I apologise in advance for this, Keith's latest comment has led me to decide to deal with it in full so hopefully it will never be used as a form of censorship by him and his 'Little Britain' friends in an attempt to silence my opinions.
For several years on this forum I have been subjected to ongoing harassment by Keith and his buddies because of our choice to spend the rest of our lives in Ireland, rather than my birthplace and home for nearly sixty years.
This has been described as desertion and "hatred of "US" (Britons) and has been constantly used as a method of undermining what I have to say.
I have requested constantly that this stop – it is both inaccurate and extremely anti-democratic to me and anybody on this forum who doesn't live 'within pissing distance of Banbury Cross'.
As can be seen from Keith's latest forays into fascist suppression (terminating in his demands that I "keep it short"), these requests have been totally ignored and I see no end to them in the future unless they are stopped by others.
Here goes.
In 1973 my wife Pat and I embarked on a project of collecting traditional songs, stories, music, lore and contextual information from members of the older generation.
This included England and Scotland, but our main work was centred on Irish people, here in West Clare, in London, mainly with musicians and most enjoyably and fruitfully with Irish Travellers.
In thirty years we amassed a large collection of this information and made it as accessible as we were able.
In 1998 we were lucky enough to be able to retire and work on our collection, digitising, annotating, documenting and archiving it in order to pass it on for further use, as we had promised all those whose generosity enabled us to gather what we did.
We decided that the best place to top-and-tail our work was where the vast majority of them called "home", Ireland, particularly here in Miltown Malbay, where the bulk of our collection was recorded.
This has enabled us to put our collection into some sort of social context (sorely lacking in our overall understanding of the folk traditions).
Our move here has proved enormously successful in all this and has also enabled us to go on gathering information.
As far as making what we have gathered accessible, the media and arts groups have been extremely co-operative in what we are doing.
We have participated in numerous radio programmes, including a magnificent three-part series on our work with Travellers by a local broadcaster – this was for national radio – Lyric FM.
Thanks to our friendship with the National Archive I.T.M.A, not only have some of our recordings been put on the web, but their co-operation has enabled us to issue two double CDs of our work.
A high point will have been reached in the next couple of months when our Clare County Library puts our entire collection of Clare songs on their web for public access.
A n extremely generous grant from the Arts Council has enabled us to musically annotate many of our songs, bringing the publication of two books within our grasp.
None of this would have been vaguely possible had we remained in Britain.
In the early 1980s we donated what we had then collected to The National Sound Archive, now housed at the British Library.
Despite the fact that our donation led to their expanding their then holdings into an official traditional archive, due to financial consideration our collection has never seen the light of day.
There you have it – my "hatred of Britain" in a nutshell.
Keith has used our move as a means of undermining my democratic rights on this forum – he continues to do so.
If he does so gain I will request that any such postings be removed – if he persists I will request that he be removed as I believe his increasingly eccentric fanatical and extremist behaviour has, for some time now been a threat to this forum.
Apologies again – particularly to Keith, in reference to his command that I keep it short – I trust I will not be forced to raise the matter again.
Jim Carroll
By the way – one of Keith's 'weapons' in suppressing has been an opinion I once passed on racism in Britain, based on my experiences in having lived in three of our major cities.
I notice that a fairly recent survey carried out among British people and published in a British newspaper, found that one third of those questioned admitted to holding and openly expressing racist views.