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"What if you stood where someone said goodbye to Ireland forever?"
There is something quietly enormous about standing in a small Irish parish and realising someone who shares your blood once stood on the same ground, terrified and hopeful, about to leave everything behind. Maybe it is a churchyard in Mayo or a pier in Cork Harbour. You stop being an abstract descendant and start feeling like a link in a real chain. You learn that your own restlessness or ambition did not appear from nowhere. It came from somewhere, and now you know exactly where that somewhere is.
Shane (25), Portlaoise — warehouse operative at a logistics depot, collects old Ordnance Survey maps
My granny had always said we were originally from somewhere in Roscommon but nobody could actually tell you where, just "somewhere near Strokestown" — which is not exactly a GPS coordinate.
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