Conclusion and Acknowledgements

Some of the material in this tidily hand-written seventy-page document relates directly to the time of writing. More of it, the ‘Cailleach Béalátha’ story, for example, is at least a hundred years older. The collection is a written account of oral sources. It contains different versions of the same events, sometimes with conflicting details. The conflicting details may lead to the richest interpretation but the historian needs to be wary. The collection is a voice from the past, not a historian’s perspective of the era. The stories reflect the values of the era. It doesn’t have the documentary evidence of census returns but it can add flesh to the bones of such documentary evidence. It illustrates and extends conventional sources. Above all it adds the local detail to a community that wrote very little down. ‘Local history…is primarily about people in places over time.’ [27] The contribution of Bansha N.S. to the Schools’ Scheme is an extremely valuable primary source for the social history of the community from which it was collected.

Acknowledgments

1. The author is grateful to the Head of the Department of Irish Folklore, University College Dublin, for permission to reproduce archival material.
2. The author wishes to acknowledge the professional assistance of Dr. Lillis Ó Laoire, Department of Language and Cultural Studies, University of Limerick.
3. Last but not least the author extends a belated ‘thank you’ to the eight contributors. Their names are Mary Hanrahan, Mary Hickey, Eily Killeen, Thomas O’Donnell, John O’Shea, Josephine O’Shea, Michael Vaughan and Mary Walshe.