Oliver Callan learns about keening: ‘They’d pull out hair, rip clothes, reveal their breasts’

Death stalks Tuesday’s edition of Oliver Callan (RTÉ Radio 1), as wake expert Ann Moylan pops in to explore this oldest of traditions. Moylan’s interest began as an ethnomusicological study of music, specifically the bean chaointe, or “keening women”, whose elaborate, mournful singing accompanied these ceremonies in times gone by.She traces the earliest evidence of keening in Ireland to the fifth century, and further back still in Greece, Egypt and several Nordic countries. In an age of sanitised death, Moylan argues, it does us well to remember the immediacy and power that such rites had even recently, with keening rituals remaining into the early 20th century and traditional wakes still common in our more recent past.“We as children would be sent down to wakes,” she says. “We’d have to kiss dead bodies and pat them on the head or shake hands with them – and we completely accepted it.”When it comes to what went on in more historical times, we can thank our nearest neighbours – “the pearl-clutching English” as Callan impishly describes them – who wrote down disapproving accounts of keening practices for posterity in the 19th century.READ MOREMoylan is indebted to these accounts, despite the fact they amount to little more than “misery tourism”, to use her memorable wording.“When the keening women got going, they would build themselves up to such a divine intoxication ... they’d pull out clumps of their hair, rip their clothes, revealing their breasts no less, building themselves up to that divine hysteria, if you like. So if you couldn’t punish death, you’d punish yourself.”Should one surmise these were entirely spontaneous outpourings of reverence, Moylan is on hand to dispel such a notion, for these were professionals. Good keeners were sought after, and particularly prized proponents would be transported cross-country, wild-haired and barefoot, sometimes even covered in ashes and white face-paint. And they were paid. “You would not dream of having a wake without them” she says, “So, in life, you were constantly saving for your wake, and you couldn’t just have any old keeners, you had to have the ones with the gift of poetry ... and it was very important that absolutely everyone in that wake house was crying, not just a little tear or a sniffle – we’re talking bellowing, screeching, even. Even if it was just your postman, you were part of that catharsis together.”Any listeners wondering, after all of that, what this shared catharsis could possibly have sounded like, are treated to a recording of a rendition arranged and conducted by Moylan herself, resulting in one of the more haunting, but fascinating, bits of brunch time listening you might expect of a summer’s morning.Newstalk's Anton Savage. On that day’s Newstalk Breakfast, Anton Savage invited Dr Ray Butler, head of physics at University of Galway about Wednesday’s solar eclipse. Much was made of lunar transits and solar occlusions, but it fell on his following guest, Optometry Ireland president Liz Grennan, to dispel more thoroughly the notion that even a quick glance at an eclipse would be fine. “No, even my daughter said it to me last night and I thought, ‘Oh lord’. There is no safe way to look at the sun with your own two eyes ... even a welding mask is not good enough to look at an eclipse.”At this, Savage provides an immediate retort, “Literally as you say that, a text has come in saying “I’ll bring the welding mask home and” – the words are barely out before the horrified optometrist exclaims: “NO, NO, NO!”“Retinal burns are what we’re worried about,” she tells us. “This can happen really quickly, within a matter of seconds ... if you can imagine in all those Tom & Jerry cartoons where they shine a magnifying glass on to something and it bursts into flames, it’s pretty much what’s happening.”“You won’t feel pain,” she continues, warming to her theme. “There are no pain receptors in the retina, it’ll seem very bright, but it may be several hours, even 24, before you realise that that little after-image is still hanging around in the middle of your eye.”“Imagine,” she implores, “having that for the rest of your life. Any time you want to sign your name or look at something up close or even far away, you’ve got a lovely little eclipse in the middle of your eyeball.”The welder in Savage’s replies was undeterred, however. “He wants to fight with you,” says our host, “And he’s equipped with either Gemini or Claude so brace yourself: ‘According to AI, a welding mask that can achieve shade 12 or more is sufficient’.”“Well,” replies the good eye-doctor, perhaps wondering if her attempts to provide public health information to Ireland’s airwaves in 2026 are a fool’s errand, “We all know AI is never wrong. I’ll just leave it there.”Moment of the WeekClaire Brock. Photograph: Brian McEvoy On Monday, Claire Brock – standing in for David McCullagh on RTÉ Radio 1 – has freelance journalist Édaein O’Connell in to talk about the best way to launch a relationship on social media. An audibly bemused Brock begins by asking whether her listeners “soft launch a relationship with a mysterious glimpse of a hand or a shoulder, or do you go all-in, with the full-face hard launch?”“This is all news to me,” she says over O’Connell’s laughter, “I’m too long out of that game”. What follows is an enterprising attempt by O’Connell to elucidate her host on the various strategies of public boyfriend unveilings. Is this a silly fad toward public oversharing, or a modern, romantic dilemma that people genuinely have to deal with?“It’s a big one, and a conversation I have with friends a lot,” says O’Connell. “It was something I was humming and hawing about myself. So what I started to do was the soft launch, which is where you’re giving dribs and drabs. It’s so cringey but it’s funny. I’ll be watching people’s stories and you know the way you follow people and you get used to their rhythms, and all of a sudden you’ll see them away, or with a pint of Guinness beside the glass of wine.” “And there’s nothing innocent about that pub table shot?” asks a baffled Brock. “No,” says O’Connell, “It’s all planned. There’s the back of the head, or an ear, or something like that. And then the hard launch is where you go full at it and put the full-blown picture up, and the tag, and whatnot”.O’Connell’s own attempts at softer options hit the rocks when enterprising sleuths noticed her unseen holiday companion was not her regularly featured father. “I thought: I’m not going to put it up on Instagram,” she says. “There’s no need. Sure, who cares anyway? But what actually happened was, I’m from Kerry, and obviously we were playing Mayo in the All-Ireland and I’d had a few glasses of wine, and I was like, okay, I’m gonna hard launch because I need to feel something for twenty minutes.” “You survived it,” proffers her host.“Well,” replies O’Connell, mildly abashed, “There’s not much going on in my life if that’s the hardest decision I had to make.”