The year is 1951 and I am nine years of age and a bit young I think to be wrenched from the security of family life. As with everything else in the Ireland of this time, things have not been going particularly well at home on the farming front. Men have been let go and the money is tight. On the national front things are even worse with thousands of Irish people emigrating to the UK each month. We do not know it then but this is the start of a whole new wave of emigration, the time of the vanishing Irish. There is a well-known Waterford lilt that translates like this: I was a day in Waterford There was wine and punch on the table There was the full of the house of women there And myself drinking their health. Having been in Ring College for one full month everyone was expected to switch to speaking Irish exclusively. Being caught speaking English after October was an offence that was taken very seriously indeed. It used to be an expelling offence in the school’s earlier days but the fact of the matter was that when I was there times were hard all over Ireland and the owner of Ring, An Fear Mór, was finding it difficult enough to fill the school.
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