This year’s crop of students have added their interviews to the class website, Oral History @UCC.

Lieutenant Colonel Tom Quirke of the Irish Defense Forces spoke to Adam Mangan about his experiences as part of the UN Peacekeeping forces in Lebanon. He felt the Irish made particularly good peacekeepers: ‘I have often heard of situations where there would be conflict in a sort of a check point and… everyone would be shouting at each other. Suddenly the commander would come in and say to the fellow, the leader of the opposition and he would say, “hey, would you like a cup of tea?”‘

Two students focused on local sports in which they have a vested interest: Jason Abbott interviewed fellow Cobh soccer players David Curran and John Flanagan about relatively recent history. They discussed the relationship between the League of Ireland club Cobh Ramblers and the youth club, Springfield Ramblers and the sport’s strong community support. Curran recalls going to matches when he was young and says, ‘I’ll always remember how the stadium was full and everyone singing on one side of the ground. There was a great buzz about the place.’ Darren Collins, a graduate of Presentation Brothers College in Cork, interviewed three people involved in rugby union at the school. Denis Hegarty attended Pres in the 1960s and came back as a teacher and rugby coach in 1991 and felt  a great camaraderie existed between everyone involved in the sport: ‘Winning wasn’t the be all and end all. You wanted to win something, but you just wanted the lads to enjoy their sport.’

Another common theme was migration: Eve Millett-Trimble interviewed her mother, Carmel, who was born in Nottingham and moved back to Fethard, Co. Tipperary with her family at age twelve. She remembers the move through the eyes of a child: ‘The actual move of going to Ireland I was quite excited about. We’d always heard the stories about Ireland growing up. My father was a very good storyteller, raconteur, and all we ever heard about was how nice it was… We thought we were going back to this sort of wonderland the way dad described it.’ As an adult she re-migrated to England in the 1980s and then returned to Ireland with her family in 2000.

Conor Long interviewed Con Griffin, who migrated to England in the early 1960s and became a successful plasterer, running his own business. He returned to Ireland in 1990 and when asked if he felt Ireland was ‘home’ (at 9 minutes into the interview part linked) he said: ‘Yes, but it didn’t matter to me where, because I had left when I was a kid and really, when I come to think of it, my real home was probably London. You know, because I could get a little bit excited when there was a hurling match on and when Tipperary are playing Cork, just for the hell of it I might put out a flag and get all excited about Tipperary, but that would be only a one-day-wonder, ‘twould never last two days. I haven’t got that kind of, you know, thing about place or anything like that.’

Feel free too leave comments or questions about the interviews here or on the website.