I’m sorry Ireland, but you can’t send me back now. I no longer own an appropriate raincoat

I’m from Boston so most people assume that I come from Irish-America. In fact, my father is Jewish and his family immigrated to New York through Odessa from various parts of Central and Eastern Europe. My mother’s family is 100 per cent White Angle Saxon Protestant. In the meticulous family histories collected by one of her great uncles, the Rogers are traced back to ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620. My in-laws are my only Irish relations, I tell taxi drivers who wonder where my people come from. Yet somehow I have lived in Dublin for 24 years and counting, more than half of my life. I have written two history books about Ireland and a novel set in Dublin. I blame Van Morrison.

Brown Eyed Girl played at every single school dance I can remember. As a child, I attended the St Patrick’s Day parades where we ate green bagels slathered in green cream cheese while other people drank green beer and sported badges demanding ‘Pog mo thóin’. We cheered for the shamrock-clad Boston Celtics having absolutely no idea what a Celt was. My father played the Chieftains at least as often as he played Tom Petty or Bruce Springsteen. I knew all the words to Raglan Road before I had ever heard of Patrick Kavanagh. My mother had actually read Ulysses and attended public lectures by Seamus Heaney while he was at Harvard.

In summer catering jobs on various New England islands I worked alongside the ubiquitous Irish J1 holders, confusing their accents with South Africans and Australians. I watched In The Name of the Father and The Boxer and The Commitments.

So when I moved here in 2002, after only one prior visit, I thought I knew exactly what I was getting in to. I loved Dublin. The narrow Georgian houses and the swans on the canal. The burned toast smell of the brewery. The damp wool smell of the bus. Proudly, I brought my visiting friends to ‘shake hands’ with the crusader in the crypt of St Michan’s and to drink at places I claimed served the best Guinness (The Royal Oak, obviously). I laughed at jokes about turning off the immersion. I did the tour at Kilmainham Jail so many times I could have given it myself. I loved how everything was old. If it was also a little dirty, well, I didn’t mind that.

But eventually Disneyland Dublin began to fade and I noticed other things about my chosen homeland that didn’t sit quite so well. When you don’t require abortion services it is easy not to miss them. I couldn’t quite believe they were really not available, that women had to go to another country for healthcare. In America, I had accompanied a friend to an abortion clinic where there were a few desultory protesters holding the expected signs. When Repeal came, enthusiasm was tempered by the profound limitations of what had been achieved and by the ugly seam of misogyny revealed in the rhetoric of some of the opposition. I associated those fetus posters with the deep South and the religious right and yet here they were in this modern European capital.

Meanwhile I had children and discovered that ‘public school’ is something very different here. The

Educate Together school was right there: a five-minute walk from our house. But, oh my, they had so many people on the list. Children who were the children of past pupils. Children who had been put down on the day of their birth.

How crazy it was to assume my child could go to the nearest school within walking distance.

How crazy to assume that the school day would not involve lessons in Catholic doctrine. In the panic of trying to get a secondary school place – also in a ‘public’ school – my husband insisted on baptising the children. As the priest began the process of anointing them, my eldest son smiled and said, ‘My mam thinks this is all a load of rubbish.’ The priest, to his great credit, laughed and then asked me if I was happy enough for him to proceed. That son now attends Mass regularly so I guess that was check mate. It’s one place I won’t follow with requests to please clean his room or do his homework.

I’m a historian so it should not surprise me that the Irish version of a secular society still involves the angelus bells sounding on national radio. Maybe it’s a reflection of how much at home I feel that I think I’m entitled to complain about all these things. In truth, I can’t imagine making my home anywhere else. I’ve taken Gaelic football, perhaps the world’s ugliest sport, to my heart. My husband is from Donegal and I have sat in the rainy stands in Collon singing ‘duh da duhda duh Don-E-gal’. I even play with a Mothers & Others Team at Ballymun Kickhams. I’m the only one in my family currently playing GAA, the sons having refused in favour of foreign sports.

I’m sorry, Ireland, but you can’t send me back now. I no longer own an appropriate raincoat. I can tell the difference between a Cork and a Kerry accent. I talk about grand soft days and grand stretches in the evening. I go out for messages to the shops and become disoriented in giant American supermarkets. But most of all I love this place that is nothing like Dublin in The Commitments, where no one is all that fond of Van Morrison and the Chieftains only play in Temple Bar. I have poured my love and my frustrations into writing a novel about a place I hadn’t even imagined as teenage me waved her arms over her head and sang sha-la-la, la-la, la-la, la-la, la-la tee-da.