From Canada and Kent to small towns in Ireland
Pilgrims in search of our Irish roots
The flags are strung across the windows of the Clongibbon House Hotel, the Irish Tricolour one side and the red maple leaf of Canada on the other. The man we speak to in the Mitchelstown Community Council offices tells us there are 150 Canadians in the town. They are all descendants of the Peter Robinson settlers, here to commemorate 200 years since the migration of their ancestors from small towns in Ireland like Mitchelstown and Ballyporeen to the newly formed settlement of Peterborough in Ontario.
Our friend in the Community Council offices tells us he has taken groups of Canadians around Mitchelstown, on history walks, no doubt showing them the same places as I was shown on my first visit, eighteen years ago: Kingston College, the Georgian square; the still-standing gates of Mitchelstown Castle, which was looted and burned down in 1922; the blue plaque to mark the house where the writer William Trevor was born, in the same town and in the same year as my father. ‘I showed my mother some photos of the Canadians,’ he says. ‘She said, “I know them.” I said, “You don’t! They’ve never been here before.”’ The features of their ancestors have travelled down the generations.
My second cousin Mary tells me that her choir and her ukulele group took part in a concert for the Canadian visitors in her hometown of Ballyporeen. ‘We sang them songs of migration,’ she says. ‘They had tears in their eyes. My friend told me that some of them cried all the way back to Mitchelstown.’
‘You have to know where you come from,’ I say to Mary.
My own first pilgrimage to Mitchelstown was in 2007, seven years after my father died. He’d rarely spoken about his childhood. There were secrets and many unanswered questions. I was fortunate in finding out a lot of answers on that first visit, not through any internet research, but by a letter I sent to the writer William Trevor falling into the right hands. I’d sent it care of the administrator of a short story competition that Trevor was judging. Having learned that Trevor was born in the same town and the same year as my father, I wanted to know if he had known my dad as a boy. Liam Cusack, who was then running the Trevor Bowen Literary Festival, read that letter, and phoned me days after I sent it. He told me that Trevor had left the town aged five, so would not have known my father. But there was a man of the same age that probably would have been a contemporary, a school friend. Liam advised me to come over, as friends and relatives would be getting older, and might not be around for much longer.
That first visit was fruitful and deeply emotional. I met the cousins my father was raised with and his old school friend, Jim Parker, who became my friend. I walked around the church, the graveyard, the grounds of the Christian Brothers School where my father had gone. My father’s cousin Nellie and her husband Jimmy drove me to the house where my father grew up. Like the Canadians visiting the ancestors’ home for the first time, I wept copiously.
This is my fourth visit to the town and this time it doesn’t hold so much emotion. Liam was right about relatives and friends who might not be around for long. Two of my father’s cousins have died since my last visit, and my beloved friend Jim Parker was lost to Covid complications at the beginning of the pandemic. Liam and my cousin Mary are happily still with us, plus Bunty Flynn of Mitchelstown Writers, whom Bob and I met on our last visit.
Apart from meeting friends and cousins, I feel a sense of connection to the place, just walking around the town, enjoying a slower pace than at home. Drivers stop to allow us to cross the road, whether there’s a crossing or not. Each transaction, to buy from market stalls, to pick up leaflets from the community council offices, takes ages. People are happy to talk, to ask if we’re on our holiday, to talk about my connection to the place. The B &B landlady remembers us from our last visit. When we meet other guests over breakfast, the landlady has already told them that I’m a writer. The surrounding countryside is stunning. The ever-changing light over the Galtees means that I read none of the book I brought with me, as I just sit staring out of the window at the mountains.
Before meeting Cousin Mary, we drive up to the house at Stag Park where my father was raised – or ‘reared’, as he would have said. Bob persuades me to knock on the door. There is no answer. And as we’re at the point of leaving, a young man opens the door. I explain why we’ve come, and he fetches his mother. It transpires that this young man was the small boy standing with his father on my first visit to the house. Trisha, Mick, and their two children moved into the house 28 years ago. The first people to live there after my Great Aunt Molly died, aged 97. Trisha shows us the original footprint of the house, which has since been extended. A tiny dwelling, it once housed Molly, her husband Mick, their four children and my father.
‘There was a big field out here,’ Trisha says, showing us around the garden at the back. ‘The grass was waist high. There was a shed over there with a cart for the donkey to pull. But by the time we’d moved in, the cart was gone.’ They have been happy in the house. ‘We used to drive past years before, and I always wanted to live in this house. We snapped it up when it went on the market.’
I tell her that I have a photo of me outside the front door, taken on my first visit, eighteen years ago. She gives me her number so I can WhatsApp her a copy. Then she says, ‘We have the original front door here, out the back.’ So Bob takes a photo of Trisha and me standing by the door. My father and his cousins would have opened and closed that door thousands of times. ‘Let us know when you’re coming next time, and we’ll have tea,’ she says.
I do not cry on this visit, though I do choke when we meet Liam Cusack at The Firgrove Hotel. It was here that Liam first introduced me to Jim Parker, my father’s childhood friend. His first words were, ‘You’ve taken me back to the first half of the last century.’ We had lunch that day, and were still there talking five hours later.
‘It was over there you met Jim,’ Liam says, and we share a moment remembering our friend, a beautiful man, a true gentleman.
It’s Culture Night in Ireland during our visit. We attend the Mitchelstown Writers’ event in Kingston College chapel. Some of the writers read pieces in response to the prompt: ‘I am from…’ The responses are rich and varied. As I said to my cousin: ‘You have to know where you come from.’
To find out more about my first visit to Mitchelstown, read A Tale of Two Jims.
Jeremy Page reviews my latest book, Learning to be Irish, in The Frogmore Papers:
“Maria McCarthy’s account of ‘learning to be Irish’ takes many forms in this entertaining and consistently engaging collection, which comprises fiction, memoir and poetry. Learning to be Irish is a fascinating exploration of culture and identity and the connexions between them, and McCarthy writes with unfailing honesty and admirable candour. Her ‘Mitchelstown’ sequence of poems concludes: I’m Irish with an English voice,/English with an Irish heart,/floating forever between/Holyhead and Dun Laoghaire…”
You can order copies directly from my website (UK orders only), here: Learning to be Irish
I loved this, so alive and intimate with people and place. Thank you. Yes, you have to know where you come from. I am retracing my Irish roots. Exciting.
Lovely reading about your visit back to the old country. I share your feelings when revisiting a parent’s birth place. I too was less emotional this time, but still a little sad that with every trip, there are less people left who remember my father.