Kevin Danaher , 1913-2002

Folklore, Oct, 2002 by Patricia Lysaght

Kevin Danaher was born in Athea (Ath an tSleibhe), county Limerick, Ireland, on 30 January 1913, where his father was a schoolmaster. He received his primary education locally and his secondary education at Mungret College, in his home county. He undertook undergraduate studies at University College Dublin and was conferred with a Bachelor of Arts Degree (subjects of Irish and Latin) by The National University of Ireland in 1936. He obtained a Higher Diploma in Education in 1937, and then studied comparative folklore and ethnology for two years at the Universities of Berlin and Leipzig as an Alexander von Humboldt Scholar (1937-9). He had sailed by liner from Cobh (formerly Queenstown), County Cork, arriving at the port of Hamburg on 19 October 1937, to begin his studies, and left on his homeward journey by the same route on 11 July 1937, at the end of the summer term, just seven weeks before the outbreak of World War II.

In January 1940 he joined the staff of the Irish Folklore Commission (1935-71) and from then until May of the same year, when he was called up for service in the Irish Defence Forces, he showed his calibre as a field worker by collecting a large volume of traditional material, meticulously contextualised and illustrated, in his native county Limerick. This included various genres of oral narrative, some gleaned from his father, Liam, from whom Kevin's brother Colm, who acted as a part-time collector for the Irish folklore Commission for a number of years, also wrote down material. The volume also contained details of calendar customs, former transhumance practices, and a preliminary survey of vernacular house-types of County Limerick. Much of this material later appeared in various publications.

Kevin remained in the Irish Defence Forces for the duration of the War in Europe, becoming instructor in the artillery school in Kildare and rising to the rank of captain. During his years in the army he maintained his interest in vernacular architecture, and when the war in Europe ended he was afforded leave to complete his thesis on vernacular house types entitled The Irish House: A Study in Traditions and Methods, for which he was awarded a first-class honours Master of Arts Degree in Archaeology by the National University of Ireland in 1945. He was invited to return to the Irish Folklore Commission by the Honorary Director and received temporary leave of absence from the Defence Forces from 1 September 1945 for that purpose. He left the Army permanently to return to the Commission on 21 March 1946, and was a staff member of the Commission and its successor the Department of Irish Folklore, University College Dublin (1971-) for the remainder of his professional career. He retired from University College Dublin at the age of seventy in 1983.

His principal responsibility in the Irish Folklore Commission was the ethnological dimension of the Commissions work, which included the development of the questionnaire system of enquiry and the mapping of results, on the lines of what was in progress in similar institutions in Scandinavia. Over the years he built up a superb images archive, which is much drawn on to the present day for teaching and publication. Until the late 1940s, when outdoor disc-cutting equipment became available, he made disk recordings in the Commission Office (82 St Stephen's Green, Dublin), including the only recording ever made of the music of the outstanding piper Johnny Doran (The Bunch of Keys: The Complete Recordings of Johnny Doran. Dublin: The Folklore of Ireland Council, 1988).

In keeping with the enlightened attitude of the Commission in attempting to provide expert training for its staff, Kevin spent two months in Scandinavia visiting major folklore and folklife institutions to observe their programmes, archives, and work methods, including Nordiska Museet [Nordic Museum] and Institutet for Folklivsforskning [The Institute for Folklife Research], Stockholm, Landsmalarkivet [The Dialect Archive], Uppsala, the University of Lund, Norsk Folkeminnesamling [Norwegian Folklore Archive], Oslo, and Dansk Folkemindesamling [Danish Folklore Archive] in Kobenhavn. He also met some of the major folklore and folklife Scandinavians scholars of the day including C. W. von Sydow, (Lund), Sigurd Erixon. Andreas Lindblom and Albert Eskerod (Stockholm), Dag Stromback and Ake Campbell (Uppsala), Albert Sandklef (Varberg), Knut Liestol and Reidar Th. Christiansen (Oslo), and Hans Ellekilde (Kobenhavn). He spent almost a week with Dr Eskerod in Lappland compiling a folklife survey of two valleys about to be flooded for a hydroelectric scheme.

In April 1948, Kevin was in the Isle of Man on behalf of the Irish Folklore Commission making disk recordings of some elderly speakers of Manx, whose speech Mr Eamonn de Valera, then Taoiseach (Premier) of Ireland, had promised to have recorded during his visit to the Island the previous year. Having redeemed de Valera's promise to the Isle of Man, Kevin turned his attention to Ireland and within the next four years he recorded about 280 hours of speech for the Irish Folklore Commission, mainly in the Irish language and consisting mostly of folktales, some of them long narratives and very fine examples of the verbal art (see Fabula 22 (1981):312-5). Among the narrators recorded by Kevin and his colleague Sean O Suilleabhain before Christmas 1951 was the famous Blasket Island storyteller Peig Sayers, who was in hospital in Dublin at the time.