Irish Texts Society

Cumann na Scríbheann nGaedhilge

Breandán Ó Buachalla Memorial Lecture

The ITS/NLI Breandán Ó Buachalla Memorial Lecture is held annually.

The 2025 Breandán Ó Buachalla Lecture will be given online on Wednesday, 3rd December, at 6.30p.m. by Deirdre Nic Chárthaigh, Trinity College Dublin, on ‘Binn gotha na dtéad: The harp and the harper in Classical Irish Poetry’. The link to this talk will be posted here in advance of the occasion.

Some of the most well-known commentaries on the Early Irish harping tradition came from outside observers. Gerard of Wales famously admired the great skill of Irish harpers in his Topographia Hibernica, while John Derricke’s Image of Ireland contains what is still perhaps the most widely recognisable (if inaccurate) depiction of the Irish harper. Less well-known, however, are the literary descriptions of harpers, harps and harp music in Gaelic Irish sources. Among the most valuable of these sources is the syllabic poetry of the professional court poets.

This lecture will examine a number bardic poems which were composed about the harp and the harper between the 13th and the 17th centuries. These include eulogies and elegies addressed to members of the harping profession, odes to harps as the prized possessions of patrons, and satires attacking the performances of harpers. Although these poems provide us with little organological or musicological evidence for the Irish harping tradition, they offer a fascinating and unique insight into the importance of the harper at the Gaelic court, into the symbolic importance of the harp, and into the reception of harping performances.

The Society has embarked upon a programme to publish these talks under its Occasional Lecture Series.

 

Lectures

2024: Dr Vincent Morley, ‘The courts of poetry: bardic relics or something else?’.

2023: Prof. Brendan Kane, University of Connecticut, ‘Bardic poets and the early modern world’.

2022: Dr Katharine Simms, MRIA, FTCD, ‘Mixed Marriages in Medieval Ireland’

2021: An tOllamh Máire Ní Annracháin (Prof. Emerita, UCD), ‘Polishing diamonds: How modern Irish poetry came to gleam’
2019: Cathal Goan (formerly RTÉ and Teilifís na Gaeilge TG4), ‘Collecting the Fragments: Breandán Ó Buachalla in Cape Clear (1959–2009)’
2018: Dr Bernadette Cunningham (Library, Royal Irish Academy), ‘Pilgrims and poets in fifteenth-century Gaelic Ireland’
2014: Dr Nollaig Ó Muraíle (Roinn na Gaeilge, NUI Galway), ‘The Irish genealogies — Irish history's poor relation?’
2013: Bernard O’Donoghue (Oxford), ‘Lyrics in two languages: the short Irish poem in the twentieth century’

2012: Professor Pádraig Ó Riain (UCC), ‘Forty years a-growing: the Dictionary of Irish Saints’

2011: Dr John Carey (UCC), ‘The Wanderings of the Battle of Moytirra’