Ghost Upon Your Path

An exploration of Irish identity.

Ever since he first visited Ireland with his family twenty years ago, John McCarthy has felt a strong affinity with its people and landscape. Yet in spite of his Irish name, he has never thought of himself as remotely Irish.

Two decades later much about that country has changed. Aware that the Ireland that first attracted him - a place of breath-taking beauty and a culture steeped in its love of language, music and humour - is only a part of the picture, McCarthy sets up home in a wild and isolated corner of County Kerry where his ancestors were living a thousand years before. From here he examines what it means to be Irish from the viewpoint of a small rural community and unravels his own curious sense of belonging to a place he has never before lived in.

Looking back on Ireland's turbulent past, which continues to colour the country today, he realises that this past nurtured his own family roots too. These roots, he discovers, are still alive and thriving, with a stream of distant cousins receiving him as one of their own. McCarthy charts his reactions to this impermanent homeland, often finding his thoughts turning in on himself as he tackles some of the ghosts in his own life, particularly the death of his mother during his period of captivity in the Lebanon.

'A Ghost Upon Your Path' presents an unsentimentalised picture of Irish people and the issues confronting their country in the twenty-first century. This is a book about change and continuity, betrayal and loss, identity and displacement. Above all, it is about commitment to community and a tribute to the strength and character of the ordinary people McCarthy meets.