Norah Casey

NEWSTALK broadcaster Norah Casey is chairwoman of Harmonia, Ireland’s largest magazine company. She says: ‘I’VE travelled all over t he world with my mum, Mags Casey. But my most memorable journey with my mother was to a graveyard in upstate New York where her sister Mary McGowan was buried. My mother is f rom Glenade, Co. Leitrim and her sister Mary was taken i nto a closed order in Rossinver, the Franciscan Sisters of Atonement, when she was 16 and my mother was just seven. From then on she was called Sister Jude. Mags didn’t meet Mary again until quite late in life and Mary had MS at that point and was living in a convent in America.

When she died, my mother was raising a young family of six of us in Dublin and she couldn’t afford to go to the funeral. In 2001, we heard that the convent in Rossinver was going to be sold and a few months before that happened Mum got the notion that we should pay a visit.

There were only four elderly nuns left and they cooked us supper. We went to see the l i ttle r oom Mary had been in and sat in the pew where she sat in the chapel. After that Mum got it into her head that she wanted to take s o me soil from Leitrim to her sister’s grave in America. We had to sneak the soil in our luggage, I’m not sure that’s legal! So we flew to New York in 2003 and drove to Graymoor.

We visited the little tombstone with Sister Jude written on it and Mum bawled and bawled. She finally got to say goodbye to someone who was very important to her and she put the soil from home on the grave.’