uncles had a-- had farms and one of them in particular was very interested in horses. And so I would go and I would spend some time with the horses, with the ponies. And my cousins would be show jumping. And I did a bit of riding myself but I was never that good, but I was competitive like them. But we would go to the gymkhana and we would spend, again, all these summer days at what was known as shows, Gymkhanas and pony shows and agricultural shows. So it was kind of interesting. It was an interesting childhood. I very much liked sport and, again, we played football. It was called women's football then. A bit of hurling, which is, again, an ancient Irish game played by both girls and boys and men and women. 

My family were English speakers. But my father was not from Wexford, he was from Armagh originally, which is in the north of Ireland. And his family had moved down to Dublin and then he then moved to Wexford after he met my mother. She was born in Wexford but, again, her father had come there from Cork. So really in a sense I got to know beyond my own locality. I-- We-- I got to know Dublin, the main city, because my father's family lived there are the time, during my youth. I also got to know a bit about the north and also Cork because my mother was very proud of her Cork roots. So when we-- When there were big football games at home, all Ireland finals, and hurling, and football, I cheered for Wexford and my mother would have always cheered for Cork, so that was kind of fun.

I had two sisters and one brother, but also we were very close to my cousins. I had two cousins and they were younger, and we all spent all the holidays together. 

I also love Christmas. We always spent Christmas together and that was very traditional; we would have Santa Claus in the morning, we would then go to mass, or else sometimes we would be allowed to midnight mass, which in those days really was at midnight. And that was really, really fun. We’d crunched down in the snow, in the frost; I remember that very well. And like a fox-- I remember one particularly evening and a fox was barking down in the bogs. And it was sort of magical because the stars were shining. You could imagine, you know, they-- the star in the east and all of that, so that was kind of fun.

And then we would have a very traditional Christmas dinner, which was always turkey and ham, and Christmas pudding. And then we'd have Christmas cake and we'd play games. We played drafts and ludo and card games. Nobody ever went out on Christmas day. We would-- It was a day that-- for the family. So we would all get together on my mother's family and my father's, my aunts, cousins and brothers and sisters. And so we-- we had great fun in those days.

Thurles Co Tipperary 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.

Thurles Co Tipperary Male Conversation

Conversation

Okay, so I was born in Dublin. I lived there when I was a kid until about… until I was about seven. Everyone knows about Dublin. It’s a great place. Love it there. The thing is, it doesn’t really feel like the rest of the country. There’s definitely a Dublin culture and then a more Irish culture. Dublin always seems to me to be more of a London junior. You kind of reflect this with the people, especially those on the higher incomes and stuff, the upper class. They tend to either feel very, to me, very Anglicized. They’re very Americanized. Because of this a lot of people really have a dislike towards Dublin, amongst especially the rural community feel it’s a fake a lot of the time. I don’t think it’s particularly true. There is a lot of fake people there, but they’re a minority. There’s a lot of great people there, too, but they always… they always almost feel like they’re from a different culture. A lot of it is because of there’s a feeling in Dublin that the rest of the country doesn’t really matter, so they don’t really leave Dublin too much except to visit family or maybe really see a concert. Stuff like that that’s up that’s happening in Belfast or Cork. And yeah, and also economically it’s actually makes more sense to go abroad than it is to get a train to the other side of the country because there’s just lots and lots of cheap flights from Dublin, but the trains are quite expensive and the buses can be, too. And the buses don’t reach as many places as the trains a lot of the time. Or at least the main parts.

But yeah, so after I was seven, I moved out of Dublin and moved to Thurles in County Tipperary. I lived there for about ten years. Well, and I’m also currently living there, but originally for ten years. Yeah, I went to school there. It’s in a county called Tipperary. Tipperary… it’s… I don’t really like it here. It’s like countryside, not a lot of stuff here, not a lot of opportunity. Me and my friends joke that it’s the place where dreams go to die, because when people can’t make it in Dublin, they tend to go back to their homes and maybe, you know, they prefer families or different priorities, but because of that, their career just tends to die most of the time.

In terms of the accent and stuff. The Thurles accent is kind of noticeable. I don’t really have it too much anymore, because I’ve moved to a couple different places. But it’s funny how it changes throughout Tipperary. In Thurles they say, “Thurles.” Like if I go on… go to a place called Templemore, which is literally a five-minute train journey away from me, they say, “Templemore.” Which is a funny place because in Templemore is where all the Gardai are trained in Ireland at Garda College because Templemore is such a shithole. You never really see Dublin guards, because they don’t want to leave lovely Dublin. And yeah, and I wouldn’t blame them. Templemore is horrible.

But yeah, so after that I went to college in Limerick when I was seventeen. I lived there for four years. Three years doing my degree and another year just really not doing much, like just chilling out there. Limerick is the third biggest city. It’s like the thing is like it recovered quite quickly from the Recession from upper and middle-class background, but… upper-middle-class people have recovered quite well. The lower class didn’t really feel it, like the working class and stuff. Because of that, like there really isn’t a lot of opportunity there for young people, I think. Because it… maybe this was one of the reasons I left there, but there’s this big feeling of hopelessness and then like I think amongst the young population, it’s the highest amount of unemployment in the country in… for young people, but I think because of this feeling of hopelessness, there’s a lot of people who… the reason there is such a high unemployment isn’t because of a lack of opportunity, it’s because of the fear of lack of opportunity. People just really don’t want to do much. Like I said, like a lot of people, they don’t apply for jobs. They just stay on social welfare. It sounds like not a nice thing to say, but after living there and meeting the people, like I know this. Like. 

So anyway, after Limerick, I came back home to Thurles for about a year trying to… I had a shitty job for a while and then I was… and then I became a teacher. And then went to Beijing in China for about a year or two. The thing about my accent, it’s kind of very changeable. It’s just… it just changes with the fact where I go, so now I have more of a Thurles accent. When I was livin’ in Dublin, where I was talkin’ to a lot of Dublin friends. In Limerick… It changed to a Dublin accent, whereas in Limerick, it changed for a Limerick accent. And while I was in China, most of my friends were American, so for a brief period, it sounded very American. Like most Americans thought I was American. Australian people. Only the British and the Irish could tell where I was from. And even then, they asked me if I spent time in America. I’ve never been to America, but I think that accent has faded now. But yeah, so then I came back to Ireland in December. Did a course and stuff here. And yeah.

Kilkenny Co Kilkenny 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.

Kilkenny Co Kilkenny Female Conversation

Conversation

I’m from Kilkenny in Ireland. I lived in France when I was a little girl. And I lived in England for university. What else can I tell you? I’ve lived in India. Don’t think that affected my accent too much. Here in Dublin? Yeah. So in Dublin right now. There’s a really good gallery just up there, the Science Gallery, you might know it. And they’ve an opening tonight. They’re launching a new exhibition called Perfectionism. And that’s just come from Australia, so you might get some good accents there, too. And what else is cool around here? You have the Pav. Don’t know if it’s cool, but you can get cheap alcohol because it’s where the students go. Oh, in Kilkenny, where I’m from, yeah there’s lots of nice place to go there, too. God, I haven’t been in so long. Maybe like the castle you can visit. There’s, oh yeah, the Coach House Café in Paulstown, which is my family’s business. The best café in Kilkenny. Today, I was just working and then we came here to go to the exhibition. And then there were too many people, so we left, ‘cause we couldn’t see anything. And now we’re going to go and have dinner somewhere with some friends. What else can I tell you? Yeah, I’ve lived in Dublin for about seven or eight years now. I work for myself as a consultant. Cultural consultant with tourism businesses and heritage archaeology. I studied archaeology. So. What else can I tell you? There’s a cricket game going on, which isn’t really a very Irish sport at all, it’s a very British sport. Only very particular organizations, institutions in Ireland will play cricket, Trinity being one of them. And so my husband was looking at it, watching it, wondering about the rules. And I used to learn it in school, so I know a little bit, but I can’t really remember.

Co Laois 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 Laois Female Conversation

Conversation

I’m from Laois. Oh, very much so. I… This is more distinct or louder. We’re very flat, that’s what they say. Flat accent, whatever that means. It’s only… Oh, my hometown, it’s only a little village with a swimming pool and an outdoor swimming pool, but you don’t find in many villages. Oh, we’re havin’ a very good day. This our first visit here to Cork and it’s very good. Okay?