The Banshee - The Irish Supernatural Death-Messenger

Patricia Lysaght is one of the most important academic voices in Irish folklore of the last 50 years. Her seminal work, The Banshee - The Irish Death Messenger, remains a centrally important text, 40 years after its initial publication.

Patricia Lysaght is Professor emerita of European Ethnology, School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore, University College Dublin. She is an elected member of the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture, Uppsala, Sweden, which awarded her the Torsten Janckes Minnesfond Prize in 2012 for her outstanding contribution to international scholarship. She is also an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, and an elected Honorary Member of the Hungarian Ethnographical Society, Budapest. She was President of the SIEF International Commission for Ethnological Food Research (1994–2022), co-organising biannual conferences across Europe, and has acted as contributing editor/co-editor of the conference proceedings (1994–2025). She is a former editor of Béaloideas, the Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society (2006–2008). She was President of The Folklore Society, London (2017–2020) and editor of the Society’s journal, Folklore (2004–2012). In 2013, the Folklore Society awarded her the Coote Lake Medal for outstanding research and scholarship in the field of folkloristics.

Professor Lysaght was an Alexander von Humboldt scholar at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, Germany (1987–1988). She was guest international scholar at The Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1995 and Guest Professor of Folklore at Seminar fürVolkskunde, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany (1996–1997).

We are honoured to have Professor Lysaght come to Lough gur Visitor Centre to explore one of Ireland's most well known and surviving supernatual figures - the banshee.