In 1936, the Irish Folklore Society published a collection of stories entitled Ocht Sgéalta ó Choillte Mághach. This small book consisted of eight stories, recounted orally by Tomás Ó Cathasaigh from Kiltimagh, Co Mayo, and edited by An Craoibhín Aoibhinn (Douglas Hyde), who collected them from the storyteller.
Three years later, the Irish Texts Society published a much expanded collection of stories by Ó Cathasaigh, this time, with an English translation and, again, edited by Hyde.
Only one of the previously published stories is contained in the Irish Texts Society volume – described by the editor as " . . . sui generis and unlike anything else I have ever met.”
To date, little is known of the life of Ó Cathasaigh. Hyde describes him as being 80 years old in 1936, the year before he died, but the entry in Ainm.ie gives 1861 as the most likely date of his birth, based on the evidence of the 1901 census, which would make him 75. According to the same source, Tomás was married to Bridget and they had five children. Both parents could speak Irish and English but could not read; the children spoke only English. Hyde claims that Tomás could write English “fairly”.
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What is unusual about this storyteller, whose repertoire was in the Irish language, is that he came from the Travelling community.
Hyde’s main source of information about Ó Cathasaigh was a letter, written after Tomás’s death, by Annie Doyle, then a student at the Convent of St Louis, Kiltimagh.
In an extract from the letter (translated by Hyde) she says: “A tinker was Thummaus, and his clan before him, but his mother settled in this town. When Thummaus was a young man he married a girl out of the town and he followed the tinker’s trade making tin ware, and he was also a buyer of mules and such. He succeeded well in money matters, and he bought a house. Then he was for a time a bailiff on the river near the town, to put a stop to the fishing of the salmon, but the people used not to have confidence in him.” (That is, they did not trust him.) She continues: “He was a very cute and clever man, and he used to have the full of the house every night listening to his stories.”
But he was thought to have been involved with the Fenians and to have revealed some secret information about them. (If he was born as late as 1861, that would seem unlikely.)
Whatever the reason, Annie Doyle claims that he was banished from the town and the local people thought he was dead until the book Ocht Sgéalta ó Choillte Mághach appeared. He was reputed always to emerge triumphant from the various incidents that proliferated about him, hence the expression, in Mayo: “You are as cute as O’Casey, the tinker.”
Tomás told Hyde that he got his stories from his grandfather, Seán Buidhe Ó Raghallaigh, who was born near Castlebar and was said to have spent 40 years with Colonel Martin (“Humanity Dick”) at Ballinahinch.
Hyde tells us that Seán Buidhe, who was nearly five score years when he died, “came to Coillte Mághach or Kiltimagh, and settled down about three miles from the town. He used to be telling his stories beside the fire at night, in his own house, and Thummaus used to be there, and he a young boy, listening to him, and he ‘picked them up himself’.”
When Hyde made his acquaintance, around 1935, Tomás was living in Co Sligo, having spent some time in America.
When his wife died, he had nobody to speak to in Irish as that language was not spoken in Sligo at the time and, consequently, he was increasingly influenced by English.
Hyde notes that he spoke the Irish of Mayo “almost the same language that I had myself when I was young in the County Roscommon” but, he describes it as “a little broken and corrupted . . . tending to simplicity”.
While some of the stories in the collection contain elements of magic and enchantment, with clear traces of antiquity, many are about natural events. Hyde comments on Tomás’s ability to embellish his material, so that incredible events in which he, himself, was purportedly involved appear perfectly credible.
The volume published by The Irish Texts Society in 1939, Sgéalta ó Thomás Ó Cathasaigh (Mayo Stories told by Thomas Casey), will be the subject of that Society’s Annual Seminar on November 9th at University College, Cork, where topics discussed will include Ó Cathasaigh’s life and language, the genesis of his stories in a national and international context and his repertoire between the settled and Travelling communities. Details of this event are available at irishtextssociety.org “Twenty-Fifth annual ITS seminar”.