16-06-2025
Podcast Corner: Celtic Studies show delves into Ireland's fascinating history
There are various rabbit holes you could dive into on listening to the opening episode of the second season of Ní Hansae, the School of Celtic Studies Research podcast.
While the episode title itself, What is the School of Celtic Studies?, isn't the most exciting, the hour-long chat with Professor Ruairí Ó hUiginn is fascinating and might leave you scrambling for your old college notebook to take down titbits.
Halfway through, he tells host Dr Nina Cnockaert-Guillou about some of the school's colourful history, having been set up in the 1940s.
'TF O'Rahilly published the famous lecture on the two St Patricks, and for people who had been brought up on the legend of St Patrick and all that went with it were somewhat put out a bit by the fact there might have been two St Patrick's. It did attract public attention.'
Cnockaert-Guillou is the researcher behind Ní Hansae. From Brittany, France, she arrived in University College Cork in 2017 and decided to study Old Irish having never done Irish before!
She eventually completed a master's degree in UCC and a doctorate in Cambridge. She is now doing post-doc work in the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS), under which the School of Celtic Studies falls, focused on a 13-century text about Fionn Mac Cumhail.
Ó hUiginn is working on something similar, and has been for a long time, he explains, working off a very old edition of an Irish text on the training of Cú Chulainn and the death of his son, Conlaoth.
There have been a number of different versions and the story travelled widely. He says he's hoping to publish his work in the not too distant future.
In more recent history, they talk of how DIAS was founded in 1940 by the then taoiseach Éamon de Valera, based on the Princeton School of Advanced Study.
'Initially it embodied two schools, the School of Theoretical Physics and the School of Celtic Studies, and it's said that this was established by de Valera to satisfy two of his own interests; he was a mathematician and had an interest in physics, and of course he had an interest in Irish and Celtic studies as well.' Every day is a school day!
The first season of Ní Hansae ran in 2020-21, with multilingualism, 'Samhain and science', and bardic poetry among the topics discussed across the eight episodes.
Coming up in the second season, episodes focus on Medieval Irish kings and the English invasion, early Medieval Irish philosophy, and storytelling and Irish manuscripts. There are so many great history - and Irish history - podcasts around. Ní Hansae, with its conversational aspect, is one you can put on and just sink into - without the pressure of cramming for an exam at the end.
