A Letter Home: Irish Correspondence from America

I want to start, actually, with how you start the book.

which is in a graveyard in Donegal and a stone, the Martins of Kilcluny.

A story that you say is as illustrative as any history book on the reality of life for people in Ireland during that time.

Yes, it's the gravestone of the Martin family of Kilclooney.

And their gravestone lists all the members of the family.

So of a family of nine children, six of them died overseas.

It notes the place where they died.

And it's very poignant when you see that, that three of them died in the US, one died in Australia, one died in England, and one died in Scotland.

So of the nine, only three died in Ireland.

And that's a very common experience across Ireland and particularly the west of Ireland, which since the time of the famine down into our own time was the epicentre of emigration in Ireland.

And that's the one thing that struck me from this book and the figures that you quote at the beginning of the book.

That emigration is an Ireland story for 200 years and it has sustained right throughout that period.

Obviously, there were peaks and troughs, but it is part of our landscape,

part of our story.

It's part of... our story as you put it and it goes back beyond 200 years it goes back into the 1600s it is estimated that from the 1600s down to the end of the 20th century that close on 8 million people left Ireland for North America that's a truly extraordinary figure when you consider that at peak the population of Ireland was 8.5 million so the numbers are truly extraordinary and And that number is so large because of people like the Martins of Kilclooney, nine children, six emigrating.

The letter would have been the only form of communication.

Yes, like I was born in 1969.

And in the early 1980s, there were parts of West Donegal that you still had little windy, uppy telephones.

And very few people had telephones.

Telephones were as rare as hen's teeth until the early 1980s.

Few people had home phones.

So if you went away, the key way that you could communicate with home was the letter down to the 1980s.