Ireland is where I am rooted and feel unbreakable connections

BBC special correspondent Fergal Keane reflects on his Irish childhood in ‘The Gathering — Reflections on Ireland’.

HOME is many places and feelings. It is London, where I live with my wife and children. It is a part of Africa that I feel forever bound to, and a few other places around the world where I have lived intensely. And it is in Ireland where I am rooted and feel unbreakable emotional connections.

I lived in Dublin until I was 11. Then came a traumatic migration to Cork, where I spent my teenage years. After that, I moved to Limerick, then back to Dublin and on to Belfast, until I left Ireland in the last decade of the old century. My peripatetic life in Ireland prepared me well for a career roaming the world.