When work experience becomes a journey to explore family origins

Will O’Sullivan even shares a work space with gran, albeit decades later

UNWITTINGLY branded part of the“old stock ”, for the first time I have arrived in the town where my ancestors lived and worked for generations.

Tralee is unfamiliar to me. I went to the town once when I was a very young boy, but I have no memories of it. I spent my childhood in Washington DC, my teenage years in Nairobi, Kenya, before eventually moving to Edinburgh, where I live now. I’ve come to Ireland but once in that time.

Yet, I’m told my family connections are strong. Across town, generations of O’Sullivans, nameless and faceless to me, called old, yellow Caherina house home. The Springfield road lies right where my father’s childhood home used to stand and, across the street, the houses that face it stand where fields used to stretch. Several people, whom I’ve never seen before, have even informed me that we are related.

As if that wasn’t enough, while I am on work experience with the Kerryman, I am coincidentally sitting each day in the same building in which my grandmother, Breda, first worked as a young clerk with the National Bank of Ireland. I am told she was the first woman from Kenmare to be employed in a bank. It’s where she was working when she met my granddad. Mick was reputedly a record-setter in his own right, winning honours in Tralee for both rugby and golf.

My preconceptions about the place, as often happens, were wide of the mark.

While I was expecting the green hills and chequered fields, I was surprised to see Tralee’s surrounding mountains. The leafy slopes almost felt tropical when we drove along the Castlemaine Road one evening, through the trees and over the bridges and streams.

My parents have taken me to Fenit, where my dad swam from the pier as a kid (without a wetsuit, he reminds me).

The rose gardens are well-tended – manicured, almost – and pungent when the air is warm. As well as natural beauty, the town itself seems to be bustling.

I was told beforehand that Tralee had been deeply affected by the economic downturn, but I found the colourful Mall to suggest the opposite, at least to my outsider’s gaze.

The Square, with the nice touch of its blue lights at night, was reminiscent of some European capitals’ central plazas (if you use your imagination a touch).

Similarly, one of my first impressions was that the sporting scene is anything but languishing. Witness the extensive knowledge of GAA and hurling that everyone you meet has at their fingertips.

It would be wrong to call the sporting culture anything but robust.

I was also astounded to hear that both football and hurling are amateur sports, considering the following they have. Long may it last, for the benefit it seems to make to the development of facilities and young players. This was a revelation, having witnessed the circuses of hyper-funded professional sports in the UK and the USA, not to mention Kenyan running, albeit to a lesser extent.

I’ve tried to keep my eyes open to the details that characterise Tralee. In a story that I’ve often heard in the States, it’s claimed that Ireland has a tendency to strike a deep chord in unsuspecting visitors, making them feel a lasting bond to the county or the country forevermore.

Americans, some who had been to Ireland only a couple of times at most, would indulge in wistful recollection. They claimed they felt more Irish than American. This, they said, would be true for me too.

However, I am wary of buying in to this mythology of Ireland; that I might be struck by some deep connection to the place. It seems wrong to stake a claim to “the Kingdom” having barely set foot in it. This is especially true considering that there might be some – among the many refugees, asylum-seekers and immigrants in Tralee, for example – who have no doubt built careers and families here but who may feel less than sure of their acceptance. In other words, “belonging” seems more sensitive a claim than it is often taken for. I’m inclined to think twice before making it. After all, in an Ireland that’s more cosmopolitan than when my dad and his brothers were growing up, maybe it has become an out-dated concept anyway.

In just my first week here, a local businessman to whom I am related finished a conversation saying, “Family is important to me. So you are important to me.”

Having grown up exclusively in cities, this was an unprecedented thing to hear from someone I had met just an hour earlier. In one way or another, it seems almost inevitable that our lives and work will be contextualised by our family, often our parents in particular: will I do the same thing or something different? Am I doing ‘better’ than them? Worse? What does it mean to find oneself right back where one’s family ‘started’? I haven’t been here long enough to decide whether the experience is revelatory.

Regardless, it seems one doesn’t have to be from the area to appreciate the Slieve Mish mountains or Fenit’s beaches in the sun.

Will O’Sullivan (right) with father Kyran and uncle Jerry in Fenit during the week.