“I stood in the shop unable to walk out until slowly it came back to me that I was in Dublin. That was when I heard the accent of the woman asking me was anything wrong. But still I wasn’t sure. I was confused. So I stepped out, ready to make another sacrifice. That’s how bad I was. I thought they had come to shoot me. But somehow I knew it was all right. The Brits just became the ordinary people of Dublin walking about doing their business. Then I knew I was finished. It was all over. But it was all right somehow. I started walking among them. By the time I reached the Shakespeare Bar in Parnell Street I must have travelled through my whole life.

“‘I know that I’m not going home,’ I told the guy.

“He said I should take it easy, think about it a while longer. But I was adamant. So he said, OK.

“‘I know that I’m not going home,’ I told him. ‘So I want my family down.’

“Well he looked at me and he said nothing. He knew. So I organized bum passports. We arranged for flights to be booked in a new name they gave my wife and son and me. They had a duty to me. It was in their self-interest to protect their activists. So about a month later I’m standing at Dublin Airport with my wife and son. The De Largey family fly to Athens. De Largey, I liked the name. And we were happy. But at odd moments I was disturbed by the fact that this was not a normal holiday. It came down to that precisely – what was normal and what was not.

“And don’t ask me what normal was or what normal is. I didn’t want to go to the States. I didn’t want to be sitting around gurning in some pub in Manhattan. We could have gone anywhere within reason, but we decided to live in Ireland. She wanted it and so did I. You see, I had been fighting for that. That I might live in Ireland. I knew where, too. In Mayo. Because when I took the name De Largey I began to read up on my roots. Who the fuck were the De Largeys? I wondered. They were a tribe that had been driven out of Mayo by the Cromwellians and taken by boat right round Ulster and forcibly settled in the Glens of Antrim.

“So why shouldn’t a De Largey return to Mayo? It was only right. I was coming home.