The Tailor and Ansty

A book (1942) by Eric Cross, in which he recreates the conversations and seanchas of the tailor Buckley, along with the bawdily anarchaic interruptions of Ansty, his wife. Tim Buckley (1863-1945, born Kilgarvan Co.Kerry) and his wife Anastasia (1872-1947) lived very near Gougane Barra.

In his introduction to the second edition (1948), Frank O Connor describes the effect of the banning of ‘The Tailor and Ansty’ by the Irish Censorship board 1942 for ‘Being in its general tendency indecent’, and the reaction of the couple to three visiting priests who terrorised the Tailor into burning a copy of the book in his own fire. Once it became available again (it was banned for ten years) it became a classic of folkloric literature. The Tailors motto ‘Glac bóg an saol agus glacfaidh an saol bóg thú’ (‘Take life fine and easy and life will be fine and easy on you.’) enabled him to weather the agitation, but it certainly shortened Ansty’s life. The Tailor's death is the subject of one of Sean O’ Faoiláin’s tenderest Stories ‘The Silence of the Valley’(1947).

Éamon Kelly and his actress wife Maura O’Sullivan played Tim Buckley and Ansty for the Abbey Theatre, a production adapted successfully for RTÉ television by PJ O’Connor.

In 1978 Seanchas an Táilliúra (‘The Tailors Stories’) edited by Aindrias Ó Muimhneacháin, was published; the seanchas in this book was collected by Séan Ó Cróinín of The Irish Folklore Commission in 1942.

Theatre by the Lake