Famous Irish folklorist's unique link to Mayo

Tadgh O'Leary had a preparatory school in Bofield from 1916 to 1928. This school was there to prepare the students from all over Ireland for the King’s Scholarship and the results were not too bad for those years. 

O’Leary came from Ardea on the Beara Peninsula in South Kerry and he qualified from De La Salle College in Waterford and later would obtain a College Diploma in Education enabled him to teach students.

One of his students was the folklorist Seán Ó Suilleabháin who also came from the South Kerry region near An Leithead where his parents taught in the local school, which O'Leary attended. Seán was born in 1903 and attended the local national school before continuing his education at St Brendan’s College in Killarney and then the preparatory school in Bofield in the rural heartland of north Mayo. 

The area was not just renowned for its school, which attracted students from all over Ireland, but it was a heartland of traditional Irish music since 1900 and also was well-known for its handball players and this remains so to the present day. Sadly, the school where O'Leary was principal closed down in June 2019 having opened its doors in April 1896.

Seán Ó Suilleabháin was in Bofield between 1920 and 1921 for a few months. It was the practice for the boys to lodge in local houses in the area and for the female students to lodge in O'Leary’s large house and they would attend classes in the school in the evening when the day pupils from the area had gone home and the normal school day was over. There were some local people amongst the students as they had finished with the national school and wished to become teachers and sit the King’s Scholarship. There were many photos of the scholarship class outside O‘Leary’s house in the years 1916-1917 and from 1920 to 1921 when Seán was a student there.

As he lived locally, Sean socialised in the area and attended house dances and wakes, mixing with the local people of all ages. He was fascinated by the customs that the people had in the wakes, especially if the deceased was elderly. There would be rough games played at the wakes and this writer was told about one of those games when he was researching a book on the centenary of the school. 

The informant told this writer that the people used to play a game called Tallaigh Thart where a person would stand in the middle of a ring of people and they would be hit by the others with a straw rope and try to grab the rope off one of the people in the ring. If they succeeded, then they joined the ring and the person who lost the rope had to stand in the middle to be hit. This was just one of the many games that Seán would have seen when he attended wakes in the Bofield area.

Such was the impact that the games had on the young Seán - he was about 16 or 17 at the time - that he began to study and collect folklore shortly afterwards and went on to be one of the foremost folklorists in the country.

He left Bofield to study in the De La Salle College and qualify as a National Teacher in 1925 before later obtaining a degree in Celtic Studies in 1934. He went on go on to be an archivist with the Irish Folklore Commission. He retired from the world of folklore in 1974 but not before he published a book on the games that were played for entertainment at wakes, in Irish in 1961, and then subsequently published as Bearla in 1967. It remains a seminal text to this day for students of Irish Folklore.

Seán Ó Suilleabháin died in December 1996, aged 92. He contributed greatly to the study and collection of folklore and collaborated with folklorists from other countries. His mentor in Bofeld and fellow Keryman Tadgh O'Leary passed away in February 1959, having retired from teaching in June 1944.