Ireland is perhaps the only part of the English-speaking world where the oral tradition of culture has strongly persisted in spite of the printed page. And Ireland has given us Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Synge, and Joyce in recent years – all of them masters of the magic of the spoken word. A Ballynooley farmer who returned to Ireland from America said to his neighbor: “In three years I didn’t meet a man who could sing a ballad let alone compose one on his feet.”