Éamon a Búrc (1866–1942) was a tailor, employee of the Great Northern Railway of James J. Hill, and, in his later life, a storyteller or seanchaí from Ireland Connemara Gaeltacht.
Seán Ó Súilleabháin, the former chief archivist for the Irish Folklore Commission later called Éamonn a Búrc, "possibly the most accomplished narrator of folktales who has lived into our time.
"[1] Furthermore, according to Irish-American genealogist and historian Bridget Connelly, the stories from the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology that were collected from Éamon a Búrc are still taught in University courses alongside Beowulf, the Elder Edda and the Homeric Hymns.
In response, Father Patrick Grealy, the Roman Catholic priest assigned to Carna, selected ten, "very destitute but industrious and virtuous families", from his parish to emigrate to Graceville, Minnesota and be settled upon frontier farm claims in nearby Moonshine Township by Bishop John Ireland of the Roman Catholic Diocese of St.
After the worst blizzard in the State's history, which Laura Ingalls Wilder later fictionalized in her novel The Long Winter, struck on 15 October 1880, the destitute condition of the Connemara homesteaders became an international scandal.
While being interviewed through an interpreter by concerned White Anglo-Saxon Protestant neighbors from nearby Morris, Minnesota, Liam a Búrc said, "There are shingles at my house waiting for a fine day to put them on; I have a cow but no milk; I have in the house fifty pounds of flour and corn meal; the flour I got from Morris people together with some clothing and two pairs of shoes, no use for children in the cradle; I have enough for about a week; did not suffer for wood; got some from Bishop Ireland's woods at Lake Tokua, and one cord from Father Ryan; Father Ryan always treated me well."
"[7] Despite their refusal to criticize him, the a Búrc family was evicted from their claim by the Bishop and resettled in a Saint Paul, Minnesota shantytown which was dubbed the Connemara Patch.
According to folklore collector and archivist Seán Ó Súilleabháin, residents with no stories to tell were the exception rather than the rule and it was generally conceded in 1935 that there were more unrecorded folktales in the parish of Carna alone than anywhere else in Western Europe.