Story telling is a live art which does not rely on stories being learnt by heart and then regurgitated. A story telling performance can be affected by the mood of an audience, the amount of time you have to tell your story, the time of day and lighting can all change the mood. The audience is the inherent part of the success of a story telling session. The audience is not passive, but will be playing a part in the story told. I watched my own children become engrossed in stories I told and read, and I am now appreciating the active part my grandchildren play in the stories I read to them. We try to make sense of the world through stories, and listening to a storyteller is so satisfying, that we can forget our problems of the moment and get lost in another world. As my grandchildren’s eyes grow wider with the stories I read to them, I appreciate just how lost and mesmerized they have become in the story.

I have known about Storytelling in Ireland for many years, but it was only in 2003 that we actually visited a Storytelling session in June at Ballyduff Wexford, where the local people stood up and told stories about anything and everything, some family history stories, some Irish legends and some pure fiction and I was amazed at how they could stand and talk at great length without any notes to guide them! Surely a sign of the old Irish Blarney! As the sun was setting over the wooded scene and it grew darker, the atmosphere became even more dramatic with the Storyteller's house of thatch standing in the foreground. It’s no wonder that many Irish families, including my own, have the lore passed down, but no proof within the myths and legends, just the hearsay!

I am tracing the history of my O’Neill family from Tipperary to Cork, and have been lucky enough, with help from cousins on the oral history side, to take my O’Neill genealogy back to 1827 in Tipperary. Sadly these old Irish relatives are dying out and with this happening I notice the old storytelling habit is disappearing.

Storytelling in Ballyduff made me think about my own Irish roots and the storytellers within my own family. I have always written stories from an early age, at first I wrote fiction stories to amuse friends at school, but later I joined Writing Groups and now belong to a Yesterdays Group where we tell stories about our own past. My generation has seen much change as I remember the horse and cart days of milk and coal deliveries, gas lamps in the streets and the gaslighters coming around to turn the street lights on and off. As a young city girl I remember being evacuated during the war to the country and then back to the devastation of the war torn city, having had my family roots torn apart, only to try to come together again as a family. We have seen the rise of motorways and the increase of cars on our roads, as well as the demise of the steam train. We have been thrown headlong into the bewildering computer age, with digital technology all around us. I have embraced the computer era and have a digital camera and am enjoying doing Family History from my armchair, having started my Family History the hard way back in the late 1950’s, when there was not even photocopying facilities available!

I am not the only member of my family who has dabbled with writing. Edward O’Neill, who died 1978, used to tell my own children funny stories, and I have been known to make up stories to tell the children myself. I used to tell them my version of Goldilocks and the three bears and the snowman, made by them, who came to life, went for a walk and found adventurous things to do and then sat by the fire, long before Raymond Briggs wrote his story, but my story was oral and not illustrated!!

However, the real storyteller of this O’Neill family is my mysterious James O’Neill.

To be continued.

Janet