The stories of older people

As part of the project, storytellers were given a number of options as to what they wanted to do with their story, once it was finished.

1) Some people wanted to keep it just for themselves. If that was the case, we helped make their story into a hardbacked book, just for them. Included in these books are photographs, song lyrics, recipes, or anything that storytellers wanted to include. After all, these are their stories, and it is not just words that make up a persons life story.

2) Other people wanted to share their stories with other people, and these are the stories that are included on this section of the site. All names have been changed in these stories- the storytellers names are changed, as are all other people and places mentioned in the stories. However, all the stories are intact, as told to the researchers working on the project, in the storytellers own words.

3) A third part of the project that some people agreed to be involved in has been a report on the topics spoken about in the stories. In this report, 16 stories have been analysed thematically, to discover what have been the key issues that have occured in the lives of people with intellectual disabiltities in Ireland. This report will soon be made available from the NIID Research office, and will be available to download on this website.

You can use the links to the left to start reading the stories. All names of places, people and services have been changed. The photographs included with these stories are covered by a creative commons license, and are not the pictures of the storytellers.