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I have run the gauntlet of many borders in my time, but the border I grew up with at home was far and away the most trying, writes Seamas O Cathain (Professor Emeritus at University College Dublin, and former Director of the National Folklore Collection). Born in Drumquin, County Tyrone, to a family of Catholic business people and farmers, he grew up a stone’s throw from the border that separates Donegal in the Republic from the six counties of Northern Ireland - - a border policed by little corporals that was the bane of our lives. -
Is iomai sin ait sa domhan a bhfuil cursa na slat thar teorainn rite agam ach dheamhan dath nios measa a chonaic me riamh na an teorainn a bhi sa bhaile againn a scriobhann Seamas O Cathain (Ollamh emeritus de chuid Cholaiste Ollscoile Bhaile Atha Cliath agus Iar-Stiurthoir Chnuasach Bhealoideas Eireann) faoin teorainn in Eirinn - mar ar ghnach leis na ceannairi beaga custam a bheith ina dtiarnai uirthi agus orainne.
JUMPING THE BORDER is an engaging account of his experience - as a child and as a young man - in three distinctive cultures, now radically changed. He describes the Tyrone of the 1940s and 1950s where Protestant and Catholic neighbours shared their lives at a personal level, but where institutions were divisive. His father’s prosperous business was ruined because of a political event he supported. The schools and the curriculum were dividers of the two communities. The border was a nuisance to everyone. As a post-graduate student in the 1960s, he took up residence in the Donegal Gaeltacht of Na Cruacha , where real old Irish was still spoken. He did a study of the area’s place names, and recorded the distinctive music and speech of Na Cruacha . Shortly afterwards his research took him to the far north of Europe, to Sapmi (known as Lapland), a cultural rather than a political territory which spreads over four countries, and where he immersed himself in the culture and language of the Sami people at a time when their native language and customs were under threat and belittled. Seamas’s many international distinctions and awards include: Knight (First Class) of the Order of the Lion of Finland; the Dag Stromback Prize of the Gustavus Adolphus Academy, Uppsala, Sweden; and the Ruth Michaela-Jena Ratcliff Prize, Edinburgh. He is an honorary member of the Finnish Kalevala Society; a member of the Folklore Fellows of the Finnish Academy of Sciences, Helsinki; and a sometime member of the Advisory Board of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen.
