Peig awards full#

Peig awards full#

Most of the time she had full authority, and she was never backward in using it. She had been brought up by the Sisters at one of their orphanages, and, being unable to find work outside, was kept on to assist the nuns. She was the most dreaded figure of them all. 6Ī woman aged about forty, named Fanny Mullen, helped the nuns to look after the boys. His body was swiftly taken away, and we were brought immediately to the chapel to pray for his soul. 5 Then we saw the boy falling from the chair, blood streaming from his head. Once, during the Derry riots, one of my companions stood on a chair and looked out of a skylight window in a bedroom at the top of the building. The fate of the manuscript is not known but the following appears to be taken from it, and relates to his childhood in an orphanage in Derry in the early 1920s. He wrote an autobiography of his years travelling the roads and though there was great interest in his work, he was unsuccessful in securing publication. Ward was then a well-known character in Ireland, his ballads enlivening many a fair and pattern. Ward was very much at home in Kerry and especially in Ballyferriter – the ‘Dingle Republic’ – where lived his good friend Sean Kavanagh. Ward was welcomed into Peig’s cabin and sat by the fireside with her and her family where they exchanged stories. Peig was, he said, one of the hidden souls of Ireland seldom shown to the stranger and recalled how her voice settled in the depths of his soul, ‘more beautiful than I can describe.’ 1 Wandering bard, Eoghan Roe Ward, left a touching snapshot of Peig Sayers in her twilight years when he visited her in her home in Vicarstown, Dunquin, in 1944.