Gathering Heritage is a social enterprise project from Louth that is a follow on from The Gathering in 2013. We have originally

interviewed and recorded people who have returned to Ireland, capturing and curating their life experiences and memories online.

The Gathering Heritage Project has had contributions from Hollywood director John Moore, musician Jim Corr, EPSN Sports pundit Tommy Smyth and RTE Director General Tom Savage all of whom come from Louth.

We want to propose our platform www.gatheringheritage.com as a national vehicle that can capture Irish Oral Histories across generations, that could easily be otherwise lost to time and memory.  These would grow to form a “History in Voice” digital library.

We started in Louth, collecting about 50 personal stories and shared them digitally through our Audioboom Podcast Channel (7000 listens) and YouTube (900 views) video Channels. We want to build on this number to complete a first phase. A future phase would be to roll this project out Nationally via schools, colleges, community and support groups.

Gathering Heritage created an animated short based on audio recordings by Irish people talking about their life experiences. We hope to expand this short into a series. The animations will be voiced by the contributors in their own words and will be a mix of background music and short stories. Each episode will be five minutes long and will have five peoples stories animated around a common theme eg. going to school, holidays, worklife, travelling abroad etc.  We have already captured 30 interviews digitally and have enough audio material for 12 episodes.

For now we are on a mission to capture our Irish heritage for future generations.