ON Friday March 7, Sixmilebridge based Tracy Fahey will appear at the Templegate Hotel along with fellow authors Kitty Murphy and Eilís Haden-Storrie as part of the Ennis Book Club Festival.
Tracy has been a British Fantasy Award finalist in 2017, 2022, and 2024. In 2024, she won the Paul Cave Prize for Literature. Her latest book is They Shut Me Up and deals with reimagined folklore and female Gothic.
Speaking about the upcoming event, she said, “The three of us kind of connect in different ways, we seem to be all exploring ideas of the female, I suppose. Eilís and I would lean more towards the folklore end of it.”
She is fascinated by Irish folklore and how it can be relevant to modern life. “A lot of what I’m writing at the moment is about indigenous folklore to Co Clare and other areas of ireland as well. I’m interested in the historical, mythic, female characters. My last book (They Shut Me Up) was about Máire Rua, who would have built Lemenagh Castle with her husband, Conor. I just became very interested in how she’s still regarded in Co Clare today, she’s still demonised.”
Tracy feels the reason for that is because she collaborated with an enemy for the benefit of her family. “There’s a schools’ folklore collection from the 1930s and there’s lots of stories about her, about her 25 husbands, her terrible behaviour, murdering neighbours, murdering husbands, torturing maid servants. But what’s important to remember is that she was a powerful woman in a time when that wasn’t the norm. She was a very strong woman and what happened was that when her second husband Conor O’Brien died she volunteered to marry any soldier in the Cromwellian army in order to keep her lands for her children. And that’s when everybody turned against her, she was seen as a collaborator. As far as I can remember that’s when the stories kind of started. I was interested in writing about her because I think in this age she would be seen very differently.”
The book saw her anchor the ancient character in modernity. “In They Shut Me Up I had a contemporary woman who starts to reconnect with Maura Rua O’Neill and she realises that she has so much energy and strength. She was just a very unusual woman and she still has a lot to say to us today about reclaiming power.
“There was something about her that really gripped me but it often takes a while to work it out as a writer. The point you can enter the story at takes a bit of figuring out.”
Right now Tracy is in the latter stages of another book that features another female Irish character from times past. “I’m just finishing another book now on the Hag. I’ve been working on it for a couple of years. Again it’s that idea of a really famous mythological character, that we don’t hear that much about anymore.”
So who is the Hag? “She’s really endemic in folklore in Kerry and also up in the north east of Ireland where I’m originally from. There are cairns around Loughcrew that are all devoted to her in the Boyne Valley. In Kerry there are a lot of folk tales still told about her. She’s like this mother Goddess who kind of shapes the land, she’s like this giant, really interesting figure. She represents the landscape, she anoints kings and approves them to rule over the land. I was really intrigued because I wasn’t that familiar with her. Then I started to think if she woke up today what would she think of things and what would she think of how older women are treated in society. That’s where the current book is coming from.”
She feels that women are largely expected to move to the margins of life as they get older. “I’m kind of intrigued by the fact that up to quite recently older women are expected to become quite invisible as they age. Even ageing itself is kind of seen as not the done thing anymore for women. If we look at Eastern culture or African culture the older woman is seen as the revered heart of the household. She gets more important as she gets older because she is the holder of wisdom for teh family and the community. I think we’ve lost touch with that today in a society where we habitually put older people in care homes, where we don’t really talk about illness or dying. I think a lot of older people feel marginalised by society. I was interested in myself getting older and looking at the past and these amazing examples of strong older women.”
In general she loves looking at characters from Irish folklore and how they might fit into today’s narratives. “I’m really interested in folklore but I’m most interested in how it stays as part of our culture today and how easily we can uncover it and the parallels that we can draw between it and the lives that we live today.
“I think we’re a nation of storytellers and each generation shapes the stories slightly differently and that’s what really interests me.”
Owen Ryan has been a journalist with the Clare Champion since 2007, having previously worked with a number of other publications in Limerick, Cork and Galway. His first book will be published in December 2024.