Harry is keen to keep it local in book about his home place

HAVING completed four decades in journalism, well-known local journalist Harry Keaney turned his time off due to the Covid-19 pandemic into a new book, entitled Carrowreagh Childhood.

Harry, now a familiar voice as he reads the news on Ocean FM, could have focused on the big stories, the famous people, the major events which peppered his days working in newspapers in Roscommon, Sligo and New York, but he explains that was the last thing he wanted to do.

Instead, he has gone back to his roots in south east rural County Sligo, to his native townland of Carrowreagh (An Cheathru Riabach, the grey quarter) and the nearby village of Riverstown to give us a very different book that’s a cross between Alice Taylor’s Through the Fields and a feature length version of Sunday Miscellany.

Harry admits that thoughts of writing a book like Carrowreagh Childhood had been gnawing at him for years. He started working on Carrowreagh Childhood in September 2017 but it wasn’t until he was off work at the start of the Covid pandemic that he made real progress on it.

With the book completed his pride at having written it is palpable: “Now I have ‘Carrowreagh’ emblazoned in the title of a book, with the place, its time and people immortalised between its covers.”

The book covers what were the main activities in the area in which Harry grew up, the main one having been farming. It also focuses on family, community, school, religion, work and more, all creating an endearing account that will evoke heartfelt memories of a bygone time.

The postman, days in the bog, going to school in Riverstown, religion, saving the hay, so-called ‘ordinary people’, who Harry rightly elevates to the status of extraordinary because they matter so much in his community and in every rural community the length and breadth of this country are the focus of Carrowreagh Childhood.

“I think the so-called ‘ordinary’ people, the people around me when I was a child, deserve to be remembered as the VIPs. I see the book as a tribute to those people, some now dead, many still alive.