By Lawrence Welsh
I still cherish Winnie Hogan’s first words to me: “Welcome home.”
It was June 1975, and our family landed earlier in the day at Shannon Airport, and now we stood at Coolaholiga, my mom’s ancestral home just outside Nenagh, County Tipperary.
“Remember,” Aunt Winnie added, as she hugged me, “Ireland will always be your home.”
Fifty years later, on some level, I know she’s right.
Unequivocally, that summer changed and rearranged everything I knew about the world, and as a 16-year-old from South Central Los Angeles, I was already world weary from the tough, gang infested streets of my neighborhood.
Coolaholiga, however, wasn’t an island unto itself. It linked to Ballycommon, another farm a mile away, and my mom said the Gleesons were our people, too, for the Hogans and Gleesons married in the 1800s, and now I had hundreds of cousins, aunts and uncles everywhere: In town, out of town, and in places like Dublin, Limerick, London, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States.
Back then, it seemed if a relative married, the newlyweds eventually gave birth to seven to 11 children, and the offspring followed the same path, until it turned into a Hogan/Gleeson world where I could only know a small segment of the puzzle. By the time of my arrival, the tribe expanded to include new relatives with last names like Slattery, O’Shea, Minogue, Ryan, Limey, O’Carroll, Morgan and Powers.
I asked my mother during those years how long our people had remained in Ireland.
“Perhaps 400 years, maybe more,” she said, in a bit of a dazed reverie. “These are roots Americans will never understand.”
Without question, I spent that summer in the old Ireland: one of endless fields, darkened woods, and tent dances at Dromineer on the River Shannon. Packs of Carrolls, Sweet Aftons and John Player Specials were smoked, and I leaned into Smithwick’s Ale, Carling Black Label and Guinness with uncles, aunts and cousins. I soon realized I couldn’t match or beat them at anything, including drinking.
Long before our arrival, my mother’s oldest sister, Mary Hogan, lived at Lissen Hall, a long gone to ruin Tipperary manor that served as an IRA safe house during the Irish Civil War. On my day there, nothing remained, not even the roof, but the walls stood and ivy and other vegetation took over the corridors, as my brother, sister and I carefully walked on through. Mary had married Danny Gleeson, a local farmer, at the age of 20 and raised 11 children on the property in a small thatch cottage. It was all staggering and mind boggling.
When summer ended, the Hogans and Gleesons threw a “wake” party for our return to the States. At Ballycommon that August night, everyone for miles around showed up: fiddlers, accordionists, guitarists, and the food, dancing, drinking and storytelling went on until dawn. I also tasted poteen, a bootleg potato liquor, for the first time and felt proud to be included in it all. In retrospect, I think the locals didn’t know if we’d ever return, so nothing was spared.
My mom just beamed and danced that night. Throughout her life, she told me not a day passed when she didn’t think about Ireland, since she was lucky enough to have stayed put until the age of 32. And even after 40 years in California, she never lost one bit of her Tipperary brogue. My high school friends dug her, but they couldn’t understand her.
I also found myself infatuated that summer with a beautiful 16-year-old from the Silver Mines, a village a few miles away, but she remained some distant cousin from a family connection and everything stayed pure and innocent. But up until that time, she was the most beautiful teenager I’d ever seen. It would take decades to find out that she liked me, too.
Recently, I realized that Shane MacGowan of the Pogues, the Irish/English band, spent his summers as a youth in the Silver Mines, and his death Mass took place at St. Mary’s in Nenagh, where my mother and all 10 of her brothers and sisters were baptized and confirmed.
At summer’s end, I returned to Los Angeles for my junior year of high school. However, I felt a bit like a stranger and often wondered if I belonged back in Ireland with “my people,” even if I remained a “Yank” as many of the Irish called me.
Seven years later, I’d get a chance to go back – this time to Cork, where my father’s people immigrated from and Phyllis Hogan, my first cousin, lived, with her young family. In 1999, I returned for my honeymoon.
As a father of young teenagers, I took my family back in 2018 and read my work at the University College Cork during the American Conference for Irish Studies.
Eighteen years have passed since my mother died, but she always reminded me: “Don’t let anyone take Ireland from you. It’s yours and you can’t lose what’s yours, even if you try.”
All of my mother’s brothers and sisters are dead now, and I still think of Ireland all of the time. Coolaholiga and Ballycommon remain in our family, and, in a sense, it’s my home, too, for one can only be who they are, and I’m some sort of Irishman, some sort of American, lucky to still call both countries home, and lucky to be alive at all.
Lawrence Welsh is an El Paso author and English professor at El Paso Community College. His 14th published book of poetry, “Drag of the Dust,” is forthcoming from Texas Tech University Press.
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