Pheig sayers7/27/2023 ![]() In this special YARN performance, she will tell some of Peig’s story – focusing on Peig’s close and happy relationship with some of the collectors who visited the Great Blasket Island summer after summer to sit at her feet and listen to her stories. Nuala Hayes is a storyteller and well-known actor. The real Peig was known to folklorists, scholars, linguists, but to the general public she was a figure to be ridiculed and despised. Unfortunately the name of Peig came to be used as a symbol for everything that was perceived to be wrong with Ireland and Irish education. Many students who struggled with Irish grew to dislike it, for various complex reasons. In 1962 it was put on the curriculum for Irish secondary schools and stayed there until 1995. Like all memoirs, it is a version of her life, and selective. Partly thanks to the interest shown in her she was persuaded to write a memoir – Peig, a Scéal Féin, was published in 1936. ![]() Collectors came from England, Scotland, France, Norway, Sweden, and various parts of Ireland, to visit her on the Great Blasket Island, learn from her, and collect her stories. She knew more than 350 stories, in many genres, and told them eloquently and engagingly. For roughly the first half of the twentieth century she was well-known to linguists, folklore scholars, learners of Irish, as an exceptionally clear and fine speaker of Gaeilge, and as a storyteller of extraordinary gifts. Peig Sayers (1873-1958) was first famous, then infamous, in Ireland. ![]() * with kind permission of the National Folklore Collection, U.C.D. Stories translated from original transcripts of recordings of Peig’s stories* by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne Musicians: Tim Doyle, Elena and Éabha Ó Céidigh Hayes
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