Pilgrim Ways

Chapter Nine - Croagh Patrick, Tochar Padraig, and Following Patrick‟s Path One of my earliest childhood memories is of a mountain, which seemed to be shaped like a pyramid, looming in the distance, dominating the skyline. For a three-year-old, brought up in smog laden streets in London‟s East End the contrast with the verdant green of County Mayo could not have been greater. Instead of trolley buses crackling along their far flung routes, here were sprawling green acres populated by sheep and cows. Instead of terraces of two-up, two down houses, here were tiny cottages and the ruins of many more, deserted in the massive exodus of the Irish , escaping poverty, destitution or the earlier potato blight and the catastrophic famine which it left in its wake. My mother was brought up near Tourmakeady on the Galway-Mayo border. One of eight children, her first language was Irish. She had come to England when the family broke up after the death, in quick succession, of her mother and father. My grandparents probably died of meningitis. The brothers and the sisters scattered to England and America and their youngest brother stayed, to be brought up by an uncle and aunt. Immigrants always tend to settle in the same vicinity as other pockets of people from their homeland, and our part of the East End of London was no exception. Even my first teacher, at the age of five, Joan O‟Neill, came from the same part of Ireland as my mother. As girls they had gone to the dances together at Balinrobe. It was a curious quirk that put her in charge of my class in the East End and an even more curious one which led to her son becoming the village school master in the one-teacher village school back where my mother and grandparents had been educated. Many years later he showed me the desks where they had sat and the school registers.

During my years as an MP I also returned to the East End to give out prizes to the children at St.Bonaventure‟s School. After the prize giving they invited me to see the parish church and to examine the entry in the baptismal register recording my baptism. I asked the elderly Franciscan who had organised this what had happened to the priest who had baptised me, Fr.Andrew. “That‟s me” he said, with an air of mischief. Fifty years of dedicated service in a deprived neighbourhood is no mean achievement and represents the quiet pilgrimage undertaken by so many unsung men and women who give up everything for the service of God and mankind. During the post war years my mother occasionally took me and sometimes my cousin, Angela, back to see her remaining relatives in Mayo. From where we stayed, near Lough Carra, there was a distant view of the holy mountain. This was Croagh Patrick, the peak which the British saint scaled , and where he stayed for forty days and nights, before he began the evangelisation of Ireland. Over the years I have always been drawn back to the Reek, as it is known by the Irish. In childhood we would climb only as far as the statue of the saint, although two of my own children have made the ascent to the summit with me, accompanied by two friends from Dublin. The last part of the climb is tough, as you slither and slide across the shale, but when you reach the summit you experience a real sense of peace and quiet satisfaction, to say nothing of the stunning view over Clew Bay. In July, hundreds of pilgrims will make the climb, some in bare feet. On one occasion, on reaching the last part of the climb I began to be deterred by the mist and was considering calling it a