New audio series offers an Oral history of everyday Life in Old Leitrim

A new audio series ‘Drumkeeran Voices; An Oral History’ has launched of Spotify, bringing the voices of Leitrim past to the present.

Created by Michael Carolan, a documentary maker for RTE Radio One and LMFM radio host, the series is made with conversations originally recorded 20 years ago.

Carolan first became interested in Leitrim decades ago when he made a documentary about the story of Jimmy Dalton, the Leitrim man who, in the 1950s, became the only Irishman to be deported from the country.

With the help of Leitrim man of the year 2017, Hubert McHugh, he found and interviewed people from the area, many of whom have since passed, about life and the social history of the area.

READ MORE: One of busiest Leitrim roads needs work urgently before a ‘serious crash happens'

He originally planned to transcribe the interviews, but he put the project on the back burner and, after rediscovering the tapes last year, decided they would make an interesting series, and the advent of the internet means there are perfect spaces for it.

“Technology moves on in a good way, and the actual horse's mouth, as it was audio, can be out there; it is probably preferable actually.”

The six conversations, which are available for free on Spotify, are about everyday life and how things were through the years in the area.

“There is nothing profoundly going on, but it is a different world. We don't realise we are in a different world until decades later, you listen back and say, " Wow, that was almost like an alien place or something.”

“I kind of think it is important,” he says,  “I did a number of documentaries on oral history, social history I done a number of documentaries for RTE radio one, Doc on One, and so this was a wider extension of that.”

READ MORE: McNulty and Gaffey deliver amazing comeback victory for Leitrim against stunned London in Ruislip

“A radio documentary you are picking up on a specific theme, you're talking to people related to it, so this is a chance to, in a wider kind of way, do recordings of people just being everyday life of people in those times, which would have been from the 1940s and 50s”

Listening back to the tapes, twenty years on, what struck him was how fast things had changed. “I think what has changed is the rate of change”

“Talking to people about the 1930s up until the 1960s, there wasn’t that much difference, there wasn't much change, but you are talking about for 2000, until now, the rate of change is incredible”