Your Stories
Your Stories
Broadcast legend Anne Doyle is calling on people of all ages to nominate men and women over 70 to share their stories on a new Vanishing Ireland podcast with historian Turtle Bunbury. She talks to Carissa Casey about the past, the present and the post-lockdown future.
Like many of us when non-essential shops reopened, Anne Doyle was taking it easy. Having just finished a photoshoot with historian Turtle Bunbury to promote the new Vanishing Ireland podcast, she planned to go “down to the jewellers to ask them to repair my watch and then I’m going to Hodges Figgis - that’s going to be my first shop.”
It’s not retail therapy she’s craving, it’s travel. With one vaccine shot in the arm, she’s hopeful that by the end of the summer, it will be possible to return to some of her favourite spots in Portugal and the Canary Islands. “But to tell you the truth, I want to go anywhere, I want to go everywhere,” she says. “I’d hop the Wexford bus. I just want to go. I want to see that film Nomadland, I want to be on the road.”
It’s a sentiment with which many of us can identify. The woman who graced our TV screens and delivered the news, pretty much most nights for more than 30 years, still feels like one of the family, ten years after her retirement. She describes the most recent lockdown as “very up and down”.
“I didn’t find it overwhelming but I found it a bit claustrophobic. I certainly found there were periods of a rather numbing lethargy, the morphing of time. It didn’t prompt you to be very motivated. I’m a lazy sod anyway, but I found it quite easy to put thing off until tomorrow or the next day, or Tuesday fortnight, or Friday three weeks….At least I kept enough contact with reality to know what day it was, what time it was, what month it was.”
She lives in the centre of Dublin and some of her favourite haunts – the National Gallery, the National Museum and the Natural History Museum – were comfortably within her five kilometre radius, but they were all closed. “They’re first world problems,” she says. “For a lot of people they would be an expedition anyway. It’s lovely to see everything open again, thank god.”
Rambling around the virtually empty city centre, she found that “everybody spoke to everybody.”
“You were so delighted to see other people it was oddly congenial. I believe something similar happened in the last world war. People struck up all sorts of acquaintances and friendships. They were just glad to have contact with others.”
Right now, Anne is reaching out to as many people as possible to encourage them to nominate men and women over-70 to participate in a new Vanishing Ireland podcast.
“The idea is to capture the thoughts experiences and reflections, good, bad and indifferent, funny, tragic even I suppose of people over 70. They’ve done quite a lot of living naturally. So the appeal is going out to nominate relatives, friends, neighbours, anyone who has an interesting story. These then would be actual voices of the podcast.”
“It would capture a lot of information that might otherwise be lost. It would showcase people’s experiences who have lived through other tough times and other good times. It will be a useful addition to our general store of knowledge of who we are as a people, and it should also be very entertaining.”
Vanishing Ireland is the brainchild of historian Turtle Bunbury who, with photographer James Fennel, have interviewed and photographed more than 300 Irish people aged between 70 and 108. Interviewees included blacksmiths, fishermen, farmers, dockers, nurses, priests, nuns, teachers and people from disappearing professions such as saddlers, thatchers, lace-makers and turf-cutters. The stories have appeared in four volumes of Vanishing Ireland books.
“I didn’t know Turtle Bunbury at all but I was a fan of his book which are fabulous,” says Anne. “I suppose this new project is a nod to what we’ve come through, and also modern technology. Podcasts really seem to have totally come into their own. It’s kind of a natural evolution and a lovely idea.”
She is not yet herself of an age to contribute to the podcast. Still, the Ireland she grew up in was very different to the Ireland of today. “So different was it that I would rarely talk about it to someone from a very different background or someone very much younger. I know bloody well they’d think I was making it up. I won’t say that Ireland doesn’t exist anymore. There might be tinchy tichy pockets of it yet. But I think people would think I was pulling their leg, talking about driving to Harrow on the Jennet for paraffin oil. People wouldn’t quite get that.”
“Can you can imagine what people who can go back 20 years before that, or more, have to say. I have a very dear friend living down in Rosslare who is I think 92, and he is physically and mentally as lively as a cricket, and remembers everything.”
The podcast, she believes, will be worthy in the best sense. “It’s a word I hesitate to use. Worthy sometimes carries undertones of lacking entertainment. I think these podcasts would be very enjoyable. They will be enjoyable and add to our knowledge and our entertainment. They will be enjoyable for the people who participate. I think it promises to be very worthy, while giving us a laugh here and there. Or, maybe, making us stop up short, reassess things.”
To nominate someone to participate in the Vanishing Ireland podcast visit vanishingireland.com