h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Quite excited today, as I found out an interesting piece of family history by accident. I was listening to the radio while driving, it happened to be a program about a tiny island in the Shannon estuary, Aughinish, where my family comes from. All the land there was bought up to build an alumina factory but half of the island has been preserved as a wildlife sanctuary. The wildlife ranger was walking the show's presenter round, and at one point explained that a large rock they were approaching was called 'The Piper's Rock' - "named after The Blind Piper Maurice Conway, that was where he used to sit when piping". That was my great-great-grandfather, but nobody in the last two generations of the family knew that he was a piper - he was never talked about, it was obviously some huge family secret. We knew that he'd lost his sight when he caught smallpox as a child, and that he was disinherited when he married the dairymaid, but that was all we knew about him. I'd often wondered how he'd survived in those days, when there was a famine in Ireland. Times were tough for everyone, you'd think even more so for someone blind who'd been disinherited. The mystery was that his sons and grandsons all had trades, and we always wondered how he'd managed to afford the cost of apprenticeships, which were expensive. I guess that pipers would have been considered the lowest of the low, they'd probably have played at fairs and races and in shebeens, it would have been a terrible shame for farmers to have a family member doing something like that.

There's even a pub named after him locally now, The Blind Piper's Pub!!

Here's a link to the whole program about the nature reserve. There's a couple of minutes of news at the start that you can skip past.
http://www.rte.ie/rams/radio/latest/rte-shanksmare.smil