Deals with the devil and an escape artist cat: Among the storytellers on a small Irish island

Cormac Fitzgerald Rockin' the Suburbs

In this series, journalist and spoken word artist Cormac Fitzgerald travels to a different corner of the country each week to write about the gigs, cultural experiences and pastimes you rarely see covered by Irish media outlets. 

This week’s subject: Among the storytellers on a small island off West Cork.

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IT WAS A dark, wet Saturday afternoon on Cape Clear Island, the rain coming in misty off the Atlantic, as people piled into Ciarán Danny Mike’s pub.

There was standing room only, and hardly any of that, as the crowd stood shoulder to shoulder, or perched on the edges of seats and tables, or did whatever else they could to get a view of the makeshift stage, which amounted to a microphone set up near the back of the pub in front of the fireplace.

“Ladies and gentlemen we’ve all heard of the snug, an important seat in any traditional Irish pub,” said Órla McGovern, Bean an Tí for the afternoon’s session.

“But now I present to you the newest important seat: The Fuinneog!” 

She pointed at a man standing outside in the rain, but with his head poking in the open window, trying to get a look at the action. 

So, what brought all these people together on a small, windswept island off the southern coast of Ireland?

The same thing that has brought people together in rooms for many centuries in Ireland.

They were there to hear some stories.

Among the storytellers

I was at the second Storyswap event of the Cape Clear International Storytelling Festival, an annual mainstay of the island that has been running since 1994. It was founded by an American couple who had moved to the island, Chuck and Nell Kruger, to keep the Irish tradition of storytelling alive on the island.

Cape Clear (or Oileán Chléire in Irish) is a rugged, beautiful island off the coast of West Cork, near the town of Baltimore. It is a Gaeltacht, where the Irish language is spoken daily, and once had a booming fishing industry.

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Before the Great Famine, the island had a permanent population of over a thousand people. Today, according to the 2022 Census, the population during winter is just 110 people. However, this swells significantly in the summer months as people take up residence in holiday homes and tourists and Irish language students flock to the island.

The storytelling festival marks the beginning of the end of the season, and is world-renowned, with professional storytellers coming from far and wide to take part. 

But on Saturday afternoon I wasn’t there for the professionals. I was there to hear what the storytellers who came to see the storytellers had to say. And they didn’t disappoint. The Storyswap is a curated open mic, a chance for festival goers to tell their own tales.

Órla Mc Govern started by laying down the ground rules, the most important being that no story was to be longer than seven minutes. A bell would be rung with increasing insistence the further people got from this time limit (fortunately the bell didn’t have to be used too much throughout the event).

The first person up was Danni Cullen from Bray with a tale of a boy, a mean auntie, a monster in the woods, and a drum. It was a great story to kick things off, bizarre and off-kilter, but well told and strangely plausible.

The thing about good storytelling is that a person can set up their own odd logic in a tale and follow it through to the end and bring the audience with them: Yes, of course it makes sense that the boy needs to play the drum to make the monster dance so that it will regurgitate his family members (it really does make sense, you had to be there).

Dani was followed by Vince from Tipperary who told a more grounded tale about how for one summer, decades ago, he became the coolest man in Dingle. Vince was followed by Niceol Blue, originally from the Pacific North West, who gave the crowd retelling of an Irish myth featuring Cú Chulainn and Queen Méabh, and so on and so on.

There were tales of rich men’s folly, of deals with the devil, of a silly boy wasting away his wages. One storyteller, Daniel Galvin, gave the history of how saunas started to appear in every coastal community on the island, pitching it as an epic battle between the forces of old Ireland – the church and the pub – and the new.

Stories, no matter the themes or content, sat easily next to each other. It didn’t matter that at one moment we were listening to how Cú Chulainn was locked in epic battle with his lifelong friend Ferdia, and the next hearing the tragicomic tale of an escape artist cat called Mini Minx who wouldn’t stay where she was supposed to. 

All that mattered was that people told their story well, and the attentive crowd were happy to follow wherever they were being led.

A long, long history

Storytelling is wound up in Irish history and the oral culture of this island. For many, many centuries, people didn’t read or write, and stories and histories were passed down from generation to generation. People gathered in homes by lamplight or firelight to hear the tales.

At the heart of all this was the figure of the Seanchaí, the person who kept and told the stories. 

This storytelling tradition, though pushed to the margins and brought under pressure first by English colonisation, and later by rural depopulation and modernity, has been kept alive throughout the centuries up until the modern day.

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Recently, a younger generation has been getting in on the action, with a number of high profile events springing up in the last few years (in keeping with the great boom in all things Irish over the past decade).

Everything that extends the tradition and keeps it alive is to be welcomed, of course, but for me, sometimes these newer events can seem a bit too modern, with slick branding and presentation on social media overtaking the actual real life storytelling session itself.

There was none of that at Cape Clear, however, and I got the sense of the same people coming back year after year to meet one another and hear stories old and new. 

There were lots of younger people in attendance too however. 

As Órla McGovern told me: “Every generation always feels like they’ve discovered storytelling for the first time. But it has always been there. It never went away.”

A professional storyteller for many years, McGovern is the founder and artistic director of the well-known Moth and Butterfly arts collective in Galway. She loves the longstanding tradition of the Cape Clear festival, and is also delighted at the increasing number of young people turning up and going on to create their own events.

So, what is it about traditional storytelling that has allowed it stand to test of time for so many centuries?

“Storytelling is one of those art forms that invites people along on a journey,” McGovern says.

You’re not being performed at, you are part of the story. A good storyteller will invite you to come on the journey with them. That’s a real part of it. 

The Storyswap was just a small part of a weekend full of story, music and performances. Diarmuid Ó Drisceoil, whose father grew up on Cape Clear, gave a history walk talking of the varied traditions and lives of the ‘Capers’, the island natives who have lived their for many generations.

Island life 

Like almost all of Ireland’s island communities, Cape Clear is facing numerous challenges. Depopulation is a serious issue, with the local primary school warning that it may have to shut its doors if more children don’t move to the island.

Speaking in the past about why he and his wife first set up the festival, Chuck Kruger – who has since left the island – said that when he arrived he was told stories “about the telling of stories”. 

“How of an evening a kitchen would fill with neighbours, and more neighbours, until adults and children were sitting on the hearth, the flags, up the narrow stairs, and tales were told into the wee hours, even through the night. But no more,” Kruger said.

The storytellers, they said, are all gone, the very tradition of storytelling gone.

He sought with others to revive that tradition, and set about founding the now-three-decade-old festival.

Back in the present day, as I find myself squeezed into the corner of a packed Ciarán Danny Mikes, listening to tale after tale, it was clear he had been successful.