Three days until we need to be back in Dublin to catch the ferry, a wet, cold and blustery forecast - what to do? We found a small paid for parking south of Midleton overlooking one of the many small inlets on Cork Harbour. So one night there, then Gill booked another couple of days in a campsite in Cashel, a small town near the M8 motorway about 90km north of Cork.
Instead of backtracking along the N71 which follows the south coast we cut across country towards Bandon on what looked on the map like a more minor road. It's not easy to predict what Irish roads are going to be like. The minor one was straighter, better surfaced and broader than the 'N' road we took last week to get to Ireland's southwest corner.
Dull and damp described both our spirits and the weather. In better weather the small motorhome parking overlooking Cork harbour would have been pretty, but the rain was persistent enough for me to become anxious about getting the van off the pitch which was ever so slightly sloping.
In the end it wasn't a problem, and once we had negotiated the bank holiday traffic on the Cork bypass soon we were heading north up the motorway. Our original plan - to head up the West coast towards Limerick then take the motorway towards Dublin - would have taken us past Annacotty. A small place on Limerick's outskirts of no significance whatsoever apart from the fact it happened to be the birthplace of my Irish grandfather.
Michael Ryan died in 1930, 25 years before I was born. I don't remember my grandmother speaking about him much and my mother had scant memory of him as she was eight when he died. All that was known about the man was based on unsubstantiated family lore - that he came from Limerick, was a watchmaker by trade and had once worked in Malta. Sometime in the 1970s my cousin, holidaying in Ireland, attempted to find out more, but to no avail. Unsurprising really given how many Michael Ryans must have been born in Limerick sometime in the 1880s.
Brexit motivated me to have another attempt, as tracking him down would allow me to claim Irish citizenship and retain the benefits of unrestricted travel in the Schengen area. I obtained a copy of my grandmother's marriage certificate which stated his date and place of birth - 1886 in Limerick. I also discovered his father was called William. This helped a bit, but still there were a dozen or more Michael Ryans born in Limerick city and county in 1886 with a dad called William. Armed with a month's free access to Ancestry.com by a process of cross checking birth, death and marriage records with census records I become 99% certain that I had tracked down my Irish ancestors. It turned out my mother had an uncle and aunt and five Irish cousins she knew nothing about. The on-line records stated they came from Annacotty, a small settlement on the edge of the city of Limerick. When I obtained copies of their certificates it turned out that they actually resided in the rural parishes to the east, in hamlets and farmsteads alongside the main road linking Limerick and Tipperary.
In the end, though I had collected the necessary documentation, I decided not to pursue Irish citizenship. The reasons were purely practical, it is expensive, almost £2000 by the time all the fees for a birth certificate and passport have been paid; it is a protracted process, even before the pandemic at least a two year wait, then Covid put a moratorium on new applications. Theoretically EU citizens and their spouses can travel freely in the Schengen zone, but we would have to carry our marriage certificate as proof. It seemed like a faff, in truth we can work around the 90/180 rule, we don't tend to live in our van for more than 150 days a year anyway. So my interest in an Irish passport was as much a rude gesture from an affronted Remainer than anything else, and I am not particularly given to puerile foot-stamping, especially given the price tag.
The older I get the less I have a sense of tribal belonging to a particular place. Nevertheless, as well as my attempt to rescue Michael Ryan from oblivion my sister has done a lot of research into our Scottish forebears. Then a few Christmases ago my kids bought me a DNA testing kit. So over recent years I have become much more knowledgeable regarding my 'origins'. Somewhat counter-intuitively I think this has resulted in me becoming more sceptical about 'belonging'. I do like watching 'Who Do You Think You Are' because I enjoy history programmes on TV. However, the inevitable scene where a minor celeb. stands in a cemetery weeping over some distant forebear's sticky end strikes me as contrived and ridiculous. I think unbridled nostalgia can be a very dangerous thing.
However, since our planned route back to Dublin would have taken us right past Annacotty it would have seemed deliberately contrary not to visit the birthplace of my enigmatic grandfather. Now we had deviated from that plan I told myself missing the place was no big deal as we sped northwards from Cork up the M8. Maybe Gill knows me better than I know myself. As we approached Cahir she remarked, 'its not a such a big detour along the N74 through Tipperary if you still wanted to visit where your grandfather came from'. So we did, even though it was quite a detour really.
In good weather the route by the Galty mountains may be attractive, but we had low cloud and drizzle. Perhaps it was the dull conditions, but the country towns like Bansha and Tipperary seemed depressed and impoverished.
Annacotty lies northeast of Limerick's outskirts near the University campus. These days it is close to an area of retail parks, halls of residence and mid-rise post-modern blocks, mainly housing academic departments. We passed a sign to a science park specialising in pharmaceutical research. It's as good a vision as any of the economic development over the past two decades that has gifted Ireland the second highest GDP per capita in the eurozone after Luxembourg
However, Annacotty itself is a workaday place, its centre little more than a parade of shops and a pub, bypassed by the R445 on one side and the M7 motorway on the other.
I knew this already because before we arrived in Ireland I had checked it out on Streetview trying to find a place to park the van so we could have a mooch about. We repeated the procedure in a Lidl car park a mile or two from our destination, coming to the same conclusion as before, parking on the street opposite the shops was the only option, if the bays were occupied or would be a very brief ancestral encounter indeed.
In the event there was a parking space, I did manage to hop out and take a photo of the local 'Ryan's store'. Any notion that this might be owned by an undiscovered relative was put into perspective by the fact that every other business we passed on the road between Tipperary and Limerick seemed to be owned by a Ryan.
After photographing the pub and the shop I just stared around, struck by a growing sense of bewilderment as to why exactly I had come here. Momentarily, looking at the antique cigarette adverts on the front of the pub I wondered if the young Michael Ryan had frequented the place. A sign by the door boasted that the place had 'served the community for generations. In reality, though transcripts of censuses recorded his family as residing in Annacotty, the detailed records reveal they lived at a number of different places in rural parishes to the east. In 1901 Michael, his father and older brother were listed as 'farm servants', his mother had died in the previous year. You sense a precarious existence, no evidence whatsoever that he was a watchmaker; it seems that was just family lore, a bit of blarney on his part perhaps.
We headed back the way we came, arriving at the campsite we had booked in Cashel in the late afternoon; the persistent rain eased. Had the detour been worth the effort? Maybe, not because I felt some sort of connection to my long lost grandfather, but because I didn't. My quest to resurrect Micheal Ryan clarified feelings about my own past and issues around 'ancestral roots. Two commonly held views struck me as particularly wrongheaded. Firstly, the idea behind the programme 'Who do you think you are?' - that somehow our identities are shaped by distant forebears seems somewhat preposterous. I can see how my blue eyes, once fair hair and myopia are probably gifts from my Gaelic ancestors, but my beliefs, attitudes and attachments are conditioned by my up-bringing and the culture I have lived in over the years as well as the personal choices made.
Furthermore, the older I get the more sceptical I become regarding attachment to place. It seems to me that the sense we have of a 'homeland' or place of origin is as much a yearning for the kind of uncomplicated security of childhood than any real connection to 'blood and soil'. Consequently it is no accident that as mass hysteria and the puerile pantomime surroundING the Queen's platinum jubilee unfolds at home I arranged to be safely ensconced in a nearby republic.
One of the great myths surrounding our sense of belonging is that in the past most people were rooted in a particular place and tended to have ancestral roots there. In fact, people have always moved about as much as stayed put. The resultant tensions is the central theme of Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan quartet - its second volume is titled 'Those who stay and those that leave'.
After we settled into the site at Cashel I found a scrap of paper and wrote down the initials of my grandparents and their offspring, fifteen people in total as far as I could recall. Among my immediate forebears who stayed and who left? I decided the definition of staying put was living most of your adult life within 25 miles of your birthplace. By these criteria seven people moved within their native country, four emigrated, three died prematurely and only one, my mother, stayed put. Wanderers greatly outnumbered the people who stayed.
Yet many of us, I suspect, remember the place we grew up in as a stable community, displaying all the home comforts of an old neighborhood. After more than half a century I still can recall most of the names of the the people who lived on street where I grew up, I remember the jobs they did, what they looked like and their differing characteristics. It would be very easy for me to romanticise this as some kind of golden age where the sense of community was stronger and people had 'roots'. The reality was quite different. I was born in 1955, the council estate where I grew up was only a couple of years old, it was a community of newcomers, but as child it seemed it had been there forever because it was the only world I knew.
For most of us our 'roots' are shallow. Our imagery of ancestry is sylvan, we have roots, relatives are describe in terms of being different branches, we share a family tree. However, if as many of us leave as stay, then maybe we should also regard ourselves as seeds, adrift, but adept at putting down roots elsewhere, slow moving like a swarm, not fixed like forest.
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