Author: doireann.ie

A credit to the parents. Rossie, political anorak, historian, feminist, gasbag. This blog was started in Chicago when I was on the JI Work and Travel visa but since coming home, the focus has shifted somewhat. I’m a history graduate and teacher. Like Joan Didion – and the similarity begins and ends here – I’m writing to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.

Irish College 2025

….Having long exhausted the phrase ‘the last place God ever made’, here I am in Gleann Cholm Cille, west Donegal.

Trees.

Decades passed into centuries, names changed and Ireland transformed. But those trees stood.

What was it like?

Someone asked me a few weeks ago what living on the island was like. It took a while to come up with an answer better than, ‘I dunno, eh grand I suppose, fine like.’

Living the other language

I think of all of this Irish I have, and how I got it, and what I’ll do with it.

And how it came to mean so much to me.

The music.

…. At the miracle of sounds made that show us ourselves

The west village.

It’s to where doubters came and said, ‘I get it now, I get why you’re here.’  

The boat.

From the boat, the unlikelihood of living on an offshore island is laid bare.

Brigid brings the spring

Brigid’s Day reflected our own lives; rushes were easy come by in west Roscommon, Brigid was headstrong rather than immaculate, she was protector of animals and we were the children or grandchildren of farmers.