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Growing Up in Ireland (1938–1963) “If he’d had the right horse and the right opportunity he would have ended up training horses. He always had that instinct of how to train.” —Michael McDonnell It is one of life’s ironies that the greatest of men often originate from the humblest of beginnings. Their later triumphs are rooted in their early struggles, their prodigious success a product of the environment in which they were born and raised. It was thus from a nation struggling in every way imaginable that a man who would become the most successful coach in American collegiate sports history would emerge. He learned his earliest and most important lessons there and gained a fundamental philosophy that would sustain him throughout his life. To say things were not going well in Ireland in the early part of the twentieth century would be an understatement. In the nearly four hundred years since Henry VIII had conquered the island, Ireland had seen more than its share of bloodshed and famine. An uprising in 1641 was successful in establishing Irish rule until Oliver Cromwell reconquered the island eight years later in a bloody war that saw the loss of nearly a third of Ireland’s population due to death or exile. Another uprising toward the end of the eighteenth century led to a brutal suppression and the Act of Union in 1801 that ended Irish self-government and the temporary disenfranchisement of Roman Catholics. In the fields, the vagaries of absentee land ownership and poor harvests led to two major famines, the first of which in 1740 saw nearly a half-million either perish or emigrate . That suffering only served as a precursor for the Irish Potato Famine or Gorta Mor (Great Hunger) one century later. Starting in 1845, this second and more virulent famine was caused in part by a fungus infecting potatoes and resulted in the death of over one million and the emigration of one million more out of a population of eight million.1 Some of the issues that contributed to this calamity were resolved through the various Irish Land Acts intended to redistribute ownership of farmland in Ireland from absentee English landlords to rural Irish farmers. The burning question of Irish independence was not resolved. 1 1 Two failed attempts to pass Home Rule at the end of the nineteenth century precipitated the bloody Easter Rising in 1916 and the Irish War of Independence immediately following World War I. Although the Irish Republican Army reached a truce with the English after two years of bloodshed, the Solomonic compromise reached in the AngloIrish Treaty of 1921 only further divided the country—both literally and figuratively. The twenty-six southern counties were separated into an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth, known as the Irish Free State, while the six northern counties remained part of the United Kingdom. The treaty split Irish nationalists into protreaty and antitreaty forces who fought a yearlong civil war that financially crippled the Irish Free State in its infancy. Among the twenty-six counties that became Ireland in 1936, County Mayo was hit hardest. For one thing, the Potato Famine had been particularly felt there—90 percent of the population was dependent upon potatoes—and it is estimated that upwards of 100,000 died in County Mayo alone.2 Because of high birthrates and scarce opportunities for employment, the cycle of hunger and emigration caused the population of County Mayo to dwindle from 388,000 in 1841 to 161,346 in 1936 and to a low of 133,052 in 1956.3 Parents raised their children to send them away from the dreariness of home to a better life abroad. At the end of the 1930s, Ireland, and much of the rest of the world, was recovering from the economic calamity of the Great Depression and was on the verge of a war that was ultimately to be waged on an unprecedented scale. Although Ireland was officially neutral, tens of thousands of its sons volunteered for the British and American armies, while those left at home were forced to eke out an existence made ever more meager by the food and coal rationing prevalent across Europe. It was into this reality that John McDonnell was born at home and delivered by a midwife on July 2, 1938, to Michael and Bridget McDonnell on a dairy farm near Crossmolina, County Mayo—a mountainous region some 135 miles west of Dublin and less...

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