‘Echoes of Our Past’

An Online Exhibition of Lost Voices from Moygownagh in North Mayo

As part of Heritage Week 2025, Dr Liam Alex Heffron gave a free webinar at 6pm on Sunday, 24 August 2025, presenting the ‘Echoes of Our Past’ project as it is currently progressing. It was recorded and is shown here for those who didn’t make it live. Make sure you check out Dr Heffron’s presentation via the link above also.

Inspired by the important work of the Digital Repository of Ireland which promotes the long-term preservation and accessibility of Ireland’s rich social and cultural digital heritage—we are digitising and preserving a valuable collection of VHS tapes and audio cassettes identified by our dedicated volunteers and sourced from the local community. Under the stewardship of Dr Liam Alex Heffron—who previously led a similar initiative for Mayo GAA, these recordings, some nearly 50 years old, capture the voices and talents of now-departed yet once-celebrated members of our community as they played traditional music, sang old songs, recited poetry, told stories, danced, and performed in amateur theatre. Once digitised, these files will be made publicly accessible for the benefit of the people of Moygownagh and the surrounding districts of Ballycastle, Kilfian, Ardagh, Ballysakeery, and Crossmolina—where many of the recordings originated—as well as the wider public.

This initiative is a vital act of cultural rescue. It seeks to create an open-access digital library before these irreplaceable materials are lost forever—either through the physical degradation of the analog media or forgotten in attics, cupboards, and under beds. Using the latest advancements in A.I. and editing software, our technology partners are restoring often degraded and low resolution media into a stunningly beautiful visual and audio memory library. The resulting archive will serve educational and research purposes for local institutions. Above all, however, its primary purpose is to preserve the unique cultural history of this part of North Mayo for future generations to come.

In keeping with the mission of St Cormac’s Society, this project offers a meaningful and respectful way to reconnect our past with our present, while offering a gift of heritage to the future.

How we are doing it

1. Gather the recordings

We have gathered analogue recordings from the local community, though volunteers going to the families which have held VHS and audio cassette recordings of local creative artists, musicians, poets, storytellers etc.

2. Convert to digital media

These analogue recordings have been cleaned and using AD conversion technology have been extracted from their original medium and recreated as a digital file, edited for better cataloguing and stored in a dedicated cloud library.

3. enhance using a.i. tech.

Using the latest A.I. applications and video editing software, these files have undergone enhancement to best recreate the original setting of the recordings, producing impressive results from even the most degraded of the original media.

Echoes of our Past Collection

Imagine you’ve got an old, fuzzy VHS tape—blurry picture, washed-out colours, maybe even those wobbly lines at the bottom. For our Voices from the Past project, the St. Cormac Society partnered with the experts at Digital Heritage Services LLC, who specialise in bringing history back to life. Using advanced AI video software from Topaz, they analyse each frame, figure out what’s supposed to be there, and then redraw the missing detail with remarkable precision. Edges become sharper, noise and grain disappear, colours are revived, and the footage can even be upscaled to high definition. The end result isn’t just a cleaner copy—it’s often better than the original ever looked, as if the moment has been freshly filmed for today.

Enhancing our video and audio recordings

Have a look at our work in progress below and see how we use the latest in editing software and A.I. technology to restore our recordings before adding these memories to our Heritage Library.