Orlaith McBride

Really, the book for us was about trying to offer a doorway into what that Ireland of 1926 looked like.

So we wanted it to provide a kind of a vivid and a human portrait of the information that's held in the census.

So we know everything about the statistics around employment, around Irish language.

We know about migration.

We know all of those kind of the big themes involved.

that are emerging through the census.

And really what we wanted in the book was to open up those themes and to explore who people were, where they lived, the work they did, the languages they spoke, and in many ways bringing historians in to interpret those forms and those villages themselves.

those streets, et cetera, in a very tangible way.

So, for example, we have a beautiful essay.

And the other thing, David, is they're short.

They're all really short.

So they're teasers for people.

So Sarah Ann Buckley has a wonderful one about the children of Dogfish Lane or Georgina Larraghy, St.

Phelan's in Cavan.

My own one, from a personal perspective, is about a family story on Gola Island in Donegal.

So what we're doing is we're trying to take...

a theme, a place, a street, and then get a historian to delve a little bit deeper and to open it up and then, as I say, hopefully tease it for people.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

And in my own story, I always knew that my great grandfather had drowned in 1943, coming back from the fair day in Dunloe.

On Gola Island.