Song and revival in a County Waterford community

The founding of the Gaelic League, in a room at No. 9, Lower Sackville Street, Dublin, on 31 July 1893, was to have widespread and resounding implications for many parts of Ireland, not least for those parts of the country which were at the time largely Irish speaking. The League’s policy of preserving and bolstering the language where it was strongest was to have long-term effect on those areas of county Waterford, for example, in which Irish was then the vernacular. This paper discusses how, under the influence of a small number of key figures within the early twentieth-century movement in Waterford, song came to be at the centre of Irish-language revival in one small coastal community, the results of which still reverberate there today