Author: admin

Bruce Copeland

On a sweltering Saturday early in May 1957, calves fed, firewood chopped, eggs collected, vegetables and flowers watered and other morning chores completed, Mother got into preparing lunch. As I left to go out to the hens with vegetable peelings, my brother Johnny charged in pushing me to one side, yelling:

‘Ma where is JH? There is a buzzing dark cloud!’

‘Johnny lad, you mean your daddy!’ replied Ma. ‘It is ok for granddad to abbreviate, but it is always Daddy and nothing else to you, and don’t you ever forget it!’
Daddy then appeared and called out ‘D, please go fetch a sheet and quickly! A swarm is landing in the old pear tree.’ Our neighbour Jimmy and I followed the black buzzing cloud from his big field to our orchard. There must be at least thirty thousand bees. Jimmy said it was the finest swarm he had ever seen. Handing the sheet to daddy my mother joked ‘You know John the saying – a swarm of bees in May is worth a cock of hay. This swarm could be worth two cocks of hay, one for us and one for Jimmy.’
The arrival of the bees and subsequent activity almost sixty-five years ago was an unforgettable event. For several seconds in the near darkness that morning, it seemed night time had arrived.

In the 1950’s my mother’s father was one of few who referred to the little black native Irish bee (Apis Mellifera Mellifera) as A.M.M. Grandfather was a studious reader. He frequently quoted mind tingling facts and abbreviated names for almost everything. He referred to Father as JH, mother as D and my older brother Johnny was JR. Granddad and father often debated politics, farming and nature topics.
My father had been left little choice but to take over the running of the family farm at the age of fourteen. In his struggle to survive those years, he was mentored by our neighbouring farmer Jimmy. Several years older than Father, Jimmy had imparted his experience of beekeeping and carpentry skills to my father. Most of the older beekeepers I know are handy carpenters, but unfortunately these essential skills I have not perfected.
‘Swarming bees don’t usually sting,’ Mother whispered, but she still held Johnny and me back. We watched Daddy and Jimmy shaking the great beard of bees down into the sheet. The calm way they gently managed the swarm from the high up, almost breaking and bending branch, and then into the hive without suit or glove protection seemed nature loving magical. At the age of five I was instantly hooked to someday becoming a beekeeper. While I walked the Camino a few years ago, I observed the harvesting of olives. One olive-picker shook the tree and a second person secured the ground sheet so that nothing escaped. It reminded me of Daddy and Jimmy and the bees, all those years ago.
I went into self-employed business in my mid-twenties. It meant moving around and great demands on my time. I was rarely far from nature but I did not get the chance to become a beekeeper. It was not until my fifties that the beekeeping ambition could actively germinate. Liam, a neighbour in the village of Ballycanew, acquired a few bee hives. We kept in contact and talked about progress with his bees. Within a short few years Liam had successfully built up hive numbers.
I moved to live in Tinahely. For the first time, I had acquired sufficient garden space as well as the time to explore beekeeping. Liam inspired me and my neighbours did not object to the idea of bees next door. I followed Liam into Gorey Beekeepers and the Federation of Irish Beekeepers Association. Experienced people in Gorey including Gerard and Ben, encouraged me greatly. I learned of Michael who kept bees and lived in Tinahely. I looked Michael up and soon acquired an expert mentor, a true friend and a lover of little black bees. We attended the Gormanston Bee School in summer 2015, making contacts and learning much. Motivated by publicity about the dangers facing the little black bee, I joined the Native Irish Honey Bee Society. During the Covid lockdown I signed into online bee webinars, which I continue to do. I am lucky to have in my family an expert carpenter, Paul, to make my beehives and stands. The measurements and making of beehives require careful bee space precision.
It is reputed the native Irish bee was first introduced by Saint Molaga in the sixth century to beehive ways of living. Lann Beachaire (the church of the beekeeper) had been erected by Saint Molaga close to Balbriggan. Clearly the little black bee has survived much. It can surprise but by nature, when handled gently, it is placid to work with. It has an almost hypnotic dance communication system. Each bee within the organised group has a defined function with few things getting left to chance. The queen does the egg laying. Nurse, worker and guard bees all play specific roles. The only males in the hive, the drones, mate the queen and when this function is completed, they immediately die.

Ireland is the only country where this little black bee still thrives nationwide. It has evolved and adapted and is the best-suited honey bee to Irish weather conditions and food sources. The importation of non-native bees is a serious threat to the survival of Apis Mellifera Mellifera. Because of this, on June 2nd 2022, the ‘Protection of the Native Irish Honey Bee Bill 2021’, introduced by Vincent P. Martin, reached second stage at Seanad Éireann. As a toddler in Granny’s fruit and vegetable garden, I never contemplated that the hard-working little black Irish bee would, in my lifetime, require laws to protect its very existence.

BRUCE COPELAND lives in Tinahely where he is a member of the Courthouse Writers’ Group, the Tinahely Bowls Club, the Men’s Shed and the Walking Club. As well as participating in many sports clubs, he is a member of Gorey Beekeepers. A keen gardener, he has a special interest in Nature and Travel.

Read more sustaining stories

The Dubs ( by: Bernie Walsh )
Munch ( by: Bernadette Colfer )
The Precious Little Black Honey Bee (by: Bruce Copeland)
The Gooseberry Bush (by: Rona Fleming)
Zaventem (by: Joy Redmond)
The Longest Journey (by Patrick O’Neill)
I Can Fly (by Jacinta Hayes)
The Marquee (by Kieran Tyrrell)
Ten Minutes (by Jacinta McGovern)
The Turkey is in the Post (by Lucy Nolan)

Lucinda Nolan

Standing in the wooden porch I bask in the trapped heat of the midday sun. The rays are shining through the lead panes of glass causing the mica flecks in the granite steps to sparkle like silver. I wonder how many people have walked over these steps to cause the sloped indent? The old gate lodge was once a Post Office and for sure lots of people have walked across this threshold. The slow pace of life allowed for greeting and catch up, as locals meandered in and out, some of them with penny stamp savings books and the familiar blue and red edged air mail envelopes. We are now living in a hyper-connected yet disconnected society. Words are typed and deleted at breakneck speed.

In rural Ireland, when very few people had telephones, those who frequented the Post Office would have taken down an inkwell from a high shelf, out of the reach of children and made sure the nib of the pen was not crooked or the split would cause double writing. Every word that made its way onto the page, unblotted and neatly scribed, was a gift to be given to the reader. It was an art form and it was very rare for words to be written down without being given some thought, even if it was only a grocer’s list. The letters from sons and daughters abroad were reread over and over and the love letters made their way to treasure boxes lined with satin and smelling of lavender water. In villages the only telephone was in the Post Office, doctors’ surgery or at the vets. The overheard phone calls provided the gossip for the squinting- window brigade. The rural Post Office was as essential to community life as it is to this present day. They provided a keystone to connection for many a lonely person. If the post mistress noticed that Harry McGarry’s old sheepdog was just about to make his way to God’s waiting kennel, she would put a word in the ear of Matty Bourke whose Sheepdog bitch was just about to deliver a litter of pups.

Maybe this Post Office provided the first soundbite, with the telegram being a means of sending urgent messages. There would have been a necessity for sparsity when each word written on the telegram was charged for. Some of these telegrams would have given Ernest Hemingway’s ‘One Line Story’ a run for his money. One local young widow and mother to several children, was summoned by an austere uncle to attend a distant relative’s funeral in Monaghan and she a grieving widow, struggling to cope with her young family. She replied with a telegram ‘Too busy minding the living’.

The Post Office also had many parcels arrive from America containing funny clothing with the exotic smells of American soap Powder. Another woman, who was as uptight as her perm and only wore skirts with block colours of brown or black, provided dynamite to the tongue-waggers. She was seen sauntering around Hollyfort village wearing trousers sent to her from an aunt in Ohio. One old bachelor swapped his ancient cap with its nondescript, oily lining, for a baseball cap with stars and stripes.

At Christmas time turkeys were sent to people in the post and God only knows what they thought in the sorting office up in Dublin; turkeys arriving feathers and all wrapped in newspapers and twine. All this to-ing and fro-ing into Mount Nebo Post Office would explain how the granite steps are so worn. A few years back, I wrote a letter to the Museum and Heritage Section of the GPO., Dublin seeking to find out some more detail. I am fascinated by the past. Anyway, this house has history enough to keep me busy. Although the gate lodge was built in 1880, the first record of it being a Post Office is 8th July 1914. Bridget Behan was appointed Postmistress in 1914 and Mrs Phyllis Bolger on 1st November 1936. When we first bought the gate lodge in November 1997, there were wooden shutters on the windows. The front set of shutters had a rectangular cut-out for Post Office use.

On numerous occasions visitors have spoken of seeing a ghost in one of the upstairs rooms. My son- in- law refused to sleep in that particular room and likewise my sister and her husband. I have no reservations about a ghost, as I fear the living not the dead. Sometimes the lights dim and a knocking sound can be heard at the door with nobody about.

Roughly ten years back I spoke to Mary Teresa Bolger. Her sister Annie was born in 1936 three days after her parents moved into the house. Her Mother Phyllis was the post mistress. They had very fond memories of living in the old house; lighting tilly lamps and fetching water from an adjacent spring. The homely smell of bacon and cabbage, mutton stews and fresh soda bread, would waft into the Post Office and mingle with the individual and seasonal smells of country life.
Mrs Bolger was a dab hand at counting the ten-shilling and one-pound notes and watching Lady Lavery flickering past as she dipped her finger into the small circular wet sponge. The shiny farthings, pennies, threepenny bits, sixpenny bits, Shillings, two-shilling piece and half-crowns all had to be counted too. Mount St Benedict was the main house, which was a Benedictine school run by Father John Sweetman. He appears to be quite a controversial figure of a man. He grew tobacco and had his own brand of cigarettes called Kerry Blue named after his beloved canine companion. He held regular dances for the locals in the large ballroom. The children of the post mistress would listen to the music as it drifted down through the fields and straight in the open windows, on a warm summer’s evening.

When it came to dancing, there were lots of rules and regulations that had to be adhered to in the 1940’s. One urban council had amongst their list of rules, that ‘indelicacy of dress on the part of women dancers to be instantly reproved by the person in charge’ and that jazz and what is known as ‘slow motion’ dances should be taboo in the hall. Fr Sweetman was the overseer of any misconduct in the ballroom of romance at Mount St. Benedict.

John Francis Sweetman (1872 -1953) born in Clohamon, Ferns, Co. Wexford founded the Benedictine school in Mount Nebo. He was educated in Bath and at the age of twenty-eight, went to South Africa as a catholic chaplain to the British forces. In later years he had a complete turnabout, becoming very much aligned with the Irish Cause. One pupil who attended Mount St Benedict was Seán, the son of Major John McBride. Major McBride led the Irish Brigade who were fighting against the British forces during the Boer War. In later years, this could have influenced the Benedictine Monk Fr. Sweetman with his strong anti-treaty stance. Indeed, when Major John McBride was executed in 1916, Maud Gonne – John’s divorced wife – took her twelve-year-old son, Seán McBride, home from France to be educated in Mount St Benedict.

Seán McBride was a member of Sinn Féin (1918-1931) and chief of staff of the IRA from 1936 to 1937. In the years that followed, he participated in many international organisations including the United Nations and Amnesty International. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for the year 1975-1976. During the time Séan attended Mount St Benedict, he would have known Stanislaus Markievicz, the stepson of Countess Markievicz. She was one of the leaders in the 1916 Irish Easter Rebellion. Stanislaus entered the school in 1907. Seán would have walked down to the Post Office with Fr. Sweetman’s little Kerry blue, barking and running alongside him. He would collect his mail from France and translate it to Irish for the others to read.

I can only speculate that both Máire Comerford and Aileen Keogh, who were two very radical republicans and members of Cumann na mBan would have frequented the Post Office. Aileen Keogh was a matron in Mount St Benedict School and Máire Comerford her friend and assistant.

During the war of independence (1919-1921) Aileen Keogh was charged in court with having seditious documents and ammunition and was sentenced to two years imprisonment. She escaped from Mountjoy Gaol in1921, along with Linda Kearns, May Burke and Eithne Coyle. They used a stolen key and climbed the prison wall with the aid of a rope ladder. Aileen made her way to Duckett’s Grove (Carlow) IRA training camp and stayed there until December 1921, subsequently made her way back to her comrades Fr. Sweetman and Máire Comerford. Aileen Keogh died in 1952 and Fr Sweetman in 1953. Twenty-nine years later in 1982, as the rifles fired their honorary shots over the graves, Máire Comerford finally joined her two friends. The three of them are now laid to rest in a low, wall enclosed graveyard in the grounds of Mount St Benedict. These three lone graves in the middle of a field appear incongruous with the cattle grazing, oblivious to their guests who lie in the shadow of the large oaks.

As the sun sets and the coolness of night descends, I stand up from the granite steps and think of Saint Brigid’s ‘Threshold Rite’. After hanging a cross made of rush, we knock on the door three times to acknowledge her. This threshold, a liminal space, has stories etched into every bit of granite and just like mica some of them shine brighter and need to be told.

LUCINDA NOLAN lives in Hollyfort where she is a member of the book club and the Writers’ Group. She enjoys walking in Mount Nebo and on the wonderful beaches of Wexford. Lucinda has two grown-up children and a grandchild who helps her to be creative.

Read more sustaining stories

The Dubs ( by: Bernie Walsh )
Munch ( by: Bernadette Colfer )
The Precious Little Black Honey Bee (by: Bruce Copeland)
The Gooseberry Bush (by: Rona Fleming)
Zaventem (by: Joy Redmond)
The Longest Journey (by Patrick O’Neill)
I Can Fly (by Jacinta Hayes)
The Marquee (by Kieran Tyrrell)
Ten Minutes (by Jacinta McGovern)
The Turkey is in the Post (by Lucy Nolan)

Bernie Walsh

It is funny how a smell, a taste, a song, or even a saying, can trigger a childhood memory. Recently I was visiting my family in Dublin and my cousin’s husband greeted me with ‘Hey Culchie’. Well it made me laugh out loud. He asked me what I was laughing about. So I told him I’m called a Culchie now that I live in Wexford, in a town called Gorey and explained to him that as a child visiting Gorey, I was known as the Dub, or the run in, or the wan from the big smoke. All the locals thought we were rich and trendy, coming down from Dún Laoghaire.

We spent all our summers at the Cottage on the Cross, at Annagh Long near Gorey. It was my nana’s sanctuary, her home place, which she had left at the age of fifteen heading to Dublin to work in Dalkey as a children’s nanny for a family called Halfpenny. Those children visited her regularly when they grew up and had families of their own. My nana was called Fanny D’eathe and when she married Thomas Quinn, in 1934 in Dalkey church, the priest asked him was he not afraid to face d’eath and he said ‘No Father I am not’. Frances and Thomas rented a room in 59 Mulgrave Street, Dún Laoghaire.

I can just imagine her devastation when Thomas contracted Meningitis, at the age of twenty-eight, and ended up in St. Michael’s hospital, dying after three days. As Frances was pregnant with her third child, she was not allowed to visit him so she never heard his last words. I can imagine her standing beside that single grave, in St. Mary’s section of Deansgrange cemetery holding her two children, Tony, age two, by the hand and Sadie, ten months, in her arms. Frances had given Tom a good send off, his coffin housed in the glass hearse pulled by two black horses with plumes on their heads. She always talked about how people in Dún Laoghaire stopped and stared, as the bereaved walked from the town to Deansgrange, probably saying ‘Sure they were only three years into their marriage.’

A couple of weeks later, Frances lost her baby due to stress and grief over the love of her life passing. He meant everything to her. After Thomas died, Nana spent all her time working in the Dominican Convent school, bringing up her two children alone. However, her family in Wexford and Carlow were very good and she visited them regularly when the children were small. And then when us grandchildren came along, we spent all our summers with her at Lennon’s Cross in Annagh.

Nana loved coming to Gorey, spending time in her garden at Lennon’s Cross, weeding, weeding, and weeding. Painting gates, whitewashing the cottage inside and out. If you stood still for long, you would be whitewashed! She had a stone embedded into the hedge on the crossroads, which she also whitewashed. People used to say, ‘Oh, we knew Mrs Quinn was down, the stone is whitewashed on Lennon’s Cross.’ It glowed at night, showing drivers where to turn.

The crossroads got its name from the first people to live in the labourer’s cottage in 1880, John and Dorah Lennon and their only son Edward. We always believed that John Lennon was one of the Beatles. It was not until we were older that we realised this was not true, which led us to great disappointment. Nana also came to the cottage just after Christmas and Easter too. Little did the locals know, we did not have a pot to piss in and all our trendy clothes were either made by my mother, the great seamstress, or came from Penney’s shop.

The other day I was driving my car and a song came on the radio, ‘School’s out for summer’ and suddenly, I was back in Dún Laoghaire. All of us were loading up into the open-back Hyno truck. There would be Nana and us five. There were only two passenger seats in the front, which were for Mammy and Majella the baby, so we all had to climb into the back and hang on.

My dad would haul the couch and two armchairs from the sitting room and tie them to each side of the truck with a big thick rope. That would never happen today. The stepladder would be brought out and Nana would be shoved up and into the back of the truck and she would install herself on the couch and she in her late seventies. The stepladder would be thrown into the truck, so we could get her out again. Then we would fling all the black plastic bags in. Some containing pillows, blankets, sheets; another with Nana’s clothes, as she did not possess a suitcase.

Then the boxes of food would be put safely at the back of the couch. Two guitars, the battery radio, a cat called Oscar and then lastly, we would be shoved in. Most times, our friends would come with us, sometimes neighbours, sometimes cousins. Everybody got a holiday in the cottage, at some stage in the year. At that time in the seventies there were no decent roads, so we would have to trundle through Shankill, then stay stuck in the bottleneck at Bray for maybe half an hour or more, until we finally got onto the Wexford Road, where my dad could open up the truck and fly along.

Rathnew was the village where we always stopped for the 99’s which were so tasty. And we all loved the flake, as it was not a sweet we would normally get. Flakes and chocolate were too expensive, we only ever had penny blacks, gobstoppers, aniseed balls or hard-boiled sweets.

That reminds me of every Saturday, when Mammy would take us to the library and we would stop at Miss Parnell’s shop, a menagerie of interesting goods, from the latest magazines, comics, newspapers, to big glass jars, all lined up on the wooden shelves, holding different-coloured sweets. And there would be games and toys, all stuffed in on bulging shelves. Dad would give us a penny each to spend on sweets which came in a newspaper cone; Mam might buy us a comic an odd time, the Jackie, Twinkle, Bunty, or the Beano. It did not matter; we would be delighted with them.

As I pass the bakery in Gorey, heading to do my shopping, I get the smell of cinnamon. It brings me back to Christmas at our house, and I can see my nana in her apron, fighting with the turkey, plucking, chopping off the neck and the legs, then filling it with home-made stuffing, with her secret ingredient. Sometimes she would chase us with the turkey neck, or a leg, that would frighten the life out of you!

Her sister Jane in Carlow would send her up the turkey each year, on the train. First to Heuston Station, then it would be transferred to the Dún Laoghaire train and we would have to go to the station and pick it up. It took two of us to carry it, the weight of it. All this was strange to our neighbours, but normal for us. Jane had been sending turkeys to my nana since her husband died, and kept up the tradition.

As I drive my car out of Gorey, I hear the song, Silver Dream Machine, by David Essex. I loved that song and it reminds me of all those times we walked from Lennon’s Cross up to the pub, Nolans of Annagh; playing that song repeatedly on the juke box, we shot pool badly, played space invaders badly, flirted with the locals, listened to the lads in the snug fighting over cards, using very bad language, but when it was all over, they would walk home arm in arm.

Every Friday night, the Nolan girls would get the big pot out, fill it with lard and put it onto the gas ring out in the shed. We would spend hours peeling and cutting hundreds of potatoes taken fresh from the field. We would make chips to feed the nation. What happy memories that evokes which will live on in me forever.

BERNIE WALSH has been writing since childhood and works as a genealogist. Two of her books have been published by Boland Press: Driftwood, a collection of poetry and short stories, and her new novella Barney takes a Walk. They are available for purchase from Red Books in Wexford town.

Read more sustaining stories

The Dubs ( by: Bernie Walsh )
Munch ( by: Bernadette Colfer )
The Precious Little Black Honey Bee (by: Bruce Copeland)
The Gooseberry Bush (by: Rona Fleming)
Zaventem (by: Joy Redmond)
The Longest Journey (by Patrick O’Neill)
I Can Fly (by Jacinta Hayes)
The Marquee (by Kieran Tyrrell)
Ten Minutes (by Jacinta McGovern)
The Turkey is in the Post (by Lucy Nolan)

Joy Redmond

From January to March 1993, I didn’t see daylight during the week. I was ‘en stage’ doing a work placement with Gráinne, my fellow Irish student, as part of an Erasmus year studying in Belgium. We were known as ‘Joy and the other girl’ for the year, as nobody could pronounce her name. Our ‘stage’ was in an industrial catering company in the airport that made those little plastic breakfast, dinner and lunch trays branded for each airline. The hours were nine to five but if you wanted lunch you had to come in an hour earlier so between the commute out to the airport town of Zaventem and being situated in the basement, we missed daylight from Monday to Friday.

Because we were business students, they couldn’t have us working as cheap labour in the kitchen, so we were assigned a hybrid role within the Cost Control department that allowed them to assign us skivvy work under the auspices of business experience.

The basement was home to three enormous industrial kitchens (the size of football fields). All the doors on one side led into walk-in fridges, walk-in pantries and walk-in deep freezers that each were the size of a good office. On the opposite wall, there were several warehouse-sized rooms whose shutters on the far side opened up to the runway, where forklift drivers would taxi over and move pallets of full dinner and drinks trolleys to be placed on airplanes before take-off.

There was a horrendous ‘us and them’ mentality between management and the kitchen. We were placed awkwardly in the middle. One of our tasks was to randomly take a prepared tray and weigh out all the contents as per the listing in the catalogue i.e., Sabena economy dinner, 3g peas, 1g hollandaise sauce, 10g salmon and so on. Though we were doing the manual work and trying to fit in, we had the unhappy task of reporting our colleagues’ errors back to management.

A few days into the placement, the temperature control system was malfunctioning so we had to manually check the temperatures of the twenty deep freeze chambers. This involved standing in a closed freezer for about five minutes holding up a thermometer waiting for the mercury to creep down to ‘min twintig’, minus twenty degrees, only to return to a boiling hot industrial kitchen to psyche yourself up to do it all again, nineteen more times. We were not in snowsuits but regular clothes and lab coats and our hands would be red raw from the extremes of temperature.

The job of every stagiaire in the world is to look busy for the remaining seven hours of the eight-hour working day, when your boss is so clearly sick of the sight of you. A lot of the time, we walked around the enormous campus with our clipboards trying to look like we were on our way to some important activity. Towards the end of the day, we’d bump into the Bangladeshi staff starting the night shift on the cleaning line. They’d proudly share the spoils of their work – an unwanted pack of crayons, an unopened First-Class giftset that could be regifted to family, a leftover lobster meal. They were all medical students by day and working night shifts, so I’m not sure when they factored in sleep.

We were desperately unhappy. Even though I had grown up in a butcher shop and was inured to cold rooms and cold hands, I had never experienced the assembly line hostility we had read about in our management books.

Being a Dubliner and having only ever done white collar part-time jobs, Gráinne announced one evening that she would not be joining me for work the following day because she simply was not spending her twenty-first birthday in the dungeon.

Off I went on foot, then metro, followed by train in the dark and so began one of the longest days of my life. In between the random weighings, the manual deep freeze temperature checks and data entry, I took at least five toilet breaks to simply cry in the cubicle. When I got home, I told Gráinne, who had enjoyed her birthday immensely, that I’d had one of the worst days of my life and we both decided enough was enough or ‘genoeg is genoeg’ and we weren’t going back.

The following day, we went into college with my prepared monologue. I cornered our Erasmus coordinator Walter Roessens, in his steel-rimmed glasses and shin-length journalist’s mack, in the corridor at break and explained that we would not be returning to Belgavia; we were business students, we were learning nothing, it was more suited to catering students and on and on I went before Walter almost burst into tears grabbing people in the corridor raving ‘Zij spreekt Vlaams! Zij spreekt Vlaams!’ ‘She’s speaking Flemish!’. He didn’t care what we had to say or that we were leaving his placement, because he was ecstatic that a foreign student could tell him all of this in his obscure language. We were off the hook.

Postscript:
Some days, our boss in Cost Control felt sorry for us and would take us on little outings around the airport to cheer us up. One of these outings was to check out the First-Class lounge of a Singapore Airlines plane and it was like something from a James Bond movie, with a bar and swivelling reclining seats.

Another time, from a passenger boarding bridge waiting to attach to a plane, I was looking out across the runway and I spotted Air Zaïre passengers making their way to the terminal building. They looked so exotic in their colourful attire, carrying cages and whatnot and I can only imagine the assault of the European winter’s chill on their backs. One of the passengers, a man in his best Sunday suit, was carrying a tattered papier-mâché suitcase which was held together with a belt or bike strap. It burst open on the runway. He hunched down and his broad frame scrambled to gather the contents which was made up entirely of green bananas, his earthly possessions for a 6,000 km flight. The bananas were either food for his family for their first few days in the new world or the means to making his first €50 in the West. That image has stayed with me. We mustn’t forget that we’ve already won the lotto being born white in the West.

JOY REDMOND is from Gorey. She moved back home in 2005 to raise her sons who are now men. Joy has always written, mainly drama and has recently taken up printmaking to tell visual stories. This story is part of a series of letters she is compiling for her sons.

Read more sustaining stories

The Dubs ( by: Bernie Walsh )
Munch ( by: Bernadette Colfer )
The Precious Little Black Honey Bee (by: Bruce Copeland)
The Gooseberry Bush (by: Rona Fleming)
Zaventem (by: Joy Redmond)
The Longest Journey (by Patrick O’Neill)
I Can Fly (by Jacinta Hayes)
The Marquee (by Kieran Tyrrell)
Ten Minutes (by Jacinta McGovern)
The Turkey is in the Post (by Lucy Nolan)