Máire Brennan Interview from "Clear Cool Crystal Streams"

Produced by Ultan Guilfoyle
Directed by Peter Lydon
Edited and Presented by Melvyn Bragg

[Appeared on the South Bank Show, Bravo! Channel, September 1995]

We grew up in an area where Gaelic was our first language and my grandparents and my mother were steeped in the old traditional songs. She married a guy that was in a show band. So along with singing Gaelic songs, there were guitars and double basses and things like that which is kind of extraordinary in a place like Donegal.

The traditional songs we used to learn when we were growing up had a lot of images of places and people's names. Like, there's an area in Donegal which is utterly gorgeous with a couple of legends attached to it as well. We tryed to take in the various legends. There's one about a one eyed ogre that came from Tory Island accross to Donegal and cried a poison tear which fell on top of this glen and it became a poison glen. And then there is supposed to have been a siege during the "Blackentown wars" in which the local people poisened the river, and that was the way they made their escape.

Sad songs are very much attached to emigration. During the potato famine hundreds and thousands of people left and there's thousands and thousands of songs about actually people even in the foriegn countries, like in the new world, as they used to call America. And they used to write them going there, the people left behind used to write them for them, the people that were over there used to write about our land, so I think there's a good mixture.

There's one song I used to hear in my father's pub. We went up to the guy that actually wrote it. He lived up in a place called Gebara. And it was a song about Gebara. It was just like the Poison Glen. It's about the beauty of the area. What it says... it basically talks about the place. And then he says at the end "When I die I'd would prefer my soul to drift on a leaf down through the stream of Gebara rather than go to heaven."

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