Doireann Ní Ghlacáin is a young Irish woman with a dizzying number of strings to her bow. The self-described “massive nerd” is a fiddle player, television presenter, storyteller, sean nós singer, podcaster, academic and meditator. On a video call from New York, where she is making a documentary about Irish women forced into political exile, the host of hit podcast How to Gael is talking about her new bilingual live show, Studies on the Cailleach. “I am first and foremost a traditional musician and sean nós singer, so the show is a way to explore that and go a little deeper into Irish folklore and history. I get really nerded out on these kinds of things.”
In the show, Ní Ghlacáin will guide audiences through an evening of reflection, ritual and traditional music using the Cailleach as a motif to explore ancient and contemporary Irish womanhood. For those not familiar, what does the Cailleach represent? “She’s the goddess, she’s the old hag, she’s the Mise Éire in Pearse’s famous poem. The earliest poem we have relating to her goes back to the ninth century. So to understand Ireland and the Irish psyche, I think you really need to understand the Cailleach. She’s the muse of all of our literature and the arts.”
As Ní Ghlacáin tells it, the Cailleach is one of the most resilient and powerful female characters in Irish culture. “If you are looking at Ireland a thousand years ago, she was a strong figure. The fact that she has survived despite all the shifts in culture and language is really impressive, and testament to how important she is. The ancient belief is that Ireland was created by the Cailleach, we refer to Ireland as she, it’s the motherland, as opposed to the fatherland.”
The Cailleach has followed Ní Ghlacáin around since her student days in Galway, when she borrowed a book on her but never returned it, balking at the “astronomical” lending fees. Having laid aside the beliefs of her Catholic upbringing, she sees herself as more of a “pagan and pantheist”. The Cailleach was a shapeshifter, so as a representative for modern Irish womanhood, Ní Ghlacáin says she is perfect.
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“She took many forms, sometimes she was the hag, sometimes the beautiful young woman, and other times she might take the form of a hare. Hares are really sacred in Irish folklore … we have all these stories of how women took that form to escape immediate danger. It’s not a million miles away from the modern shapeshifting that women are doing all the time at work or at home or in life generally … we’re constantly having to adapt and evolve in ways that maybe a man isn’t.”
Ní Ghlacáin grew up in Dublin’s northside with her mother, TG4 political correspondent Sorcha Ní Riada, and her father, retired garda Kevin Glackin. The family, including her two siblings, spoke Irish at home, where they were taught traditional music. They were an unusual family in Clontarf in the 1990s. It wasn’t always comfortable. “I spent such a huge amount of my childhood and my younger years under a kind of cloud of shame about the whole Irish language thing … I can’t emphasise enough how much we were viewed as the f**king weirdos.”
Not any more. “Thanks be to God it has come back into vogue,” she says, referencing the latest revival of the language, a renaissance that started in the pandemic and can now be seen everywhere from the rap songs of Kneecap to TikTok gaeilgeoirs to the books of the late Manchán Magan. She says she “crossed paths” a lot with the author. Her great grandmother Bridie Curran was in Kilmainham jail with his grandmother Sheila Humphreys, which they’d often talk about when they met. “He is a massive loss,” she says. “He planted fertile ground for us, and we hope to plough that field for a very long time to come. I think we’ll be talking about him as one of the most important Irish men since the foundation of the State, for sure.”
Ní Ghlacáin’s own Irish pedigree is impeccable. Her mother comes from Cúil Aodha on the Cork-Kerry border, and her maternal grandfather was composer Seán Ó Riada, known as “the man who gave the Irish people back their own music”. He was at the fore of the Irish language revival in the 1960s, but he died aged 40 in 1971, so she only got to know him through making a documentary, Seán Ó Riada - Mo Sheanathair, produced by Jim Sheridan.
Nearly a decade ago, Ní Ghlacáin was “22 and incredibly broke”, working on her PhD in oral Irish poetry at University of Galway, when she was approached by TG4 to do some television presenting work. “Rent was cheaper then, but the work paid for my rent for a whole year, which was amazing,” she remembers. While working at TG4, she met her future podcast hosts Louise Cantillon and Síomha Ní Ruairc. “Being a woman, working in the same area and being the same age, often you are pitted against each other, you are up for the same jobs. So the podcast came about from a place of ‘Look, imagine if we do something together instead of being suspicious of each other’. That’s how it was born, and it’s just been a dream to work with these two brilliant women.”
Witty and engaging, the bilingual podcast has toured the country, with sell-out live shows across Ireland and the United States. Ní Ghlacáin also appears regularly on RTÉ radio and television, a go-to voice and face when it comes to the Irish language. It’s a welcome contrast to “being the weirdo in the corner who spoke Irish at home and played fiddle, which was absolutely not sexy up until lockdown”. The How to Gael podcast, now two years old, is still flying. The women will headline the Galway Comedy Festival with a live podcast on Friday, October 24th.
But back to Ní Ghlacáin’s debut solo show and the ancient Cailleach, the divine hag who has given her an opportunity to explore contemporary Irish womanhood through a different lens. “We can get really bogged down in the notion that what we’re going through in this day and age is absolutely unique to us … but actually, the human condition stays exactly the same. The problems I’m absolutely tormented by now are the exact same problems that were tormenting another woman 500 years ago.
“So I’m looking at these old stories and trying to reframe them … I mean, we’re fairly basic as humans … it’s quite easy to draw those parallels, because we’re not as evolved as we think we are.”
What kinds of parallels? She points to the societal expectations placed on women which, she maintains, haven’t changed much over the centuries. Newly single, Ní Ghlacáin had earlier assumed she would be getting married and having children by now. “But having been in a relationship for most of my 20s, when I got to 30, it all went tits up … and thank God I didn’t go down that road because I wouldn’t be here in New York doing this documentary, or looking forward to doing a cultural residency in Paris after Christmas," she says.
“As women we can find ourselves going along with what people say you should want, and then you wake up and you’re like, ‘f**k, this isn’t what I wanted at all’. So that’d be one of the parallels. I think something else that has not changed is that there’s a really large cohort of Irish women that are in sh**ty relationships with sh**ty Irish men.” She quickly qualifies this statement. “I think men are great, I’m not trying to hate on them, but I just think it’s very difficult for men to express themselves and to be the people that they actually want to be or are capable of being.”
More generally, in terms of parallels, she believes people are still grappling with “nationalism, our notion of nationalism, and being really dissatisfied with the powers that be, whether that be English rule or Irish rule. And landlords. You see it all down through our oral history, and we’re still absolutely crippled by landlords, it’s very frustrating. I don’t know how many more hundreds of years we need to spend protesting this. And it’s really important to draw those parallels.”
The Studies on the Cailleach show is bilingual. How much Irish do people need to know in order to attend? “I don’t think you need to be worried about your level of Irish. I suppose it is a valid concern for everybody, but my general pitch is, ‘Look, come along, and you’ll surprise yourself by how much you’re going to pick up yourself anyway.’ And it is primarily in English. We’re doing a fully Irish language show in Galway, but I don’t think I’m fully fluent in English or in Irish any more. Everything I do is very intertwined.”
And how much music is in the show? “It’s a good mix between storytelling and music. It’s very pared back. Just one woman and her fiddle,” she says. “With the oral tradition, what really excites me is that nothing was ever written down and it was all transcribed by ear. I never went to any formal classes. I learned everything at home, by ear, from my father.”
This communality is at the heart of Ní Ghlacáin’s mission. “What you are tapping into is the collective energy of all of these communities, all of these artists, all of these composers who took a tune, reshaped it, made it their own and then someone else heard it – and on it went. That’s a really powerful and potent thing. It’s the collective imagination of Ireland going back hundreds of years. I don’t think that we realise how special that is and how the energy from that can sustain us.”
Doireann Ní Ghlacáin’s Studies on the Cailleach is touring Ireland until October 29th
