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
Can I write about you so that other people can share my astonishment at your life?
fascinating and astonishing and important life.
Can I tell people that you're every bit as important to me in my heart as any of the people we consider as making national history in this country?
I want to quote you like I might quote someone who was an important political figure at the time.
Absolutely.
And that was a sense that I had.
Over and over again, Derval, as I was researching this book, was although the language in these case books that the doctors were using and their methods of treatment had, of course, as you'd expect, aged poorly.
And it's difficult sometimes to even read the kind of language that's being used.
The sense of the core of human distress that was being communicated on the page is often unchanging in contemporary world.
And like, I think that there's a real sense of empathy and compassion that we can feel from that is that like the troubles that people were experiencing that would have driven them to seek help in these institutions.
was very similar to difficulties that we, as contemporary Irish people, often share.
Really, really difficult times.
And sometimes people were walking up the steep hill towards the institution in Cork, hoping and their families were hoping that they would receive the help that they needed there and that they would be
helped towards healing there and that and this really did happen and I wasn't I didn't foresee this as I began the research and that there would come a day very soon where they would feel back to themselves and they would be able to turn around and walk back down that hill into their own lives and away from the archive
And away from the case books and never come back to that institution.
And many, that was what surprised me sometimes on my long mornings in the archive, was that here were stories of real lives where often people went back to their own days and were never seen in the archive again.
And again, maybe...
Well, we do now.
We do now.
And she's an extraordinary person as every single one of her patients was also extraordinary to me, to everyone.
Showing 121–140 of 408 · page 7 of 21
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