Tall Poppy: Castleconnell, 1985

One day after Mass—the younger monks like lighthouses in black among the visiting parents, a sea of boys in navy blazers, and the older sisters who anybody between thirteen and eighteen was busy eyeing up—Br. Patrick said to Mum and Dad, “You know, I think David might just qualify for an exemption from Irish. He’s had most of his primary education outside the country, after all.” It was 1985, the Michaelmas term, and we had just come home after two years in New England and three-and-a-half in Belgium before that.

My father was an executive with the aircraft leasing company, Guinness Peat Aviation, or GPA, and since our move to Brussels in 1980, where he worked with the European Union, I’d lived in comfort and somehow apart from wherever we happened to be as we followed his career. In Dublin, my childhood had evolved in a new suburb without a past—only a present and a future. We had left for Brussels just when I was about to begin national school, and the laying down of certainties about Irishness. Darien, Connecticut, where we’d moved back from, was in one of the richest congressional districts in the United States; Brussels was like a diplomatic bubble. I was a teenager, and had been living in a variety of Pales since we left Ireland. At some point between the ages of seven and thirteen, the thread linking Ireland-before-leaving and Ireland-after had melted away, as if it had never been there. Now I was a student at Glenstal Abbey, which was famous as one of the elite boarding schools in the country.

When the exemption came through, my classmates were jealous: “Bloody hell, Yank. What are you going to do in all your free classes?” The only other boys who didn’t have to do Irish were Andrew Westbrook and his brother, who had lived in Nigeria all through primary school. During Irish class, as Andrew and I played table rugby in the library with an octagonal silver 50-pence piece, one of us making his thumbs into goal posts while the other spun the coin for a penalty kick. Andrew’s stories juxtaposed the luxury he’d known in Lagos and the watery fields and hedgerows of Clare-Galway, where he had lived before Africa. Sometimes I knew we had something unspoken in common. It was strange. It was as if he was still, partly, where I had been. I didn’t think about it, but I didn’t envy him. I didn’t realize that I hadn’t fully come home yet myself.

I was slowly beginning to understand that coming back was more complicated than leaving had ever been. As people insisted “but, where are you from?” they didn’t have the patience for my story, for the ellipses between Dublin, Brussels, Darien, Glenstal, and Limerick. Ireland only had space for the simpler narrative. But my family didn’t fit it. We were some of the first emigrants to return, and they didn’t know what to do with us. For Dad to have been promoted back to a place people were emigrating from—and where those who had stayed were fighting to get by—was unheard of.

In the dark onset of November 1985, we were still living in O’Brien’s Bridge, in the house on the hill, slightly back from the village, that looked onto the Shannon and the long, narrow bridge where fishermen stood in stone booths, dropping their lures into eddies. I was angry on my Sunday visits home—or sad, without knowing why. As if quoting something, with the shyness of addressing something difficult, Mum sometimes said, “you seem a little bit at loose ends, Daedo.” That was her old name for me. “Or like a dog looking for a bone,” Dad blustered, patting me on the back in his own loveable awkwardness, good copbad cop all in one person. Home was still in storage, and leaving Glenstal, even for a day, reacquainted me with the floating feeling.

Mum said later, “Leo McGrath used to...