Ireland-after forty years

the long version

Describes the author's first return to Ireland since he left for America as 15-year-old with his parents in 1890 from the Townland of Coolkill, Crosserlough Parish, County Cavan. The first chapters of the book describes his trip over and arrival as a delagate from Boston to the 1932 Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. Subsequent chapters describe his days after the Congress, revisiting places and people he knew from his boyhood days, particularly those of Coolkill and the surrounding townlands. He writes a mix of joy and sorrow about the revisit. His joy was that much of Coolkill was as it was when he left Coolkill some forty years ago and that a number of folks and families that he knew were still in place. His greatest sorrow was finding that his Callan family cottage in Coolkill, where he was born and raised, had fell to ruins. A value of the book is that it is a first person account of what life was like in rural poor Ireland in the late 1800s and how families lived the positive.