From the Great Blasket to America by Michael Carney

Author:Michael Carney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Collins Press

An Unexpected Opportunity

One day, Pádraig’s brother Cormac told him about an opening for an apprentice in a bar in Dublin. Pádraig sat me down to talk about it. I had lived in Cahersiveen only about five months. I always thought of it as a kind of way station. I had a sense that there was something greater yet to come. I certainly did not want to go back to the island. But I needed to get some place bigger where I could get a good week’s pay and help out my family on the island a bit.

Cormac was a schoolteacher in Clontarf in Dublin. (He was eventually elected a member of Dáil Éireann and served as Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1949–50.)

Pádraig said that the apprentice job was an opportunity to meet new people, do new things and see more of the world. He encouraged me to move along. He said, ‘You can’t stay here forever. You don’t want to do this all your life. You need to advance yourself.’

I was a little hesitant. I wrote to my sister Cáit and asked her to let my father know what Pádraig had proposed. My father was anxious that I keep on going in terms of pursuing a career. Cáit wrote back and told me that my father was sorry to see me go so far away from home, but that he was glad to see me headed in the right direction. So I decided to see what might come of this job in Dublin. I said, ‘Let’s go!’ It was September 1937.

Pádraig bought me a new suit. He took me to the train station in Cahersiveen and bought me a ticket to Dublin. It was a long ride to Dublin, about 300 miles. It took all day. I was full of doubt that I was making the right move.

Pádraig had arranged for me to be picked up at Kingsbridge Station, now called Heuston Station. P. J. Carroll, the owner of the pub, and his son picked me up in his car. A car! There weren’t many cars in all of West Kerry. I loved it.

But when I first arrived in Dublin, I thought I had better go back to the island. I had never seen the likes of it. And I thought Dingle was big! I thought to myself, ‘I’ll never be able to make it.’ The traffic … The language barrier … The people didn’t speak Irish, only English. The cars, the buses, the lights, the shops, the houses, the big buildings … everybody in a hurry … the way they went about things … It was all so different from the island and from Cahersiveen.

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