WHAT DO IRISH READ?

Ireland

Has a huge literature heritage behind and it is incredible if we take into account its size as a country. The main reason why Ireland has produced so many greats and continues to do is because as a country it is steeped in a rich cultural history which marks it out as special from many others.

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Over the centuries they’ve been conquered and repressed and made to suffer at the hands of invading tribes. Each time they were attacked, they had more stories to tell and each influx of invaders left a little of their own traditions and ways of storytelling behind. It is, therefore, the mark of the people who tried to change them, melded with the unfailing Irish spirit that makes them so great. So we can say that even being an ‘isolated’ island, Ireland own one of the biggest amounts of writers in the world. Need to highlight the fact that they hold Four Nobel Prizes of Literature.

Apart from just carrying out a survey, we tried to make something different, not only a simple system of questions and answers, we wanted to generate debate about what was going on with people and literature in Ireland. We met with Irish friends from our classes to talk about what they usually read, but we also wanted to see the differences we could find, so we compared the results to other students from other countries.

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The situation was as follows: we met and began to talk about the party we had last night (we did not want it to go straight away to the issue and we were all students so it was not unexpected at all), and like half an hour afterwards we began to speak about the topic. We started debating that all of us do read even if it was only an article in a newspaper or online, but that was something that happens in every culture and society these days. What we really wanted to know is, who actually devotes time to read? Who in their busy student routine says and does, I want to spend some time reading?

First of all, the vast majority of them like reading books among other things like magazines, but just a few of them do actually read daily as a way to have fun and for personal fulfilment. The ones who don’t usually read is not because they don’t find it interesting, is just because they obtain more satisfaction by doing other activities.

They find that the perfect time to read is bed time. For most of them it was something ‘natural’ (meaning naturalas something you do without any reasons in particular), but for the rest reading at that time was something related with relax and helping them sleep. We thought about what were these other things people do apart from reading. Social media? Spending time with the smartphone and computer, listening to music… Is also something seen as ‘natural’ nowadays.

What do Irish read?

In regard to the genre they choose for their novels we found two main ones: romance and fiction. Even though they also mentioned horror stories as really entertaining for them, they commented us that it was difficult to find a good horror story book, that almost every best-seller was either a romantic or a fiction story. Where are the classics? None of them mentioned any classics during the whole time. Suspicious, isn’t it? Where is that feeling of belonging to a place and get yourself involved to know more about the origin of your values? Another topic that we brought up then and talked about was if they read or had ever read the Irish’s classics (James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, William Butler Yeats).

James Joyce, Source

Samuel Beckett, Source

Oscar Wilde, Source

Bram Stoker, Source

William Butler Yeats, Source

Surprisingly, they have read at least one or two of the authors, but only because they were given it as a compulsory material at school. Because of that, we decided to ask international students, that had decided to come to Ireland for their year abroad, about the same question. Irish classics.

As we expected, more people coming from other regions read or have read some of them because they wanted and not because it was compulsory material. We asked them about the authors, what did people from the best writer’s cradle in the world know about the influence they have on literature. So in a way we believe that, apart from the academic remembers, as we Spanish and Basque students have about our classics Cervantes or Quevedo writers, Irish people know about their history because of their studies, more than because of a real passion to the theme itself.

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Consequently, we reached the conclusion that there is more awareness of the importance of the Irish’s literature in the rest of the world than in Ireland. It is true that maybe before it wasn’t that way and it is obvious that there are exceptions, but it is a fact that times has changed and young generations any longer are interested about what while ago was considered as relevant. However, this heritage is not lost at all, since its importance remains present for many all around the world. Nevertheless, Ireland remains and will remain as a country whose literature has a huge impact and influence on therest of literatures from the occidental world.

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