In case anyone is wondering why a German scholar was hired to record Irish speakers: http://matters-phonetic.blogspot.com/2011/08/wilhelm-doegen.html
Great history.
For those who didn’t read the page, this fellow went around POW camps in WWI to record native speakers in as many languages as possible. They used the following plan:.
“The prisoners of war recited the Parable of the Prodigal Son in their own language and dialect for comparative purposes”