The Holy Wells: A Two Part Essay in the Literal and the Figurative.

The Literal:

There's a lot of talk about wanting to connect with our ancestors. This often comes into conflict with an entirely understandable desire to distance ourselves from the Church. However this leads to a very harmful fixation on the ancient, the parts of our history we know the least about, the people we're the least connected to; and skipping over the dozens of generations in between that we have much more in common with and can learn about most easily.

But there is a thread that can link us in the here and now, through our Christian ancestors, all the way back to our Pre-Christian ancestors. That thread is the Holy Wells.
There's a misunderstanding about the Christianisation of pre-Christian beliefs. People think it's always top-down, with the clergy schemeing to to convert people by reframing their beliefs. But for the most part evidence indicates it's usually the other way around.
It's usally bottom-up, with people refusing to abandon their old practices and traditions after conversion much to the frustration of the clergy, who will often spend centuries trying to convince them to stop their “heathen practices” until eventually one side or the other finally gives up.

This kind of conflict was common in Ireland for centuries, with the ordinary people practicing what was essentially a form of Jesus-Flavoured Paganism while the priests impotently raged agains it. Sometimes the ordinary people would win, the clergy would give up resisting and would begin to take part in the practice themselves.
This is almost certainly what happened with Holy Wells.

Holy Wells are sacred spots in the landscape associated with specific saints and the curing of specific ailments.
Each Holy Well usually cures a specific thing, there would be one Holy Well for headaches, another for burns, another for toothache, one for being the wrong gender, etc, etc.
People would travel to these wells at all times of year for cures, and sometimes would take some water home so as to have the cure handy if it was needed.
Holy Wells are also often believed to be homes to unusual fish or other aquatic animals and the presence and happiness of this creature is often associated with the effectiveness of the well's cure.
Its likely these creatures are originaly a pre-Christian belief and were the original patrons of these wells before they became associated with Saints.

While the Priests did start holding masses at Holy Wells at specific times of year in order to honour the associated Saint, they strongly disapproved of the ordinary people having their own gatherings at the wells unsupervised by the clergy.
These gatherings were called Patterns, a term coming from Patron as in Patron Saint. Patterns would usually begin on the day honouring the Saint associated with that well and could last up to three days. They involved singing, dancing, stortyelling, playing games, feasting, drinking and sometimes trade and markets.
Here we see the divide between the Christianity of the Clergy and the Christianity of the ordinary people. Both honouring the same site at the same date, but in vastly different ways, with the Clergy condemning the practices of the ordinary people.

Even if Patterns Holy and Wells aren't pre-Christian in origin, the practice of these gatherings still shows how even our more recent ancestors would rebel against the priests. They are still an example of communities coming together in an act of defiance against the church.
And they are still a way that we can connect with and become more aware of our landscape and our people, to connect with our ancestors and even with each other.
Find your local Holy Well, visit it often; weekly, monthly yearly, whatever you can manage. Bring your friends, build your own little practices, clean the place up.
Connect.

Figurative:
But Holy wells are not the only gathering places. We have created more and more down through the years.
The pub, the music venue, the arts collective, the public library, even vintage and steam rallies, farmers markets, the ploughing championships.
These are centres of gathering, participation and repetition. More legitimate sources of folklore, more legitimate wellsprings than any curated anthology or private business that bars entry.

These gathering places can even be more ephemeral and not tied to specific locations, trad sessions, ciorcal cómhra, union meetings, craft meetups, book clubs.

Folklore does not come from books or museums, it is not dictated to us from a pulpit. It is not something to be visited rarely.
It's created collectively, it's something you do regularly, it's part of your regular routine.
It's not something you pursue on your own, it's something you find among people.

Our communities are where the life of folklore flows from, they are where new understandings, new stories and new practices flow from. Our communities are what keep folklore alive.
Séamus Ó Duillearga (founder of Ireland's National Folklore Commission) once wrote “a week in Ballinskelligs is better than a year in school” because the real way to learn folklore is to be immersed in it, to be sourrounded by the people who produce it. The real experts are the people it comes from.

The Holy Wells that our folklore springs from are the palces where people come to gather again and again and again, to talk and share stories and music. Where people come again and again and again to take an active part in their community.
If you wish to learn about folklore put down the books and find a community group. An Arts Collective, a choir, a local session, a story club, join a union, anything. And go, go again and again and again. Make it part of your life.

Apathy is Out

“We Issue from everywhere” is how Greg Delanty chose to translate “Níl áit ar fuaid na cruinne nach ann a saolaiodh sinne”the final line of Seán Ó Ríordáin's beautiful poem NÍ Ceadmhach Neamhshuim; but a more direct translation might be “there is no place in the world where we weren't born”. This is the thesis of Ní Ceadmhach Neamhshuim and arguably it is the thesis of Ó Ríordáin's collected works. If there's no place on Earth that we weren't born in then nobody is a stranger, nobody is a foreigner, everyone is our community and everyone is our concern.

For a long time writing, and especially poetry, in the Irish language has been filtered and curated. Very little was discussed in schools that was not explicitly about the Irish language or the misery of the Irish people under British colonialism. Ó Ríordáin's poetry may give us an idea of why that was the case. Because while Ó Ríordáin certainly did write poetry about the Irish language, his relationship to it, his shame at it being his second language rather than his first and the way the language was looked down upon by society at large and especially the Church; he also wrote about sexuality, about solidarity about collectivism. In Ní Ceadmhach Neamhshuim Ó Ríordáin specifically mentioned South Afirca, a reference to Apartheid more than a decade before the workers of Dunnes Stores held their famous strike against Aparthied South Africa.

And Ó Ríordáin was not the only one. Seanchas Annie Bhán a collection of folktales collected from the seanchaí Annie Bhán begins with two back-to-back cautionary tales against hoarding wealth and features many stories about outsmarting and outdoing the ruling class. It seems plain to me that much Irish Language writing has been deemed too radical to be taught about or promoted for much of our nation's history. It's only in the past decade or so that Ó Ríordáin's poetry has been getting the recognition it deserves in the English speaking world, Seanchas Annie Bhán is out of print and difficult to find. Whereas the poetry of avvowed fascist and Hitler admirer W.B. Yeats has been freely available and actively taught in schools for decades. The latter affirms the state, the former affirms the people.

You Can Read My Body But You'll Never Read My Books

Spasticus Autistcus was written by Ian Dury in 1981. Ian Dury contracted Polio at age seven and as a result his left arm and leg were permanently weakened. This song was written in protest of the “International Year of Disabled Persons”, something championed by disability charities and something Dury found personally insulting and demeaning. According to his daughter Jemima Ian would frequently make a point that has been echoed by disabled people around the world “Why do we have charities? Why isn’t this normal? Just give me what I need to get around and live my life.”

Spasticus Autisticus was a battle cry against this kind of institutionalised paternalism that condescends to and infantalises the disabled. The line “you can read my body but you'll never read my books” speaks profoundly to the experiences of many disabled folk. People see or learn about our disability and immediately judge that we cannot take care of ourselves, that we cannot know what is best for ourselves. And they have no interest when we try to tell them otherwise. They have no interest in the richness of our internal lives, the value of our perspectives and lived experience. They will read our bodies and pour out saccharine pity, thinly veilled disgust or outright contempt with very little meaningful difference between the three all the while refusing to engage with us as equals, as real human beings.

The full meaning of this lyric, the sheer contempt of the abled world for the disabled experience, was only underlined when the song was effectively banned by the BBC and other radio stations who deemed it's title and lyrics that directly related the disabled experience such as “I widdle when I piddle 'cos my middle is a riddle” were deemed too offensive. Because of course, the real victims of disability are the abled people made uncomfortable by the reality of our existence. The fact that the medical term Spastic, once used for Cerebral Paulsy, became derrogatory as a direct result of the fact that abled people have such contempt for us they will weaponise medical terminology into insults is, of course, our own fault and a reason to silence us.

This song is fully and entirely about the disabled experience. But that one line “you can read my body, but you'll never read my books” resonates across marginalised communities. You can read my body, the ability of my body, the shape of my body, the size of my body, the desires of my body, the colour of my body and consider that knowledge enough to make your judgements and reach your concolusions. But you will never read my books, never care enough to truly know me.

Meteing out punishment in the name of the Moon. Who was the National Moonlight Boy?

there lived a terrible bad man named oliver cromwell

While England had seized and enclosed parcels of land in Ireland dating as far back as the 13th century, it wasn’t until the Cromwellian conquest beginning in 1649 that land enclosure in Ireland really began in earnest. With Cromwell and his soldiers forcing as many of the Irish people as possible to the rocky, less fertile land west of the Shannon. Those who resisted were either killed or taken prisoner and transported to England’s colonies in Australia or the Americas.
Between the death toll and kidnappings this was the first time in which Ireland’s population was cut in half, the second being An Gorta Mór.
The Cromwellian Conquest was also the birth of landlordism in Ireland.
Cromwell’s colonisers realised they had no labourers to work the land for them. So they allowed some of the native Irish to come back to their homes in exchange for rent and labour.

The Moonlighters were the first that put hope into the nation

In the 19th century land enclosure was reaching its height and, evictions were mounting and fooding and housing shortages were common.
In light of these circumstances the Moonlighters were formed by Bob Finn (the first Captain Moonlight), Batt O’Leary and Justin McCarthy.
Though this group was originally formed in Castleisland, Co. Kerry it spread to many parts of the country.
The Moonlighters were a secret society dedicated to opposing English Rule, to preventing land enclosure (or “grabbing” as they called it), to protecting tenants and enforcing boycotts.
They would do this through use of Moonlight Raids in which they would tear down fences, sabotage farm machinery, injure, kill or steal livestock, and assaulting or killing Grabbers (those who tried to enclose common land) and Landlords.
The Moonlighters would also raise money through various means to help provide for families during boycotts and rent strikes as well as fighting to prevent evictions and sometimes to reclaim stolen homes.
They would generally perform these Moonlight Raids while masked and disguised. And they would often leave warning notes or taunts signed off by Captain Moonlight.

The National moonlight boy

Composed by the Cork Poet Con O’Mahony whose repertoire had a distinctly revolutionary bent. The song romanticises the Moonlighter movement and the poet plainly sees the punishment of Moonlighters as unjust. The titular character has been sentenced to transportation, though the song does not clarify which of England’s colonies he’s being sent to.
This is very interesting considering that the legacy of the Moonlighters did make it to Australia in the form of Andrew George Scott, a masked outlaw and gang leader who often made speeches on prison reform under the name Captain Moonlite.
Scott (who was also presumed gay) was originally from Ireland. Though he chose to move to Australia of his own free will he was still very plainly honouring the Moonlighter legacy begun by Bob Finn.

Fáin's top five books for starting in Irish Folklore and Storytelling

Seanchas Annie Bhán

If you only read one book from this list make it this one.
Annie Bhán (Annie the White, so called because she was albino) was an incredibly talented Seanchaí with a sharp tongue and a wicked sense of humour. This volume collects a number of her folktales, several of which are relatively obscure, not appearing in the popular Irish Folk Tale anthologies, accounts of her daily life and observations of the cultural context of her time.
The book is invaluable for learners of Ulster Irish as it is bilingual; giving both Annie's words as Gaeilge and the English translation, it also contains an examination of terms Annie used that were unique to her dialect and are often left out of dictionaries.
Taking things even further the book examines Annie's use of digressions in her storytelling and talks about the history of the folklore collector and scholar Gordon W. MacLennan.

Summary:
This book will introduce you to stories you've never heard, can help you develop your understanding of the Irish language (especially the Ulster dialect), teach you to be a better storyteller and teach you about the work that goes into collecting and studying folklore.

The Enchanted Bay

These stories were collected by Ernie O'Malley.
Ernie was an Irish revolutionary who fought in the 1916 rising and went on to be an IRA training officer in the War of Independence and IRA chief of staff in the Civil War. He was also a revolutionary Historian.
O'Malley was heavily invested in Irish Folklore and new many of the people who would go on to form the Irish Folklore Commission, therefore his work collecting Irish Folklore was done to quite a high standard. In this book you'll find communities coming together to overcome their landlord, a trans man avenging his family, a trickster outsmarting Cromwell and dozens of other folk tales ripe for the picking.

Summary:
This is the Rabble Rouser

An Irish Folklore Treasury

Stories and entries from the School's Collection of Ireland's National Folklore Collection selected by John Creedon alongside his own commentary. This book is a really great introduction to the kind of material you will find in the NFC or on Dúchas.ie and give you a solid idea of what kind of thing to expect to find.
Aside from giving a few stories that will help familiarise you with different characters and figures in Irish Folklore it also provides vital cultural context for those figures and beautiful insights into people's daily lives.

Summary:
If exploring dúchas.ie seems intimidating this is a good way to prepare.

Why The Moon Travels

An anthology of Mincéirí (Irish Traveller) Folk Tales collected and edited by Oein deBhardúin, himself a Mincéir. The first anthology of its kind, these stories present a beautiful and unique perspective on aspects of Irish Folk Lore while also introducing aspects that previously seemed to be absent, but may have simply been forgotten by the settled peoples of Ireland, kept alive amongst the Mincéirí. No understanding of Irish Folklore can ever be complete without the Mincéirí perspective.

Summary:
Mincéirí (Irish Traveller) folk tales, important for building a complete perspective of Irish Folklore.

Over Nine Waves

Marie Heaney's retellings of stories from the Mythological, Ulster and Finn Cycles of Irish Mythology along with Lives of three Christian Saints. This is an excellent introduction to the older mythological material of Ireland, giving a good grounding in the different Cycles of Irish Mythology

The Day the Nazi Died: On the Difference between Institutional Knowledge and Community Knowledge.

Written in the late 1980s by the members of the band Chumbawamba The Day the Nazi Died tells us that despite the words of governments, historians and history books the Nazis did not simply vanish after WWII, it also encourages us to spread the truth that Nazis still live in our societies and still wield significant political power and encourages us to confront historians on this topic.

But the question remains. Why would governments, historians and history books lie about this? What would they gain from spreading such misinformation?
The answer is relatively simple; after (and even during) WWII high ranking Nazis were recruited by governments and knowledge institutions all over the world.
Most famously during the USA's Operation Paperclip wherein Nazi scientists were recruited to work for the US military (the most famous of which was Wernher Von Braun whose work for NASA was instrumental in the moon landing and whose recruitment was commemorated by American Satirist Tom Lehrer) but even here in Ireland Fritz Brase was Director of the Irish Army band School of Music, Dr Adolf Mahr was Director of the National Museum and Helmut Clissman was Head of Ireland's German Academic Exchange, all German citizens, all high ranking members of the Nazi Party, all working in knowledge institutions connected to the Irish Government, and all appointed to their positions by members of the Irish Government.

While this information is publicly available it is neither widely known nor widely taught. Most likely because doing so would damage the reputations of these instutitions.
But that reluctance to confront this fact (and similar situations across the globe) calls the superiority of Institutional Knowledge, particularly in the human sciences, into question.

And so where Institutional Knowledge is reluctant to inform us Community Knowledge must provide instead, as in the case with the song by Chumbawamba.

At this point I would like to clarify that I am not saying Institutional Knowledge is inherently bad. On the contrary Institutional Knowledge has given us excellent research and confirmation methodologies.In this essay I am arguing that Institutional Knowledge, particularly in the human sciences, has serious vulnerabilities that are an inevitable consequence of it's Institutionality, just as Community Knowledge has serious vulnerabilities that are an inevitable consequence of it's lack of Institutionality and it is only through symbiosis between the two that the vulnerabilities of both systems can be countered.

So what are the vulnerabilities of Institutional Knowledge?
Chief among them is Propaganda and Censorship.
Because Knowledge Institutions are dependent on outside funding, reputation and hierarchical structures they are extremely vulnerable to being censored and propagandised.

We are seeing this all around us in the modern day with universities and government departments in the USA caving to government demands to censor mentions of LGBTQ+ history under threat of defunding.

We see this in Universities around the world clamping down on anti-Israel protests in order to protect their financial ties to Israel and to protect their reputations.

We see this in the UK's infamous Cass Review; as the very Institutionality that allows for proper research practices, peer review and ethics standards also allows for those things to be overuled by the Personal Biases of high ranking Hierarchs.

When Hierarchy suppresses Institutional Knowledge that knowledge must be converted into Community Knowledge in order to preserve it.

The second big vulnerability of Institutional Knowledge is that making knowledge tangible and collecting it in once place makes it more vulnerable to both natural and man made disasters.

Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexology was one of the few institutions on Earth dedicated to the study of homosexuality and transexuality. It had thousands of patients with detailed notes on each patient's experiences and Hirschfeld's theories on the nature of human sexuality.On the 6th of May 1933 the Institute was raided by the Nazis and Hirschfeld's research was burned, with little to nothing surviving. Likely setting back our understanding of human sexuality and the rights of LGBTQ+ people back by at least a century.

However, had the building been burned due to a lightning strike or a burst gas line rather than the deliberate actions of human filth the loss of knowledge likely would have been just as significant.

When Institutional Knowledge is destroyed Community Knowledge is all that's left.

So then, what are the strengths of Community Knowledge?

Community Knowledge is harder to identify and harder to destroy. Contrary to the proverb you absolutely can judge the contents of a book by the cover. Or at least you can generally tell what subject an academic text is about by reading the title and then, if you're a fascist storm trooper, you know what to burn. But most Community Knowledge is Intangible, it's mostly locked up inside people's heads and you can't tell what people know just by looking at them.
Community Knowledge is also less clustered in clearly labelled, individual nodes like Universities or Museums.
It's more diffuse and widely spread, making it harder to track down.

If the Hirschfeld institute was burned today the loss of knowledge would be far less profound; because now there is a large, interconnected and often well informed Trans Community; many members of which have large chunks of that knowledge locked in their heads.

A Human being has two powerful advantages over a book or a document; Agency and Locomotion. A book cannot try to save itself or its comrades in the event of a disaster like a burning building, but most human beings can. And in saving themselves, they save their knowledge as well.
Burning the contents of a library is a lot easier than wiping out an entire people.

Community Knowledge does, of course, have its vulnerabilities.
Reports can be effected by poor memory or personal bias, and so we must apply the methodology of Institutional Knowledge by finding as many sources as possible and using them to ascertain the truth.

Human Beings are more vulnerable to disease and famine than books and documents which can cause a lot of Community Knowledge to be lost. Which is why it is still important for Institutions to collect and document knowledge in a tangible format.

Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians is an excellent example of how Community Knowledge can supplement Institutional Knowledge.
Knowledge Institutions consistently denied the existence of the Palestinian Genocide throughout 2024 and much of 2025. It was Community Knowledge spread through social media sites like TikTok that kept people informed. And when Institutions finally acknowledged the Genocide as real the evidence provided by these Community Knowledge networks was instrumental. Both in terms of providing evidence but also in terms of putting pressure on Knowledge Institutions to override their own financial interests.
My conclusion is this; neither Community Knowledge nor Institutional Knowledge is inherently superior and privileging one above the other is incredibly dangerous. Privileging Institutional knowledge over Community knowledge makes us dangerously vulnerable to propaganda and censorship. As well as making knowledge far more vulnerable to physical destruction both deliberate and accidental. Privileging Community Knowledge over Institutional Knowledge leaves us with no backup in the event of mass death and leaves us with no real method of reviewing and confirming the truth of our knowledge. In short, instead of privileging one above the other, Community Knowledge and Institutional Knowledge should be seen as two equally necessary halves to a fully functional whole.