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Sometimes you’ve got to get away for a break or you’ll go crazy. In London after a while you feel like your head is going to explode with the pace of life and you’ve just got to head for the hills screaming. Luckily we have some hills we can head for every now and then and this May we were heading (not exactly screaming) for Fintra near Killybegs in Donegal courtesy of Valerie Morton our long time benefactor who owns Cloghy cottages, two great little cottages perched on the side of a hill overlooking Donegal Bay. We are doing so many of these trips now that our chances of getting away are pretty good these days anytime of the year. For our clients though it’s a different story. For some they have never had a holiday either back home in Ireland or anywhere else, something most of us take for granted and see as our right.

Many have worked for years and some had saved up big sums of money in the past but had no holiday entitlement as they were on the lump and off the cards. After years of sending money home, hard luck and no work made it impossible after a while and the shame factor kicked in, unable to fulfil the bread-winner duties some just dropped out of sight. Others used the big money to come home in style with flash clothes and cars (hired, borrowed) and put a pile of money behind the bar in the local pub. One of Aisling’s first clients did this until there was no more work and no more money to be had and so he didn’t make it back again for years. He wouldn’t have gone back at all but for persuasion from Aisling and even then he was racked with pain and fear about the poor reception he’d get coming back ‘with the tail between the legs’. Of course it wasn’t like that. His mother was glad and relieved to see him turning up unannounced. His mates down the pub were relieved also that they didn’t have to put up with him flashing money around and ‘behaving like a prick’. He was enormously relieved himself that all that big man behaviour was unnecessary. This is part of the shame/pride syndrome that has kept so many emigrants from going back home.

Seamus died last month when we were in Donegal alone in his room in Arlington House. For years we have been trying to bring him back home and a few years ago he relented and came with us to Clare but wouldn’t come with us across the Shannon to his native Kerry. Recently, as his health was deteriorating he hid himself away in his room, never going out, even to the bookies or the off-license (his friends did his shopping and betting for him). Anytime John, Charlie or me called in to see Seamus he would look out through the crack in the door and say he was fine and he had no intention of going home with us or anyone else: ‘It may be alright for these other guys to go back with nothing, but I would need at least £2,000’. Effectively he was saying he would never make it back as he was unlikely to get a big enough win to make it happen and even if he did he was probably too far gone. Lately though, there had been a change in Seamus and he was talking about going back for good, although he still wouldn’t take any help from Aisling. Then one time when John made his regular knock on Seamus’ room door things had changed again. He had been in touch with his sister in the family home and they were delighted to hear from him and happy to have him back for a holiday. But Seamus put a negative twist on this news too, as far as he was concerned ‘for a holiday’ meant they didn’t want him back for good and he retreated again once more into his cocoon. The next we heard he had fallen in his room and had later died in hospital. We contacted his family and they were devastated – after all those years of silence he had been in touch only in the last few weeks and now they had to bring his body home.

James was full of regrets that he had not gone home years earlier. He was with us in Wicklow in March when we started trying to trace his family. While we were there we managed to get a lead on his sister who had settled in Sligo years earlier. We had written to the address we were given and we had managed to contact the landlady of a local pub who had dropped a note into the house but had heard nothing back. We decided to take him with us to Donegal and try to make some contact in Sligo with his sister while we were there. When James’s keyworker from his hostel dropped him at the office on the evening we were heading off from London James looked much the worse for wear since we had last seen him only as couple of months earlier. He came in to the office like he had just stepped ashore from a very rough sea crossing looking disorientated and dizzy. The keyworker said that there had been changes in his medication which may explain this and he dropped off a bag of beer cans for James to use on holiday. The cans had the usual blue label which is the scourge of street drinkers everywhere.

When we got back from Wicklow last time, James had been weaned off the heavy stuff and was happy having a few pints of Guinness in the pub and we asked the staff at the hostel to keep him off the high alcohol cans. Now he obviously had that drunken wooziness typically associated with regular super strength drinkers and would take some time to come out of his stupor. This is annoying for us and not excusable as the landlord of the hostel had led a campaign to highlight the dangers of these super strength drinks only three years ago and asked for our help on the campaign. It turns out that while they feel the government should intervene legally against the brewers they were not prepared to ban the products from their hostels. We won’t use the stuff and have a policy of weaning clients off the supers as a harm reduction exercise and have since become great promoters of Guinness.

As it was it took a bit longer than usual for James to resurface, he was disorientated all the way to Donegal and even for some time while we were there. We eventually got him into a more alert state but he never fully came back to his more rational self and we wondered what kind of reunion he would have if we found his sister. As it was he kept repeating the same refrain throughout our time in Donegal, ‘I should have gone home with that Yorkshire feller’. The ‘Yorkshire feller’ it seems was a brother-in-law (different to the one we were now tracing) who had worked with James and who came back to Ireland more than 20 years earlier. From what we could tell the brother-in-law left James to face the police for something he had done and James lost a good job and had been homeless pretty much since that time.

Alcohol and its consequences was the theme of the week in Donegal. Two of the men were off the drink and three were on it to varying degrees. The two off it were Pat and Sean who were both graduates of the Kairos community rehab project in Camberwell, who we have a long and very good relationship with. Kairos, in our experience has a very good record of successful rehabilitation with our client group, ie long-term, heavy drinking Irish emigrants. The programme is pretty much like most alcohol projects but the atmosphere and the ethos seems to engender a positive will to succeed in hard core street drinkers. Pat had a relapse recently and was feeling quite vulnerable and we felt that a trip to Ireland would do him good. Sean had been alcohol free for a couple of years and needed a break away from his usual environment which is fraught with difficulties and memories of the places he used to drink and the people he drank with.

The others with us were James, Johnny and Des. Johnny was a long-time drinker who John had been working with for months preparing for this trip. He had managed to cut down his alcohol intake dramatically and you could see the positive effects of this from his complextion, if nothing else, which had cleared up amazingly from the bright red pockmarked state it had been only a year ago, to the clear fresh look he had now. Des was drinking steadily and it was seriously affecting his mobility in a way characterised by what is known in the business as a ‘speed wobble’ which is like when you are walking down a hill and lose your balance except that this happens on the flat as well. It’s a bit like hurtling forward using your momentum to keep you going, to halt your movement you have to go into reverse and this can be like watching one of those round bottomed toys they used to have years ago or subutteo figures wobbling back and forth. This is caused by muscle atrophy and at an advanced stage is pretty much irreversible.

Johnny was planning to visit his sisters in Donegal and we rang before the trip to say he was on his way. We called again and arranged to take James up on Sunday for lunch. We had told them we would arrive around one o’ clock and they were waiting at the door as we arrived on the hour. The two sisters drove Johnny back to Fintra later that evening and we met them outside the cottages virtually hyperventilating after the steep drive up. Johnny was in great form feeling like he had climbed a mountain. He kept up a constant monologue about the gossip from home and anything else that came into his mind. That evening we went out to Slieve League, the highest cliffs in Europe and always an exhilarating drive. It is still a wonderful view from up there but they have tarmaced and widened the road since we were last there which takes away the death-defying exhilaration of the hairpin bends and sky drives but it is probably a lot safer and they seem to get more visitors. We passed by the Rusty Mackerel on the way down from the cliffs and stopped to listen to some musicians playing outside and the lads had a couple of drinks. We went back there another evening and the pub was hopping with about 30 musicians playing in a session.

On the next day we drove to Sligo to pick up the threads of James’s lost family. We picked up a couple of hitchhikers on different days, one was a long distance man heading for Sligo who we picked up outside Derry and who decided he was going to Killybegs when he heard we were headed that way. We dropped him off by the Sligo bus stop in Donegal town, the other one we picked up at Bundoran and was also going to Sligo town. On the way at Cliffony John spotted a sign for Creevykeel, an ancient burial site and so we had to stop to have a look. Our hitchhiker was either not interested in his Celtic heritage or was in a hurry to get to Sligo and decided he’d stay on the roadside and try his luck thumbing. Creevykeel is 3 – 4,000 years old and is in remarkably good condition: you can make out the passage into the tomb, the separate chambers inside, even how the ceiling was vaulted and an ingot for smelting bronze. As we were leaving we found our hitcher still thumbing and he jumped in with us once again. On the way passing through Grange, Johnny suddenly said, ‘Grange? My sister lives here, she has a tile factory’. Just as he said this we were passing by a tile factory. ‘Would it be this one Johnny?’ It was and we drove into the car park and asked one of the office workers passing by who brought out a young lady who turned out to be Johnny’s niece who he had never met. She took us over to the house across the road which was a state of the art modern building with (naturally) great tiling and many windows. Johnny’s sister hadn’t seen him in 20-odd years and we left them hugging on the doorstep and went in search of James’s family feeling that it was unlikely to be so remarkably easy.

The address we had was in Strandhill, on the coast tucked away on a housing estate. We parked up the minibus around the corner, not wanting to let James know where we were going yet, in case no-one was home. The first impressions weren’t good, there was a car in the drive but there was mail piled up behind the door and the curtains and windows looked unloved. There was no answer and there were conflicting stories from the neighbours, an old couple confirmed it was the right house by their names and said that they were there but came and went at irregular times. The brother in law was a lorry driver and the sister was often away. Across the road another neighbour said that there was someone living there at present so they must have gone out to work or shopping. We tried the local pubs and a man at the bar in the nearest one said that they had gone back to live in England and he thought the house was let out. The pub we had contacted before we set off, which was supposed to be their local hadn’t seen them in months. We left notes in the door and at the neighbours giving our contact details and saying that we would be passing through on our way to Dublin on Friday. Throughout all this James seemed pretty oblivious but on the way back to Donegal he showed that he had been following developments by asking if we thought he would ever find his sister and then repeating his refrain: ‘I should have come back with that Yorkshire feller.’

By the time we arrived back at Grange, Johnny was waiting for us surrounded by his newly found family and they waved him off from the doorstep of the tile mansion. Johnny was feeling pretty pleased with himself having been in contact with all three sisters and on the way home he and Des disappeared into the off licence and came out laden down with booze. That night they were both pretty well sozzled. The next day we took Des out to visit his aunt in Tyrone. While Des was being stuffed with tea and cake we decide to check out more of our Celtic heritage and drove by Lough Erne taking the lower lough road which goes onto Boa Island on the lough which is connected by bridges at either end. In the middle of the Island is Caldragh graveyard which has two famous residents. The bigger of the two stone figures is a Janus statue with a face carved on both front and back, which is about 1.5 metres high, the other is smaller, less than a metre and was found on nearby Lusty Island and is known as Lusty Man. He was brought to Caldragh possibly for company and because of the similarities between the figures as they both have the exact same strange physiognomy. They also both have crossed arms and, possibly crossed legs/feet. Because they were found in old Christian graveyards it is thought that they must have Christian origins but they look a lot older and nothing like any other Christian artefacts I have ever seen. They could also be fertility symbols like the Sheila-na-gigs found around Lough Erne. These were Pagan figures often appropriated by the Christians and placed on their churches to give them a connection with paganism.

Looking at the figures something struck me very strongly. These little fellows were exactly like our modern day depictions of aliens. They have the same broad high forehead, huge almond shaped eyes, straight nose, thin mouth, long pointed chin and are also completely hairless. The images of aliens that we have today, of ET etc, are taken from people's claims of actual encounters and whether you take them seriously or not, they have been universally described and drawn down the years like Janus and Lusty Man. John and the lads could see the similarities too so it wasn’t just me. I pointed it out to some American tourists though who gave me very strange looks and started edging away towards the car park. We try to look out for historical sites to visit on our trips whenever we can and Sligo is a great county for Celtic grave sites including Carrowkeel which we visited one of the days. There are 14 passage graves on the site, some of them in perfect condition including a very large one which was uncovered from under a huge mound of stones and must have been the grave of a very important person. We were given a guided tour and learnt a lot, although our guide seemed less than impressed with tales of alien sculptures. No romance these academics.

Des had kept himself pretty sober for his home visit but his stiff legs and shaky walk were still very noticeable and you could see the concern on his uncle, aunt and cousin’s faces as they watched him get back into the van. On another day we visited Derry as we usually do on these trips to Donegal, walking the walls looking down over the Bogside. We had lunch in a pub by the walls and Des and Johnny settled in for a session, while the rest of us went out to see the murals and whatever other sights we could find around about. The murals of the Bogside are like a gallery with gable ends for canvases. The power of them is undiminished by the peace process, indeed they stand as a potent symbol of the communities’ hope for peace. They must have been astonishing to witness the morning after their creation, like wandering into a wheat field at dawn to see a newly completed crop circle of great complexity. Sorry, I’m getting a bit obsessed by this alien stuff.

Back at the pub, inevitably the boys had only just ordered new pints, while their other ones were less than half finished, also Johnny was on brandies. Waiting for the lads to finish I was introduced to one of the original Bogside muralists. I was speechless: like they say you should never meet your heroes. Later I could think of loads of things I wanted to ask him. It reminded me of the time I met Van Morrison on the street in London. I said hello and he said hello and waited for me to continue. I said I had a lot of his albums and he asked which ones. I couldn’t think of any and a pretty embarrassing silence followed before he walked off. Back at the flat I got out my half dozen or so albums by him feeling a bit of a fool. I’ve hardly played any of them since.

Now that Johnny had completed his mission to visit the sisters it seemed he felt he could revert back to his old heavy drinking ways and he was loading up with drinks at the off-license for the evenings and when we stopped at pubs or to visit places he was forever buying brandies to go with his pints of Guinness at the bar. His skin was starting to flare up again and he was getting very argumentative. This was the flip side to the shame and pride dichotomy. Now that he had seen the family fairly sober, leaving a good impression he could reward himself with more drink and the anger was the shame still there poking through. The sister in Sligo must have thought she was doing the right thing by giving him a bundle of money but it only validated his excess. Drinking brandy in this context was like the returning emigrant putting on a big show of wealth and impressing no-one. Des was keeping his distance from Johnny now and was cutting down on his own drinking. Pat and Sean were only more determined to stay sober. As for James, well James was still not fully with us.

On the way to Dublin at the end of the week we went back to Strandhill to see if there was any sign of James’s sister and family, they had two grown up daughters, but to no avail. The neighbours had seen nothing of them. We booked into the North Star hotel on Amiens Street and got an early alarm call to be in good time for the ferry. That evening we took James on a tour of his old haunts around O’Connell Street. His local was the Mooney’s pub on Parnell Street which was there but boarded up. We had a couple of last pints of Guinness in a pub next to the Gresham hotel and went back to our hotel. The bar was jumping at the North Star with a one man band accompanying a totally undernourished Dublin Elvis look-not-much-alike. Johnny was sitting up at the bar knocking back brandies, saying he was quite happy by himself thank you.

On the boat in the morning we got in the queue for breakfast leaving Des and Johnny in the bar looking for a cure. As we were making our way around the servery, queuing up for the full Irish I looked back amazed to see James knocking back a full pint of Guinness, putting the empty glass back down on his tray and licking his lips. I couldn’t believe my eyes, were they serving pints for breakfast on the boat these days? Apparently Johnny had sneaked up from the bar and handed James the pint as he queued for his breakfast. Shame likes company.