JUMPING THE BORDER
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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 OCathain, 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.”
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.
Seamas O Cathain was born in Drumquin, Co. Tyrone, and educated at Christian Brothers Grammar School, Omagh, and at Queen's University Belfast where he graduated: BA in 1960, MA in 1966, and PhD in 1977. Among other academic posts, he has been appointed Professor of Celtic, Queen's University Belfast in 1980; Associate Professor, University College Dublin in 1990; Dean, Faculty of Celtic Studies, University College Dublin from 1990 to 1996; Acting Head, Department of Archaeology, University College Dublin in 1995-1996; Acting Head, Department of Irish Folklore from 1996 to 2000; Professor of Irish Folklore, University College Dublin from 2000 to 2005; Interim Head, School of Irish, Celtic Studies, Irish Folklore and Linguistics in 2005 and 2006; and Director, National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin in 2006 and 2007.
He has been Editor of 'Bealoideas', the Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society from 1996 to 2005, and has received numerous honours and awards, including the Gael Linn Gold Medal in 1960, the Dag Stromback Prize of the Gustavus Adolphus Akademi, Uppsala, Sweden in 1994, and in 1986 became a Knight (First Class) of the Order of the Lion of Finland.