Lifestyle – Galway author Nora Corcoran wants to ensure that the traditional elements of her Traveller culture will still be familiar to future generations – and. she tells JUDY MURPHY, she believes the best way to do it is by turning them into children’s stories.

Nora Corcoran has one burning ambition in life. She wants the Traveller stories that she learned as a child from her parents and older family members to be passed on to future generations – and be available to children from the settled community too.

“There is still no children’s story book about Travellers,” says Nora.

But that’s about to change because she has written a series of children’s stories which are currently at manuscript stage.

Nora is in discussions with publishers and is hopeful they will be available soon. But, she says, even if none of the established publishers of children’s fiction are happy to run with her, she’s going to do it herself. And Nora, who is from Ballinasloe, is a woman who gets things done.

Now her mid-fifties, she always loved learning and books.

“I didn’t stop reading until I went back to college,” she says of her relatively recent return to education.

As a teenager, Nora attended secondary school where she did what was then known as the Applied Leaving Cert, before she began working.

“I knew I wouldn’t be going to university,” she says matter-of-factly.

She married shortly afterwards and, apart from a few years in England, Ballinasloe is where she and her husband Tom have spent most of their lives.

That’s where Nora was born to a family who lived on the side of the road – they moved into a house not long after her birth.

Her father was a tinsmith. “That’s what kept us fed. It was a big family,” says Nora, adding that “his workshop was the side of the road”.

She was the fourth-youngest of 14 siblings and while they mightn’t have had material wealth, theirs was a happy family.

“My mother used to make paper flowers, and she made great griddle bread. And beady pockets,” she says of the hand-sewn, elaborately decorated pockets which were made and worn by Traveller women and where they stored important items.

Nora’s family lived in a rural area, and grew up foraging for nuts, mushrooms and berries – although foraging wasn’t a word wasn’t used back then – and playing in the outdoors.

But that life is gone, she says, and skilled workers like her father are rare in the Travelling community today.

“Those are the things I want to record in my books, those traditions.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App

Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.

Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.

Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite  HERE.

Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.