WHAT'S THE IRISH FOR KISMET?:

Cré na Cille, which is regarded as comparable to James Joyce's Ulysses or the work of Samuel Beckett, is set in a graveyard where the corpses gossip endlessly about each other and life above ground and has the famous opening line: "I wonder am I buried in the Pound Plot or the Fifteen Shilling Plot?" [...]

The recording of Ó Cadhain reading from the book is part of a tape made by Egon Felder, a student at Trinity College, Dublin (TCD).

"Ó Cadhain had been appointed professor of modern Irish at TCD at the time, and was on a visit to Germany in the summer of 1964," Irish language scholar Dr Feargal Ó Béarra said.

"When he was there he met up with Felder, and agreed to be taped by him."

Writer and republican Ó Cadhain - who taught himself many languages, including Russian when he was interned in the Curragh Camp during World War II - had been very popular with the TCD students for his use of wit and humour.

He once asked his students to translate Mao Tse-tung for an exam, and on another occasion asked them to write a dialogue between the statue of British admiral Horatio Nelson in Dublin's O'Connell Street and the person who blew the monument up in 1966.

Felder passed his tapes on to Professor Barbara Wehr, who kept a copy for many years and digitised them.

She offered them to Dr Arndt Wigger, a colleague of Dr Ó Béarra's at the SKSK, a Celtic language institute associated with the University of Bonn.

"When we played them, what we thought was a recording of Irish tuition took on another dimension when we heard Ó Cadhain's voice reading his own text," Ó Béarra said.

The writer's nephew, also Máirtín Ó Cadhain, of Iontaobhas Uí Chadhain, the Ó Cadhain Trust, said it was the only recording he knew of his uncle reading from his classic.

The recording has been included in a CD with a new book on the writer's methods of teaching Irish, compiled by Ó Béarra and Wigger.

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