Kevin Danaher was born in Athea County Limerick in 1915 and educated at University College Dublin and the universities of Berlin and Leipzig. After service as a captain in the Irish army during the Emergency, he became a full-time ethnologist with the Irish Folklore Commission (later the Department of Irish Folklore in University College Dublin). He was as fine a writer as he was a folklorist and his many works include The Year in Ireland (1972) and Irish Country Households (1975, reissued 1999). His research provided the basis for the Folk Park at Bunratty, county Limerick.