€1.75 million of new funding to enable further digitisation of one of the world’s largest folklore collections
Dublin, Ireland, 18 December 2013—Dinny McGinley TD, Minister of State at the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht has officially launched Dúchas.ie (www.duchas.ie), a new Irish folklore repository, at an event held at NovaUCD, University College Dublin (UCD).
Dúchas.ie currently features some 64,000 pages of hand-written folklore and local history recorded in 1937-38 by Irish schoolchildren in counties Dublin, Mayo, Donegal and Waterford.
This original material, digitised for Dúchas.ie in a project funded by the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, is part of the Schools’ Manuscript Collection. This material, part of the National Folklore Collection at UCD, comprises in excess of 500,000 pages of material recorded by some 50,000 school children in over 5,000 schools in 26 participating counties.