Due to the nature of my business, my Christmas break this year consisted of a long week-end in the Station House Clifden at the end of January. Outside of the surprisingly narrow bedroom, this is a wonderful week-end venue. The staff are cheerful, helpful and enthusiastic, the Leisure Center attached to the Hotel is second to none, the food is magnificent and the Station Bar itself is delightfully renovated, warm and inviting. On our first night there, we were served dinner by a young Frenchman, Olivier Zaegel. During the course of the meal, he told us he came from the Alps. He had telephoned home the night before and they had told him that the snow was not good at the moment. It was sleety and furthermore had frozen. Ah, but in March, there will be a nice powdery snow and he and three or four of his friends will take off on skis and go into the Valleys where there are no tourists, and his eyes lit up at the thought of it.

His conversation was going through my head the following day when Anne and I walked along the old Galway Clifden Line and drank to our fill the wonderful and whispering silence of the Connemara landscape. Olivier's landscape was the snowfilled Alpine valleys. Two vivid memories jumped to mind. One of my father's seven lives was the work he did for Our Lady's Boy's Club. As its name would suggest, this was a Catholic Youth Club catering for the boys in the poorer part of the city. A major annual event of the club's activities is the Summer Camp. Since 1940 countless Galway Boys have been given a week's holiday they would never have had. In the early years this camp was held in Lough Cutra Castle just outside Gort. It was there I found myself at the age of 7 ready to take on the World. That was of course until I was asked to go and find Ding-a-Ling and get the key of the tent. I ran off as fast as my little legs would carry me before I realised I didn't know who Ding-a-Ling was. It turned out he was James P. Cunningham now Patron of the Club. When I made my request, he thought for a minute and said that in order to get the key to the tent, he needed the glass hammer and would I get it for him from the Half Door. Off I took again to find that the Half Door was Paddy Mac Donagh who seems to have been cooking for the Camp since time began. He told me I'd find the Glass Hammer just inside the Door to the Lake and off I took again and all of a sudden, the penny dropped. Red-faced and sheepishly, I walked back to the Castle and swore and swore that one day I, too, would be a Senior and get my own back. Days at the camp were full of activity and would finish with evening prayer in the dim-lit chapel. Every night, Fr. Michael McGrath would wind up the ceremony with a special prayer for the countless boys who had to leave Galway to eke out a living abroad, "these our exiles".

In March 1971, I was living in Paris. These were pre Common Market days where there was virtually no Irish presence in the city. On St. Patrick's night, I found myself in the Rue Des Ecoles on the fringe of the Latin Quarter. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I could hear the music of a lone piper. Almost instantly and without warning, loneliness and homesickness swept over me like a cold wave. For over an hour I searched for the piper. The music was haunting, coming, as it were, from the silent rooftops. Up and down the Rue Mont St. Genevieve, round the Pantheon, towards the Place Contr'Escarpe. Finally, unsuccessful, I walked home sad and desperately alone to my Chambre de Bonne on its seventh floor. There are very few Irishmen or women who have not experienced the loneliness of exile. Nowadays, the exile is more transient. With modern transport and communications, the emigrant returns more often, has more contact with home. Furthermore, emigration nowadays is often by choice and not forced by political or economic circumstance. Tom Keneally's new mammoth book "The Great Shame" tells of a different kind of exile, an exile that was forced, immediate and total, an exile that was suffuse with guilt. During his recent visit to Galway, he told us that the book was an effort to face this Exile down and to lay its ghost to rest. The breadth and scale of the book brings to mind Michener's "Hawaii", Uris's "Exodus" and Hailey's "Roots". It is interesting to note that these three books also deal with emigration, forced exile, the uprooting of whole generations.

The book begins in a townland outside Ballinasloe, where a small farmer, Hugh Larkin, finds himself accused of Ribbonism. He is dragged away from his young wife and family to Galway gaol, tried, convicted and transported for life to Australia. Keneally describes in some detail the conditions of home life, the reality of imprisonment and the run up to final transportation. After three months at sea, we finally make it to Australia and, here, the book takes on a different life as we live and feel the life of an Irish convict in that massive country. All the time we are conscious of the fact that Hugh Larkin was Thomas Keneally's great grandfather-in-law. Intermingled with this, the book returns to Ireland and to the Young Ireland movement. We are given, again in some detail, the run up, failure and aftermath of the bungled 1848 attempted Rising. The book continues to mix the two stories, the day to day life and tribulations of the Larkin family, and the nefarious activities on the world stage, particularly during the American Civil War, of the dashing Tom Francis Meagher, John Mitchel and William Smith O'Brien. We watch the commercial activities of Hugh's children as they make their way in Australian life, and the birth (and demise) of the Fenian Rising in Ireland. Once again, we find our heroes transported to Australia and towards the end of the book there is a superb description of the Catalpa rescue. There are some glaring historical inaccuracies in the book (Eva of the Nation was born in Headford, not Portumna), but these are irrelevant to its spirit. Somehow, the book is not about historical fact, it is taking the skeleton of our exile culture out of the cupboard and putting its ghost firmly and gently to rest. This St. Patrick's Day, I am going to remember the Key to the Tent, the Glass Hammer, that Parisian night in 1971;. I will think of Olivier in his Alpine valley, raise a glass in spirit with Keneally in Australia, salute, and drink to the ghost of "these our exiles".