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On Christmas Eve as a nine-year-old child in 1915, he came over the mountains from the village of Muirioch, destination midnight mass in Dingle Town, Co Kerry. Seven miles there, seven miles back, the rusty old boots of his dead grandfather clanking on the gravel road, his friends singing the old Christmas songs and hymns on a star-spangled night if they were lucky, in pouring rain even snowfall if they weren’t. It was a treasured moment in my father’s young life.

He only wore his grandfather’s boots so the townies in Dingle wouldn’t laugh and make fun of his shoeless feet. Some others he remembered, were not so lucky and walked barefoot. Back home were his 13 other siblings and his parents in a three-roomed house with a small farm to keep the hunger away.



Sign up to IrishCentral's newsletter to stay up-to-date with everything Irish! When I was a child, he took me to the corner of a field and told me this was where a young girl from the family was buried during the famine, they had no strength to bring her to the graveyard. He took me to Kilmalkedar graveyard where his parents and their parents lay and probably further back since the O’Dowd family had come over the hill from Castlegregory, reasons unknown, around 1830. The family had nothing and no prospects of anything.

Some took the religious way out - there were three Christian Brothers, Matt, Denis, Tom, one priest, Pat, one nun, Terasina, who found education and a life outside the narrow spaces. We would hear f.

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