Inis 74: Futa Fata at 20
Translated from Gaeilge to English and as featured in Inis 74, Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin reflects on the last 20 years of Irish-language publisher Futa Fata
When Michael O’Brien – hero of the Irish book industry and founder of The O’Brien Press – passed away, he was writing a memoir. It was published in 2024 under the title The Accidental Publisher. That title would equally be suited to this account of my story as founder and director of Futa Fata, of which we are celebrating its twentieth anniversary.
Futa Fata wasn’t a book publisher at first, but a small independent music label, a kind of business that has almost disappeared since then. It was almost by accident that the music label turned into a book publishing business. It started when I was living in Dublin in 1998 with the publishing of a collection of original songs in Irish for kids, a collection titled Bliain na nAmhrán.
In 2004, Futa Fata’s logo went on another CD, another collection of songs for children, Ceol na Mara. By this time I was living with my wife Cristín and our four children in Connemara, and I was making music and writing for television. The following year, Futa Fata published its first book, Gugalaí Gug!, a collection of verses from the oral tradition in Connemara. That book was the foundation for the work we’ve done since. In all honesty, when it was published, I was still working by myself and I was thinking of it primarily as a music release – it was a CD with an accompanying book. And it succeeded – the people of Connemara enjoyed the mix of verses and songs because it reminded them of their own childhood. Cartoon Saloon, based in Kilkenny and who have received Oscar nominations since then for their animated films, illustrated the book. The first print run, two thousand copies, was sold out within six weeks. ‘Ooooh’ I said to myself. ‘Book publishing is easy!’ I was wrong about that, but looking back now, I’m glad I was wrong.
The success of Gugalaí Gug! motivated me to keep going. In 2006, I attended the Bologna Book Fair for the first time. I discovered two books there that I would translate into Irish, both with accompanying CDs – Frog sa Spéir and Eileanór an Eilifint Éagsúil. It wasn’t music on the CDs this time but stories, recited by children and by the author himself, Eric Drachman, an actor from California who had founded a small publishing house of his own over there. I sensed a great similarity between Drachman’s method of working and my own approach in Connemara.
'There were days when we sat in the little office over the garage in Spiddal, feeling a bit like Captain Kirk in the Starship Enterprise as he scurried about in space, with our own version of his famous motto as our inspiration: ‘To boldly go where no leabhar Gaeilge has gone before ...’
The following year, I returned to Bologna and found more books to translate, these ones published in English by Little Tiger Press in London and in French by Éditions Mijade in Namur in Belgium. They were beautiful books and they marked a change of direction for Futa Fata – they had no CDs associated with them. There were always music projects going on in the early years, such as Peigín Leitir Móir, a collection of traditional Irish songs. I was also writing for screen during that period – I wrote Aifric, the TV series for young adults, which was aired on TG4 for the first time in 2006. There were ups and downs in terms of income at the time and if it weren’t for the support of my wife, Cristín, I don’t think I would have been able to continue. I’m very grateful to her.
It was a massive step up in 2009 when Breda Ní Chonghaile started working with me full-time on administration. In 2013, the writer Gemma Breathnach started with us as a publicity officer. In the last three years, two more people have come on board – editor and schedule manager Róisín Adams and editor Éadaoin Ní Dhomhnaill. As someone who spent years working in television, I have experience of working with editors, in Ireland and overseas, and they have a broad knowledge of storytelling. They were the people that shaped my understanding on how central editing is to the writing process. That is the understanding I want to pass on to the next generation of editors.
There were challenges to overcome with running a publishing house based down the country in the west of Ireland. Returning to that title, The Accidental Publisher, there was an unusual, almost accidental element to what we were doing that helped us progress, and that was our connection to music, to the stage and to public presentation. In an effort to make a better living from the books we published, we were regularly on the road for music, verse and storytelling sessions in schools, in libraries and at festivals all over Ireland. As other writers started working with us, including the the heroic current Laureate na nÓg, Patricia Forde; the screenwriter, Ailbhe Nic Giolla Bhrighde; and the journalist and broadcaster, Bridget Bhreathnach, they started going out and publicising their books, which was uncommon for authors writing in Irish for children before then.
Something else happened with those writers’ books that motivated us – they started to get selected for translation and publication overseas. As we returned regularly to the Bologna Book Fair and now to the Frankfurt Book Fair too, our new books were finding readers around Europe and in places we didn’t expect – China, South Africa, Laos and Thailand, for example. There were days when we sat in the little office over the garage in Spiddal, feeling a bit like Captain Kirk in the Starship Enterprise as he scurried about in space, with our own version of his famous motto as our inspiration: ‘To boldly go where no leabhar Gaeilge has gone before ...’
With that said, I would be exaggerating if I said that selling rights abroad was a central part of Futa Fata’s work. It happens regularly and it’s great to see the translations but at the end of the day – or even at the start of the day – the local community is always the most important part of the target audience. One big global cultural change helped us to foster that community.
In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook. Twitter was born in 2006 and Instagram followed in 2010. While we all now understand the negative impact that social media had then and still has now, these networks have the ability to bring groups with special interests together and turn them into communities. Social media helped us find our community and cultivate it. As we started working with writers and illustrators who were skilled at presenting themselves on social media – Sadhbh Devlin, Máire Zepf, Muireann Ní Chíobháin, Tarsila Krüse, Paddy Donnelly, Brian Fitzgerald and others – their ability to spread their own stories hugely helped Gemma Breathnach in her incredible work at building a network for publicity. This gave the creators a sense of ownership over their work and that strengthened our spirit as a collective, as a group of people who love books for children and are happy to work together and support each other.
What specific difficulties, you might ask, are involved with being an Irish-language publisher for children? That question reminds me of something Mairi Kidd, writer, publisher and a leader in Scottish culture, said to me. I met Mairi years ago when she was working in Edinburgh with Barrington Stoke, a publisher with whom we have a partnership in translation. Mairi was in Dublin one autumn and we were both attending the Children’s Books Ireland Conference in the Light House. An Irish-language publisher was giving a presentation about his work. In his speech, he described the challenges of a life in books – the difficulties with distribution, the lack of attention from newspaper journalists, the lack of space on shelves in bookshops ... Mairi leaned towards me and quietly said: ‘The challenges of being an Irish-language children’s publisher sound remarkably similar to the challenges of being a publisher.’
That statement stayed with me. It wasn’t that the publisher wasn’t telling the truth. It wasn’t that there weren’t and aren’t challenges in his work. But it is necessary to remember that publishing for young people is difficult in general, especially at the scale at which most publishers in Ireland operate. You have to remember that when you walk into a bookshop in this country, 85% of the books you see were published in Britain. As for the other 15%, publications in Irish are a very small portion of that slice of the pie. That said, demand and sales for our books have improved in recent years in spite of the jostling for space on shelves in shops. It is hard to compete for that space with the sharp elbows of HarperCollins, Penguin Random House and Bloomsbury.
On the bright side, the Irish-language publisher has a corner of the market that is hard to take away from us. Additionally, unlike English-language publishers in Ireland, we have the ability to create partnerships with big international brands – such as Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dog Man or Julia Donaldson’s verse picturebooks – and take advantage of the fame of the original versions to sell our translations in Irish. It is also worth remembering that those Irish-language versions add to the tradition of translation that goes back a thousand years in Ireland’s native language. Both streams are important, original books and translations.
We have some events planned to celebrate twenty years of Futa Fata. We are telling the story of those twenty years on social media, with an account of the different genres and age categories in which we publish – the boardbooks for very young children, the picturebooks, the books for children who are starting to read independently, the short novels, the graphic novels, our versions of classic stories in verse, the books on mythology, and the collections of songs and verses. In the autumn, we will return to our roots and present a stage show, Futa Fata @ 20, for the community that has given us so much support – the people of Connemara.
Personally, I have thoroughly enjoyed the last twenty years and I am very proud to work with such talented people, from the team at Futa Fata to the writers and illustrators, to the musicians and young entertainers who record with us. We have received great support from funding organisations – Foras na Gaeilge, The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, COGG and Ealaín na Gaeltachta. Our books have been promoted by Children’s Books Ireland and Tuismitheoirí na Gaeltachta. Our publications have found a more central place in bookshops, and librarians and festival organisers are more keen to work with us.
It’s unlikely that I’ll be doing this work for another twenty years – I have books to write and other adventures await me. However, I am hopeful that Futa Fata will live on, and every now and then, that it will boldly go where no leabhar Gaeilge has gone before!
