Fiachra Gallagher
speaker
59 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 28 Jun
Fiachra Gallagher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
A few small drops of rain
Beyond the building site, drumlins and patchwork fields stretch towards the calving border, the landscape keeling over into Ulster.
I'm reaching towards my father, frail arms struggling against the weight of my winter coat.
Mishagiri, I say.
I want.
I take the Panasonic camcorder from him shakily.
Then the videotape ends.
I spoke only Irish at the time we moved into that house outside my naughty, a village lodged in those hillocks of North County Meath.
My parents were keen to raise us with the language.
My mother had an organic love for it, while my father, like generations of his family before, traced his Irish to an upbringing in the Donegal Gaeltacht.
But schooling through English and a juvenile antipathy forced my grip on the language to loosen.
As time passed, as I grew, I lost much of the Irish rooted in those early years.
Recently, I've tried hard to recognise the child in front of the half-built house.
I think that's what brought me to Gola Island, off the coast of Donegal last summer.
That, and an impulse to follow my great-grandfather's journey to this island.
Joseph Gallagher, my father's grandfather, was born in 1882 in Gweedore, a cradle of the Irish language.
He trained to be a teacher, and at 22 years old he took his first job at the National School Angola, a short boat journey from where he'd grown up.
At that time, the island was sustained by fishing the teeming waters all around.
It was a place renewed year after year by the cycle of the seasons.
Joseph stayed on Gola for six or seven years before returning to the mainland.
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