Book review: Declan O’Rourke’s first novel reaches back to the suffering of past generations

Declan O’Rourke concentrates on the efforts of Pádraig and Cáit Ua Buacalla to keep themselves and their children alive on the scraps of gruel doled out in Macroom.

Declan O’Rourke

When reading the first novel by one of the country’s most successful songwriters it is hard not to pay particular attention to what he says about a song sung by one of his characters.

It is 1846 in Macroom, County Cork, and Cáit and her family, like many more around her, are feeling the terrible grip of the famine as it begins. She sings to her daughter. O’Rourke said it is to entertain herself and her children. But it is so much more — a terrible effort to banish hunger, to bring comfort at a time of sadness and to connect with others who have felt the same pains: “… the songs connected her to people far and away and beyond in different times. To her own people, no matter how distant they were, or how long any of them were gone from her.”