Kevin Danaher

Life
1913-? [Caoimhín Ó Danachair]; b. Co. Limerick, ed. UCD and Berlin; Irish Army captain, 1940-45; ed. The Irish Sword, 1960- . DIW OCIL

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Works
General
  • In Ireland Long Ago (Cork: Mercier 1962; rep. 1976; 1978, 1991).
  • Gentle Places and Simple Things (1964).
  • Folktales of the Irish countryside (Cork: Mercier 1965; rep. 1976).
  • Irish Country People (Cork: Mercier 1966, 1976).
  • The Pleasant Land of Ireland (Cork: Mercier 1967).
  • Irish Wake Amusements (Cork: Mercier n.d.).
  • The Year in Ireland (Cork: Mercier 1972).
  • Ireland’s Vernacular Architecture (1975).
  • That’s How It Was (1984).
  • The Hearth and Stoll And All: Irish Rural Households (Cork: Mercier 1985).
Bibliography
  • A Bibliography of Irish Ethnology and Folk Tradition (Cork: Mercier 1978), q.pp.
Miscellaneous
  • ‘The Gaelteacht’, in A View of the Irish Language, ed. Brian Ó Cuiv (1969), pp.112-21.
  • ‘An Rí [The King]: An Example of Traditional Social Organisation’, in Journal of Royal Soc. of Antiquaries of Ireland, 111 (1981), pp.14-28.

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Quotations
Respectability: ‘The second half of the last century ... saw a very curious influence - Victorianism - at work with disastrous results for many aspects of Irish tradition. The essence of Victorianism was, of course, “respectability”, and this respectability attained the status of a mora code for far too many people [...] It wasn’t respectable to eat porridge or oaten bread or salt herrings, and these and many items passed out of the diet of the country people. It wasn’t respectable to make the rounds of the blessed well, and clergy and laity alike combined to suppress most of the patterns. And above all faction-fighting (and hurling) were a cause of horror to the “respectables”, and even later the lapse of a century they are still regarded askance by people whose great grandfathers trounced each other through fair and field and market in many a hard fought contest.’ (Q. source; quoted in Alan Titley, ‘The English Respectability, and Football’, in Nailing Theses: Selected Essays, Belfast: Lagan Press 2011, p.65; query parenthesis & ital. ‘and hurling’ - which may be Titley’s addition to the passage.)