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HEAVEN ON EARTH
by Patrick Donegall
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This delightful memoir almost writes its own review. The author declares that ‘this book is devoted to the world of the horse and its place in the South East of Ireland’, but it is so much more than that; it is a eulogy for a way of life that has almost completely disappeared, something that he describes as possibly ‘the last hoorah of the [Protestant] ascendancy, but what a way to go!’
The title was borrowed from Patrick Donegall’s late sister, Chich, who summed up her experience of being raised in Dunbrody Park in Wexford in the 1950s and 1960s as ‘Heaven on Earth’, a wonderful stage for ‘those of a sporting inclination’.
‘It was then’, he recalls,’ and to a lesser extent now, a sporting paradise: the best of horses, the best of fishing, the best of rough, particularly snipe, shooting, and the best of craic’.
‘This book is primarily about the thrills and spills of growing up in the bottom right-hand corner of the Emerald Isle … about the characters who made it what it was and the scrapes they got into. It may seem unlikely, but everything in this book is based on fact [with] some embellishment maybe’.
The author manages to evoke that ‘paradise lost’ with charm and humour and concludes by declaring that the people of Wexford and its neighbouring counties have good reason to face the future with a sense of optimism, if the temptations of what he describes as ‘Rip-Off Ireland’ and ‘Cute Hoorism’ can be kept at bay.
Peter Williams
Nine Elms Books
www.nineelmsbooks.co.uk |
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