From the early 1790s onwards, in Ireland as on the sister island, an ongoing print war raged between those who supported the political status quo and those who sought to replace it with one shaped by French revolutionary ideas. While French Enlightenment writings had been circulating widely among the elite and upwardly mobile of Irish towns since the early eighteenth century, cheap print was now pressed into service to determine whether an increasingly literate and politically aware population would stay with the values of the old order or move towards the new radical ideas. Competing pamphlets and newspapers battled it out, to be enforced by a veritable deluge of songbooks, broadsides and handbills proclaiming for and against the new ideas.

Pamphlet warfare was nothing new in the realms of political disputation in the two islands but now the London and Dublin publications were supplemented by an increasing number from Belfast – the hub of United Irish print production in the disturbed decade of the 1790s. Though one of Thomas Paine's works was published in Cork in 1797, the output of southern printers, insofar as it was political at all, seems to have been dominated by the conservative rather than the radical. In Cork both Edwards and Haly published a number of works that focused on ‘exterminating French principles’ (as one 1793 publication expressed it) and particularly challenging Paine's Age of Reason.

A chapter attempting a discussion of oral history and tradition as a source for the study of the Irish Famine must surely start with a story. This story was told to me by my mother about her own maternal grandmother, Mary Skehan, the wife of a comfortable farmer in the upland region of north Waterford. In a tradition passed down to her daughter and her granddaughters, Mary was presented as a woman of great generosity. During the Famine, so my mother told me, Mary Skehan was never known to turn a poor person away from her door and yet, despite her constant giving, her meal-bin was never empty. She died when my mother was a child – almost a century ago – yet the story lives on, transmitted by me to my children and to anyone else who cares to listen. So here we have an authentic piece of oral history about the Great Famine. Or do we? Is this story oral history? And is it about the Famine?

Oral History and Oral Tradition

This piece of family lore, its theme of generosity rewarded familiar in all folklores, illustrates many of the complexities of the oral as a source for historical research. In the first place, it raises questions regarding the distinction between oral history – the first-hand evidence of individuals – and oral tradition – tales passed on from one generation to the next.