A love affair with west Cork
As I child, I had lived in some of the loveliest places on this island, in Kerry, Cork, Tipperary, Mayo, Dublin, Donegal and Kilkenny — my father was not an itinerant; he was ‘in the bank’. When I returned to Ireland, it was to west Cork. Of all the places, it had most strongly gripped my memory, or my imagination. I remembered boyhood days in Emmet Square, in Clonakilty where we spent all of eight years, the longest I ever lived anywhere until my return.
I moved to west Cork ‘objectively’ — I took a look at the world and decided there was no finer place the family and I could be. Coming here was a risk; my wife, Marie, and I had no jobs to come to — but, down the years in foreign places, we’d always ‘made out’ and we are both blessed with an optimism which some would call naivety.
