Speechification

Still digging around in the archives of RTE’s really excellent Documentary on One. In 1985, quite close to where my dad’s family comes from in Cork, in a village called Ballinspittle, people started to see a statue of the Virgin Mary move. Ireland succumbed to a kind of hysteria. I remember enjoying it all hugely.

Cousins of mine drove up and down to Ballinspittle to watch the statue in action at weekends (some saw her bleeding, crying, even winking). In pubs sensible farmers and land agents and nurses earnestly sought a reason for this miracle. Chip vans and souvenir sellers filled the lanes around the statue. It was an extraordinary time.

This beautifully crafted feature gets at the strangeness and excitement of that Summer in a sympathetic and quite poetic way. The podcast is here. You can, apparently, play this SMIL file in Real Player (although I can’t make it work) and here’s the MP3.

Picture by Addictive Picasso.

This entry was posted by by Steve Bowbrick on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 7:15 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.