Oral History Centre

Founded by Dr Maura Cronin (now retired from the MIC Department of History), MIC’s Oral History Centre holds a unique collection of more than 3,000 interviews on 20th century Irish social and cultural history. A number of interviews are available on the Mary Immaculate Research Repository (MIRR) here. All interviews are currently being digitized under MIC’s Research Group Funding Scheme 

The Oral History Collection

The majority of interviews held in the oral history archive were recorded between 2000 and 2015. Participants were generally elderly people from rural Ireland. Many participants were born in the first two decades of the twentieth century, with memories dating back to the War of Independence. Oral history interviews cover a wide range of themes, including: care and caregiving; women’s lives, agricultural work; the social world of rural Ireland;  the Catholic Church; national schooling; cooperative creameries; local and national political engagement; emigration; Irish peacekeeping missions and beyond. 

Recent Partnerships:

Sites of Fracture: Twentieth century Ireland at the Margins of Capitalism 
Headed by Prof. Mo Moulton at University of Birmingham, this project brings together academics, artists, and archivists to explore the history of twentieth-century Ireland through the lens of landscape and capitalism. This project makes use of MIC’s collection of interviews based on the lives of creamery workers and farmers who engaged with cooperative creameries across the twentieth century. 
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/…

EVA International Never Look Back
MIC’s Oral History Project has frequently collaborated with EVA International, supporting the work of artists interested in oral history methodologies. Most recently we partnered with EVA Internationals’ Never Look Back project. This involved gathering oral histories relating to art installations in Limerick city across the last thirty years

Fisherman’s Tales: 
MIC’s Oral history Archive collaborated with Limerick City and County Council and the Limerick Archives to make nearly 50 interviews available online including Fisherman’s Tales - 30 in-depth interviews with local fishermen who fished along the Shannon River and also with reed cutters and boat builders. The Creative Ireland funded short film, The Estuary, was based on the groundwork laid by these interviews.

Ranks Mills Oral History Archive Project 
In collaboration with Limerick City Council. Link to interviews here

Pigtown Oral History Archive Project 
In collaboration with Limerick City Council. Link to interviews here

Saint Joseph’s Hospital Archival Project 
In collaboration with Limerick City Council 

Recent publications by MIC’s Oral History Research Group

2025

Sarah O’Brien and Chris Fitzgerald, Combining oral history and linguistics to explore public art and cultural memory, Linguistics and Oral History: Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach. Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 165-182  

Chris Fitzgerald, Linguistics and Oral History: Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach. Bloomsbury Publishing 

Sarah O’Brien, Oral Histories as Cultural Inheritance, Inheriting the Family: Objects, Identities and Emotions. Barclay, K., Barnwell, A., Begiato, J., Evans, T. & King, L. (eds.). Bloomsbury Publishing

2024 

Chris Fitzgerald and I. Timmis, Corpus Linguistics for Oral History. Taylor and Francis 

2023

Mulcahy, D. By the Left Quick March - A History of Limerick Bands, Limerick City and County Council

Sarah O’Brien, Cartographies of Memory: An Oral History of the Irish in Argentina, Cultural Perspectives on the Irish in Central and South America.  Epinoux, E. & Healy, F. (eds.). Cambridge Scholars Publishing

2022

Sarah O’Brien, Remembering Nora: Interpreting the testimony of a Magdalene Laundry Survivor through the lens of collective memory, Oral History. 50, 2, p. 41-51.

2021 

Sarah O’ Brien, "Art, Oral History and Ireland's Mother and Baby Homes." The Oral History Review, April 

2020

Helene Bradley Davies and Maura Cronin, Are You Going Uptown? – Shops and Shopping in Limerick, Limerick City and County Council, 2020.

"Oral History and the Artist" Public Lecture, 23 April 2024

This public talk featured a discussion with Marit Kapla, author of “Osebol” and Tadhg O’ Sullivan, filmmaker and creator of the oral history installation, “Carlow Portraits”