Her father Tomás Sayers was a renowned storyteller who passed on many of his tales to Peig. She was called Peig after her mother, Margaret "Peig" Brosnan, from Castleisland. She was born Máiréad Sayers in the townland of Vicarstown, Dunquinn, County Kerry, the youngest child of the family. A stage play named Peig: The Musical! (co-written by Julian Gough, Gary MacSweeney and the Flying Pig Comedy Troupe) was also loosely based on Peig’s autobiography. In Paddy Whackery, a television show on the Irish language television channel TG4, Fionnula Flanagan plays the ghost of Peig Sayers, sent to Dublin to restore faith in the Irish language. It led, for example, to this comment from Senator John Minihan in the Irish Senate in 2006 when discussing improvements to the curriculum: Popular culture From 1960 the Irish population was urbanising, a process that led to the "Celtic Tiger" economy in the 1990s, and Peig’s tales of woe in rural surroundings confirmed to many students that Irish was a language of poverty and misery, while English was considered the language of science and commerce. As a book with arguably sombre themes (its latter half cataloguing a string of family misfortunes), its presence on the Irish syllabus was criticised for some years. The book was for a long time required reading in secondary schools in Ireland. The often bleak tone of the book is established from its opening words: Peig depicts the declining years of a traditional, Irish-speaking way of life characterised by poverty, devout Catholicism, and folk memory of the Famine and the Penal Laws. Parody of the type reached its zenith with Flann O’Brien’s satire of an tOileánach as an Béal Bocht ("the Poor Mouth"). The movement swiftly found itself the object of some derision and mockery – especially among the more cosmopolitan city dwellers of Ireland – for its often relentless depictions of rural hardship. Flaherty’s documentary Man of Aran address similar subjects. Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s memoir an tOileánach ("the Islandman", 1929) and Robert J. Peig is among the most famous expressions of a late Gaelic Revival genre of personal histories by and about inhabitants of the Blasket Islands and other remote Irish locations. The books were not written by Peig but were reminiscences which she dictated to others. Sayers is most famous for her autobiography, Peig, ISBN 0-8156-0258-8, but also recounted folklore and other stories which were recorded in Machnamh Seanmhná/An Old Woman’s Reflections, ISBN 978-0-19-281239-1. Robin Flower, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, and again by Seosamh Ó Dálaigh twenty years later." Books Some of her tales were recorded on the Ediphone in the late ‘twenties by Dr. Seán Ó Súilleabháin, the former archivist for the Irish Folklore Commission, described her as "one of the greatest woman storytellers of recent times".Sean O’Sullivan, "Folktales of Ireland," pages 270–271: "The narrator, Peig Sayers, who died in December, 1958, was one of the greatest woman storytellers of recent times. Peig Sayers ( 1873–1958) was an Irish author and seanachaí born in Dunquin (Dún Chaoin), County Kerry, Ireland.
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