Dr Ken Ó Donnchú

Absolutely, yeah.

So you kind of touched on two important points there in these poems.

One is that a lot of them are very light and satirical and they're to entertain and to just provoke a laugh.

And then the second one is that you often do get a more serious message or some kind of veiled dig at somebody in power.

So there's a whole section in this book which is having a go off the clergy and how they're holier than thou.

And it's interesting because there's kind of two sources for these poems.

Some of them were single verses on the margin of manuscripts.

And they had no other context and they didn't exist beyond those four lines.

And then other ones were extracted from much longer poems where it was kind of a built in pre-existing proverb or a little moral or a little message of some description.

And then it was taken out in isolation.

So T.F.

O'Reilly, who compiled the book, he was an expert in Irish manuscripts.

And as he was cataloguing and researching some of the hundreds of Irish language manuscripts that we have in this country, he was taking note of these phrases as he went along.

And he compiled about four or five books similar to this, which is it's a kind of a subjective, you know, it's his own compilation and his own edition.

But they speak to us still.

And I think they're very enjoyable literature compared to some of the more heavier literature you find throughout Irish history.

I love that, the veiled dig, which I think is something that Irish people are really, really good at, smiling but actually putting their elbow into your ribs at the same time.

I mean, out of all of them, and there's literally hundreds in this book, what is your favourite?

What stands out for you?

What do you think still resonates in 2026 Ireland?