Doireann Ní Ghríofa
speaker
408 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 24 May
Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I think even the briefest of lives, I think like our precious babies who live only for a few hours, they're so important in this world and they're so cherished and loved and
Every human life, I think, deserves that and deserves someone who will listen for those echoes that survive after they're gone.
And that was the privilege of this book and spending these years of my life listening for these echoes where often no one had thought of these names for many years, where they don't have any descendants of that family.
I think it's a really vexed question in modern Ireland that we're all grappling with so much, the legacies of these institutions and how the friction that's created when we consider those ruins often in light of the housing crisis, which is one of the most pressing issues facing us and our generation.
how to make homes for people.
And that's something that came up a lot when I was wandering and roaming through the site, Ervil, was the sense of how do we, how are we choosing to make these buildings into homes?
And that's what's ongoing there at the moment in part of the site in Cork.
Yeah, and half of it already, half of this institution as it survives now has been renovated into beautiful apartments.
And I write in my car for want of a better space.
So when I was writing this book, I would often park my car right in front of it so that I could feel the shadow of the building moving in the areas I was writing across my car through the windscreen, the lateral shadow, I should say.
And I
I hoped that it was making its way, as was the lingering shadows of the people once held there would be making its way through my being, through my fingertips and onto the page.
But what was lovely about parking my car there was
You see the children who are living there now.
You know, you might be distracted when you should be writing by seeing a child learning to cycle their bike in front of that institution, falling down and laughing.
And the echoes of those voices are...
I feel like are really important to acknowledge in the very dark history that we're dealing with with psychiatric institutions.
They're inhabited now, that one anyway.
And that's beautiful for me, I think, to see children living there now.
That's a new layer of history being laid down.
Showing 81–100 of 408 · page 5 of 21
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