Seamus McKenna has been having his letters published in The Irish Times for over forty-five years. There have been hundreds of them.
The middle and later years of the 20th century, and before, saw an Ireland that was judgmental, ultraconservative, and stultifying. Mother-and-baby homes flourished, clerical sex abuse on a massive scale was being covered up by church institutions, and religiously-inspired clauses, which allowed the state to interfere in the relationships between members of the public, particularly women, and their doctors, were being inserted into the constitution.
The letters in this book, together with historical and autobiographical commentary, chart Ireland’s progress from that period to the relatively liberal and caring country we now enjoy.
Along the way a myriad of other subjects is addressed: hare coursing; EU membership; the physics of falling raindrops; politics; economics; international affairs; noise pollution; book censorship; Sinn Féin; the wars in Gaza and Ukraine; and many other matters.
The Maker’s Name editorial reviews
Kirkus Reviews category: THRILLER
Two men love the same woman, but the one she prefers is on the wrong side of history when he makes her pregnant, causing her self-righteous employers to dismiss her from her teaching job in small-minded 1980s Ireland.
In Saint Helen, Anton Quigley, an engineer on the building of an offshore gas rig in southern Ireland, in 1982, tumbles head over heels in love with teacher Helen Peavoy.
Ireland at the time is under the influence of an austere and stultifying flavour of Catholicism that, in particular, is hostile to women and women’s rights.
When Helen meets and falls for the revolutionary Ned Rocket, a complex character who writes books, runs a pub, and is a member of Sinn Fein, and becomes pregnant by him, she is threatened with dismissal as a teacher, and disgrace in the community.
Then the IRA carries out a terrible atrocity, which has deep and long-lasting effects on all concerned: it damages Helen’s attitude to Rocket because of his republican tendencies, and causes the erstwhile man of integrity, Anton, to consider taking unfair advantage in his desire to hold on to Helen.
The deadening atmosphere of the time is woven into the narrative through the activities of churchmen who cover up wholesale child sexual abuse, and the involvement of a Magdelene laundry survivor, Constance McCarthy.