The Fireside Chronicles | Tales from an Irish Hearth with Pat Greene: Chapter 1

🪵 We are thrilled to premiere The Fireside Chronicles: Tales from an Irish Hearth. Over the coming months, we are charting a chronological journey through the life, lore, and memories of one of Brooklyn’s finest Irish storytellers, Pat Greene.

In this debut chapter, Pat sits down by the fire with host Tim Grant to paint a beautiful picture of growing up in East Limerick, the magical power of the written letter, and how the simple traditions of rural Ireland shaped him into the storyteller he is today.

Whether you're looking to reconnect with your Irish heritage, love traditional folklore, or just want to slow down with a cup of tea and a good story, this episode is for you.

🔔 Don't forget to subscribe to The Irish Snug Podcast for more chronicles, music, and stories!

⏱️ EPISODE TIMESTAMPS
• 00:00:02 Introduction to the Fireside ChroniclesTim welcomes Brooklyn storyteller Pat Greene to the premiere of a brand-new chronological series exploring Irish life, memory, and lore.
• 00:01:22 Childhood in East Limerick Pat describes growing up in Kilteely, East Limerick, surrounded by legendary storytellers, and shares a humorous tale about peeping through a staircase peephole to hear them.
• 00:04:44 The Turning Point: "Crossing the Line" How an assignment from his schoolteacher, Mrs. Rice, unlocked Pat's natural storytelling gift on paper and moved his entire classroom to tears.
• 00:10:42 Discovering the Joy of Reading A childhood sibling dispute leads Pat to discover Walter Mackin's classic book Quench the Moon, sparking a lifelong love for literature and rural Irish history.
• 00:13:39 The Ireland's Own Connection & Transatlantic Pen Pals Tim and Pat reminisce about the famous pen pal section of Ireland's Own magazine. Tim shares a personal 1982 clipping submitted by his grandmother.
• 00:17:05 The Art of the Handwritten Letter Pat reflects on writing massive, heartfelt letters to his first pen pal in Santa Barbara, California, and the vulnerability required to truly express oneself.
• 00:23:26 A Box of WWII Letters & Irish Ancestry Tim shares a fascinating story from his days as a Bronx firefighter about uncovering a hidden box of World War II pen pal letters and returning them using Ancestry.
• 00:27:03 The Apprentice Barman in Thurles Leaving school at 14, Pat lands an apprenticeship at a hotel in Thurles thanks to Father John Sweeney, bringing the local characters of Kili to a wider audience.
• 00:31:00 How Fictional Characters Come Alive Pat explains his unique creative process—molding several real-life personalities from his youth into beloved, kind-hearted fictional characters.
• 00:35:32 What is a Seanchaí ? A deep dive into the historical, wandering Irish storytellers who traveled from home to home, carrying the spirit of communities on their backs.
• 00:40:09 The Poet in the Rain at Lough Gur Pat recounts a mesmerizing night near Lough Gur observing a mysterious poet recite a 30-verse poem in the pouring rain, cementing his philosophy on emotional writing.
• 00:43:46 Poetry, vulnerability, and Jerry Divine A nod to powerful Irish poets, including friend Ger Divine (author of The Hurly Maker), and why artists must let go of control to create true connection.
• 00:46:03 Emigration Advice: Keep Your Accent, Slow Down Pat shares his wisdom for young Irish emigrants traveling abroad, reflecting on his own transitions to London and New York.
• 00:49:58 The Rhythm of the Accordion & Plucking Geese Pat fondly remembers hearing his father and Uncle Frank play the button accordion, and the social importance of visiting lonely farms as a youth.
• 00:54:00 Winning the "Billion Dollar" Green Card Pat previews his next chapter, detailing his journey to London, emigrating to America, and literally kissing the ground after winning the Morrison Visa.

🔗 LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED
• Explore Irish Family History: http://Ancestry.com
• Discover Traditional Irish Stories: https://www.irelandsown.ie/

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#FiresideChronicles #IrishStorytelling #IrishHistory #Limerick #BrooklynIrish

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to the Irish Snug Podcast. Okay, everyone. So welcome back to a brand new space here inside the Irish Snug. This is the premiere of the Fireside Chronicles Tales from an Irish Hearth. Over the coming months, we are charting a chronological journey through the life, lore, and memory of one of Brooklyn's finest Irish storytellers. Joining us from the fire for chapter one is Pat Green. Pat, welcome to The Snug.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Thank you, Tim. I'm delighted to be here. A pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

I'm so happy to have you. It's it's a pleasure to have you on the show. This will be uh a new uh uh added edition to the Irish Snug, where we will have periodic episodes with yourself, and I think it's gonna be great.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

That means you're going to invite me back.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

That's right. You're gonna be invited back. We we wanna we want to make this a regular show.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

My readers, they will be happy to hear that. Great, they've always been asking me to do this.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Yeah, and it's another way to get your your stories out there. And I hope other people will want to do the same too, because that's what this podcast is all about, is to really kind of get get some storytelling in there. And uh, you know, I think it's great. Now, would would you like to uh paint a picture for us of uh rural Ireland, Limerick, where you grew up? Where do you want to begin? Where would you like to do it?

SPEAKER_00 1:30

I want to begin at my childhood. You know, it all started back there for me. My writing, my storytelling, you know, it all started back there in um in Kilteley, Ballandock Kilteeley, which is in East Limerick, out near the borders of Tipperary, you know. And um there, I grew up with a mother who was a great storyteller, and my uncle Frank across the road, who lived right directly across the road from us, and he was another great storyteller. And then my uncle Jackie Wine, who was my mother's brother, another great storyteller. So I had to be a storyteller, you know, and every night by the fireside, there was always stories in our house. Always, you know. I mean, we were poor, but we had stories, and once you have stories, you're rich, you know. So that was it was great. I used to I used to hide out. There was a certain time we had to go to bed every night, you know, things like that. But I used to hide, it was a covered staircase in our house, and I would hide up on the stairs every night, and there was a little peephole there, right? And I would peep down to this peephole, and many times I got a sty in my eye over this peepole. Eventually, my mother would come up and she would put me to bed. She knew I was there every night. I thought I was hiding, but my mother knew I was there every night. She would come up and put me to bed the whole up. But eventually I got my chance to come down when I was maybe five or six years old to come down and tell some stories too. Now, funny enough, I didn't realise it back then. It was years later. Looking back, I realized I never sat down to tell a story. I always told my story standing up, you know, and I used my hands a lot. I would go over if the story was a sad story. I would go over and touch somebody, you know, whoever was there. And if I saw somebody was really sad, I would go over and I would touch him in the face. I would do things like that, touch you on the shoulder, touch you in the face, and I would walk around a little circle. The circle was small. We lived in a small house, so the circle was small. But sometimes some of the neighbors would spill in around the kitchen and I would do my story time for them and all that. But back then, my biggest thing that I wanted to be was a hurler, like Mick Mackey. Mick Mackey was the legend of Limerick when it came to hurling, right? So every chance I got, I had a hurley in my hand and a ball, and all I wanted to do was to be like Mick Mackey. Be better than him, actually. I wanted, which didn't work out. I know. But uh, I would go into the Murphys. The Murphy's were our neighbors. They lived in a passage, a passage. We call them a passage. It's an avenue, you know, in the lawn. They lived in there. We would, I would go in there, play hurling inside here. They were great storytellers too. They were fantastic storytellers. And every night, maybe we would sit around the kitchen table and we'd all tell stories to one another. A lot of those ghost stories, we'd be so afraid, we'd be so afraid coming out the passage that the Murphys used to have to come with us because we were that scared coming out, you know, after all these stories. So it went along telling the stories, playing the hurling, and that's all I wanted to do at that time in my life. I wanted to be a hurdler and everything. But then I was maybe nine or ten years old. And my teacher in school, Mrs. Rice, she went to the blackboard on a Friday afternoon and she wrote up there Crossing the Line. And she says, I want all of you to go home this evening or this weekend and write a story with the title Crossing the Line. Now, at that time, I hadn't even read a book. If it wasn't a school book and I was forced to read it, I had never, I wasn't into reading, I wasn't into any of that. I never did my homework. I would get slapped every Monday morning for it. Mrs. Rice never slapped too hard anyway. You know, she it never hurt. Her heart wasn't in it, you know. But um, she wasn't like the the nuns and the and the brothers, you know. But um, but then but something struck me that day. Something was weird. I was I was trapsing behind my brothers on the way home, a couple of friends there as well, and I was way behind them, coming down along the coming down along the hill road. And I couldn't figure out what was going on with me, but I knew I wanted to write a story, and I don't know where it came out of, you know. No, I was telling stories, but I never really thought about the writing thing. But telling the stories I loved it doing. But writing the stories was a whole different thing. I got home and instead of throwing my my bag, my school bag, into the hole underneath the stairs, I took it upstairs with me and I opened up my copybook, right? I sat there for a long time thinking about this crossing the line. What's crossing the line? What is it? Right? So I eventually put my head down and I started writing, right? I'm supposed to write two pages, I wrote ten, right? And I read it over and over again that entire weekend, and I loved it. I showed it to my mother, my mother liked it, and everything the whole so off I go into school, I'm as proud as a peacock walking into school that morning, right? I go in and I we Mrs. Rice said to us, leave your leave your assignment, leave it on the desk, and I will, during the week, I will look at them all and I will give a prize, a first prize, which was two copy books. They were glossy copy books, right? With glass, sorry, they were glass, they were just two copy books with glossy covers of farm animals, right? And she showed us these books and they were beautiful. I'd never seen anything like it before because everything was bland and you know, back then, and you know, so I'd never seen a copy book like this. So I didn't really think I was going to win the win the prize. I never thought. I thought there were two other people in my class who were the two smartest students in my class. I thought they were going to win it, right? One of them, at least. So the morning after, I go, I come in. That night, of course, I got no sleep. I got no sleep thinking about this story. I don't know, maybe, you know, I was so excited. I just I didn't care about winning. I just wanted her to like it, you know. So I go in the morning after, and she's sitting there, and she calls me over to her desk as all the other students were getting into their desks and the hall. And she called me over and she said, Pat, she she took me by the two hands. She had never done this before. And it was very weird for me to be taken by the two hands like that by my teacher, right? She was almost cradling my hands. And she says to me, Pat, did you write this story? I said, Yes, miss. She said, Are you sure you wrote this on your own? I said, Yes, miss, I wrote it on my own, yeah. And um and then she said, Wait a minute here, right? So she stood up and she says, Everybody, stay quiet. Cunis. Cunis is quiet. She said, I want to read a story for you, right? And she took me by the hand. Now at this stage, all the students are looking up at me. I said, What the hell is going on here? And I'm looking down at him. I'm very I'm probably as red as a beetroot. I'm all embarrassed about this now. I didn't think I was going to be standing in front of my classmates and everything like this. So there I was, and I'm I'm standing, and she the teacher was holding me by the hand. I mean, I here's a guy, you know, that never did any homework or anything. I'm no teacher's pet or nothing, but she's holding my hand. So then she starts reading. Right? And about halfway through my story, I said I looked down and all my friends, all my they're all there crying. Everyone is crying. At this stage, I wanted to cry myself, you know, and because I'm not uh, but at that, at that point, I had cried myself the whole weekend. Every time I read the story over the weekend, there was big blobs of tears falling down on the pages. I I probably gave the teacher those that same, you know, I there was no correcting back then because everything was written by hand. You know, it's not like today where you have the computer and you can, you know, erase and go back over it again. Then I looked up and I saw Mrs. Rice and she's crying. Right? I said, geez, man, this is crazy. You know, everyone is crying. But it was a powerful feeling, absolutely powerful. And it and um I won first prize. She gave it to me right there. She didn't even wait till Friday. I got first prize right there, right? And um I come home that evening and I have my two books with me, and my two copy books, and I can't stop looking at them. And I'm as proud as a I'm as proud as anything. This is the proudest moment now in my life so far, right? This, I mean, it was great to get, I used to always get praise at home for telling my stories by my mother and Jackie and everyone else, like, you know. But this was something very different, you know? And um, but I still hadn't read a book on my own, without it being a school book. There was still no love for the reading there, even though my mother was an avid reader, my mother read everything. Everything. Anything she got her hands on, she read it. My oldest brother, you never saw him without having at least two books, his face stuck in two books. And then my brother that was older than me, he was the same way. There were seven boys in the family. I'm the middle. Three younger brothers, three older brothers, and me. It was probably maybe that summer I had an argument with my oldest brother, Ned, the genius, right? Now he never really argued with anyone. All he wanted to do was read. He wasn't, but me either. I wasn't, I won't, we weren't really that kind of a family that we used to. I mean, every now and again we'd draw a swipe, but we'd never really hurt each other. But that day, I don't remember, I don't even remember what he said to me. But I was mad. And I picked up my father's hobnailed boot, you know, the one with the horseshoe on the on the heel of it? I picked it up and I threw it at him and I hit him right in the face with him here. There was silence. Everyone said, Oh my god, no, what's he have to do now? Is he up to uh do we have to go to the hospital to go to the doctor or something? You know, but anyway, my brother started crying, and I was sent straight up to my room and do not come down for the rest of the night. That's it. This is a nice summer's evening now, probably six o'clock in the evening, you know. And in Ireland, it stays bright until 11 o'clock at night in the summertime, not like here in New York where everything goes dark at 8:30, you know. So um I'm upstairs, I'm sulking, upstairs above there, and um, now in the room that I was sleeping in, I slept in the same bed as Phil. And then there was another bed over at the other end of the room, and that's where Ned slept. So there was three was in the same room, right? And um, and I'm up there sulking, and I can hear all my brothers now, including the bald Ned. They're all downstairs playing down there. They're all down there, actually playing cowboys and Indians. You know, that was a big thing for us. I'm looking across from the bed that I'm laying on, and I'm looking across the room, and I see a stack of books. There was always these stacks of books by his bed anymore, but there's this the next to the stack of books was this one book on its own on the floor. And the title was turned towards me, right? And the title of the book was Quench the Moon, right? As I later found out, it was written by a great Connemara man, Walter Macken. Totally recommended. I totally recommend all of Walter Mackin's books. If you ever want to know anything about Ireland, about the old Ireland in the 50s, the 40s, the 60s, Walter Macken was the man to read. And uh he was for rural Ireland. He was James Joyce was for Dublin, Walter Mackin was for rural Ireland. But anyway, I said, how can you quench the moon? I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, how the hell can you quench the moon? So after a while, I got up out of debate and curiosity got me, and I went over, picked up the book, brought it back to the bed, and I started reading it. And all night long, I was upstairs, my brother Phil was going crazy. I had a candlelight, and then I was I was reading the book with the candle, and I finished the whole book that night. Then I started reading other books by Walter Mack, and I wanted to get more of them. I started searching, and then I fell in love with reading, the joy of reading. You know, so reading became a very important thing to me then after that. And then it was probably a few years later, maybe about five years old. There's a there's a magazine in Ireland. It's called the Ireland Zone. Have you heard of it?

SPEAKER_01 13:56

I actually have. I've uh when I was young as a kid, they uh my grandparents submitted an article uh with me and my brother and my sister. I I don't really remember what the article was about, but I I do have it. I just haven't looked at it in so many years. I should pull it out.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

So here in the back of the of Ireland zone, it used to be always in the back page, and always in the second last page, to have a pen pal section in the back of Ireland. I remember pen pals from all over the world. I mean, they there would be basically maybe Australia, England, Scotland, Wales, you know, there would be um even all over Ireland as well, you know.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

I have to ask my mother, but I think I might have been a pen pal to somebody from the Ireland zone years ago.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

And it might that might even be why we were in there. I can't. I'm gonna have to I'm gonna pull it out. So, Pat, I did. I just went and looked through the house and I found the the one Ireland zone that I have. This is from 1982. Um, and there's a hold on here. My grandmother submitted it. Uh hold on here.

SPEAKER_00 15:16

1982. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

1982. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 15:22

I was a young man back then.

SPEAKER_01 15:25

Yeah, well, where do you see the picture of me? My grandmother submitted this picture, and I wanted the picture burnt.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

Yeah. How was there a story with it?

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Um, it's in in the back of the magazine. There's a thing called Young Ireland's own, and it says meet the family. Yes. And there it is right there. Oh, wow, yeah, good. Very nice. It says a transatlantic hello. And then it just has uh Tim Grant. I was 14 years old. About where I went to high school, uh, had my brother, my sister's name.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Ah, that's brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

It's it's just a short little thing, but oh god, my mother, my mother still has that picture up in her house, and I said, Oh, get rid of that. No, that's our career was so big back then.

SPEAKER_00 16:17

The island's own came into our two things came into our house every week. Well, every night, we may not have money for a lot of things. A lot of things we were poor, but we always had money for the Irish press, right? Newspaper, all right, and especially the evening press. The evening press came out every evening during the week, you know. And uh we always had money for the island's own every week. It was always cheap, it wasn't expensive, but it was there, and we would have arguments over who was going to read it first in the whole lot, you know. So there was always arguments over it, and um we would weed.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

Yeah, in 1982. In 1982.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

Yeah, so it was it was amazing, and you know, but there was the the the pen pals, and for some reason I decided I wanted to have a pen pal, you know, because you know when you're when you grow up around people, especially in a in a small parish in East Limerick, you know, you don't want them knowing your inner feelings, you don't want to expose your inner feelings to anyone, you know. You want to pretend like you're tough and you're hard and all, and you don't have none of that type of thing, right? So I said, you know what, maybe I can express myself in letters to people who are far away and who I'll never meet. Right? So I'm looking through the pen pads, and I saw this Susan from Santa Barbara in California. She was my first pen pad. Right? I ended up having 12 of them, and I used to write to them every week. Some of them would get two pages. It depends on what they sent back to me. Some of them would get two pages, some of them would get five pages, but this Susan from Santa Barbara, I I have sent, I've sent her probably many, many times. I sent her maybe 50 pages of a letter. I would be trying to cram this letter into an envelope, you know, trying to get it in there and the whole, and she would write back to me. Now, she wasn't like ever going to write 50 pages back to me. I probably didn't need to read 50 pages either, you know, and everything. But she was the only one that ever really put herself into a letter. She really spoke her, spoke her heart, you know, everything was everything was there. And I loved writing to her. But then one day she says to me, you know, when your letters arrive here, it's not they're not just for me. My entire family reads your letters. We read them every night around the supper table. You know, I read them, we all take it, we all take a few pages and we read them, you know, and so your your letters are always, we wait for them all the time, right? Jeez, I said that's amazing. And I'm sitting up on the side of a hill. There's a hill near us. That's where I went, that's where I wrote most of my letters. When you've got six brothers and you're living in a small house, you can't do something like that around him because they're always spying and they're always watching everything. Any letter that would come for me if they were, if they were out there first, and the postman came, they had the letter read before they would give it to me, and then they would be teasing me and everything. Now, Susan used to send me these letters with a pink envelope, right? And my brothers played hell with the pink envelope. No, it was great. Back then in the 1919, early 1970s, and I'm getting letters with a pink envelope. You know, so I was um it was a lot, but at the same time, I was very proud of the fact that I had a friend in Santa Barbara, California, and she was writing, and that her whole entire family were reading my letters in the whole. No, I don't know what they were reading, I don't know what it was. It was all simple stuff and everything, but I still didn't have the writing book for writing stories. That never came to me back then, you know.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

It was um you know you know what though, you just painted this picture of a snapshot in time of stuff that people don't do anymore. Thank you. You know, you really people don't do that anymore, and they don't, they don't they actually should. You know, that it might be a little bit of a way to to just sort of bring back a little bit of uh some sort of humanity in a way, yeah. You know, why not? Why not? Just because you can email somebody doesn't mean a handwritten letter wouldn't mean so much more. Well, I'm just thinking out loud right now, but don't you think that would be an amazing thing if people actually started doing a pen pal just as a paper stuff doing pen pals, yes.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

But the only thing about pen pals is like, you know, back then, you know, I'm saying not saying now that the that we can't be the same today. We can't, because I have I basically never changed throughout my life. Everything has been simple to me all my life. I mean, I live here in New York, and I'm I'm sure a lot of people think, oh, he's got he's over there in that big city. I live like a real simple person here in New York. I've never changed from the way that I grew up back in Kilteeley, in County Limerick, you know. I've never changed from that, you know. And um basically everything has always been very simple to me. My mother used to say when we were young, all you ever need is a cup of tea and a crust of bread and you're and you'll be and a story and you're happy. You know, that was all my mother ever said, you know, and I lived, I lived that way to my life today. I swear to God, meat, fish, expensive restaurants, it doesn't matter a thing to me. I swear to God, I could live on on slices of bread and a cup of tea and a few stories and a few books and things like that. I could live on it for forever and it wouldn't bother me. I have made attempts over the years, Tim. I've made attempts to get some people to write letters to me. Me, you know, and I find that a lot of people today, when they're right when they're right, they're afraid. They're afraid to say things about themselves, private things about themselves. They're afraid to open up and be themselves. Me, I I know right now that when people will look at this video, especially my people that I grew up around at home, they go, just do listen to him. Look at him, look at the way he's talking. That's what they will be doing. And if I wrote some letters to these people and they want to read them, they would go, this guy's off his rocker. He's completely off. But that is what you must do, Tim. When you're a writer, when you know that you have a passion for writing, you have a passion for storytelling, you must never be afraid to open yourself up and expose yourself to everyone. Because when you do that, they will come to you privately. They will never come to you as a part of a group. They will find you out in a private way and they will tell you things that they would never ever tell to anyone else. And I've had that great privilege throughout my life that many people have spoken to me, tell me things that they would never ever tell to anyone else, you know. And and I feel I feel honored that people can open up to me in that way. But that would never have happened unless I stayed, I stayed loyal to the simple way of life. And I'm totally loyal to it.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

You know, and um I want to tell you a quick little uh just a quick side note. This happened probably about 10 years ago. A friend of mine, I was a fireman in the Bronx, but a friend of mine who was a fireman in Queens, they went to a vacant building. Uh there had been a fire in the building, I don't know how long ago, but the the building was vacant. And they were in the attic of that vacant, and they found a box, and in that box were hundreds and hundreds of letters to uh one to one woman. It was the woman who used to live in that house, and she had passed away. Hundreds of letters, and it was during the war, during World War II, she was a pen pal with uh numerous soldiers. Wow, and they would they would write to her. Amazing. And and she kept all those letters. My buddy brought it home, and he knew that I was big into uh I knew I knew a lot with ancestry.com, and I've done a lot with my own Irish ancestry, so I know how to navigate that site. So I took some of the letters, the addresses, and I found the person who wrote the letters. I was able to get in touch with the son of that person.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 24:43

This is all through ancestry.com. I got all those letters to him because these are letters that his father wrote to a pen pal. I met him and sure uh oddly enough, the guy who uh who it was was a fireman in Washington, DC. And I met up with him, I brought the letters down to him in Washington, and uh I gave them to him for him to read because they were his yeah, they were his father's letters to to a pen pal.

SPEAKER_00 25:14

I had a lot of letters, and when we moved over here, we we brought a lot of our stuff back to Ireland, back to my my mother-in-law and father-in-law's house, and we stored it in an outhouse over there. And inside one of the cabinets that we had, didn't I leave a big box of letters there that I had? One day my wife says to me, We were here maybe 10 years. My wife says to me, Um, my sister Carmen, you know what she saw last night? I said, What? She said, My my father was outside in the shed reading the letters that you wrote to me. Oh, Jesus, I said, You gotta be joking. He said, Yeah, he's out there reading all the letters, right? So I said, You know what you do? The next time you go home, make sure you, you know, make sure you get those letters out of there, right? As it happened, there was there was a uh the roof cave down in the in the in the in the shed, and all the rain came and washed all the letters out. And I was so happy to see all the letters being gone. Now no one could read the meeting, you know. But that was what happened to my my pen pan letters. I mean, I really liked, I mean, I would love to have them today, like all of the letters that I that I wrote back along then, you know, not that I wrote the ones that I got, you know, but I I kept writing and writing, and then I stayed going to school until maybe 14. And then I knew school was not for me. I had that was it. It wasn't that I wasn't intelligent or anything, it's just that when you're poor, you know, you can't wait to get out from underneath everybody and just go making your own money and stop working. So I started working for a farmer down the road from us, and I walked there for a while, nearly a year. And then the parish priest, Father John Sweeney, a great friend of mine, he was from Thurles. He used to go to Thurless every now and again to see his family. They had a bakery over there, the whole lot. And uh he would go over to visit them and they would have a meal in the Anor Hotel in Turles. And he asked the manager, would they would they have any openings for a young young boy? He said, I see this kid, he's good, he's a nice kid. I see him, like he should have a good job. You know, can you can you hire him? He said, Cindy Moran, I'll interview him. So he came back and he said to me, This, and I spoke to the manager of the hotel and um over there, the Annor Hotel in Turles. I had never been to Thurtles. Turlus is only 40 miles from us, but I was never there, you know, and uh 40 miles back then was a was a long way, you know. And um, so I was very happy. I went home, taught my mother and everything in the whole lot. And then Father Sweeney came, picked me up, drove me over for the interview, and I got the job. I was an apprentice bartender, barman. The man who was a manager there turned out to be a really good friend of mine as well. You know, Dennis Condon was his name, Pascal. And he was from Kilfinan, which is not that far away from me at home, Tipperary. He was in the Murray. And um, we became really good friends. And then my storytelling came to a different level altogether over there. Every night there was a mess hall down in the in the back of the hotel, and we would all get there was like 20 full-time people walking in the hotel, and there was maybe another 10 or 15 part-time. And none, only one person out of the whole lot of us drank back then. The only one that drank was the head chef, right? The rest of us, all we did was drink pots of tea. So every night in this mess hall, we would be making pots of tea and pouring them one after the next, and I would be telling all these stories about Kilteley. So I made Kilteley, my parish, famous over in Turtles. Everyone knew everyone's name. I would tell them stories about everyone I grew up with, all the people. And and every night it became a thing. Pat, Pat, tell us more about Kilteley, tell us about Kilteley, you know. And um, and so my stories went on from there, and my letters, I continued, I continued writing my pen pal letters, even from there. And I got a lot of pen pals in in Ireland, and they would come to the hotel to meet me. Some of them, they weren't the same when you when you meet them. Many times when you write letters to someone, and when you meet them, they're two different people. You know, that's what I found anywhere, a lot of it. You know, not that I met a lot of my pen pals, but I I definitely met about maybe 12 of them over the years, and they were not the same. They were either too shy or they wouldn't open up. They would they would say things in a letter or write things in a letter that they would never say openly to you. So then I always felt out of place. I'm sitting across the table from someone, and they're being, you know, they're being very cagey about everything they say. And here's me, Mr. Open, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah everything out, you know, the whole. And after a while of doing that, you lose interest. You don't want to, you know. And um, but I had a great time in Thurless. I really enjoyed it. One of the best like times of my life when I was doing, and I I learned a lot about writing when I was in Turlus, you know, and uh I learned a lot from the people that were there, you know. And also there was uh the church was a cathedral, you know, in Thurless. And, you know, I used to go in there a lot. Back then I was a very strong believer in the Catholic faith. And I used to go in there a lot. I found myself walking around the church. I walk all around inside the cathedral every day, maybe for at least a half an hour. I would just keep walking and walking. And whenever I came out of there, I always seemed to want to write a letter. Write a letter to someone. And I would sit down and I would write these big long letters to people and the whole lot, wherever they were, whatever part of the world they were, you know, and um and I always felt very good about it. But still, at that time, at that time, I was never into really writing stories, even though the only story that I had ever written up to that point was the story in school. And I never continued it. I eventually ended up over in London. Now I'm here, you know, 30, 36, 35 years, and I got the the writing bug a few years back. And I love writing these stories, and these stories come to me, you know, like I sit down, I never really know what the story is going to be about. I never know where I'm going to begin, where I'm going to end. And all of a sudden, I stop writing, and there's a story there. And, you know, it I still write the story and I go, wow, geez, I can't believe that that came to me. Where did that come out of? You know, and uh, but it's all the old Ireland, simple Ireland, you know, that I grew up in, and um and I love stories.

SPEAKER_01 32:00

They're all fictional. Stories about about how Ireland was. So you really, it's kind of a you're telling the truth about how Ireland was through through a different uh lens.

SPEAKER_00 32:13

Now, many of my stories are a mixture of many of the people that I knew growing up. I would I would probably put a mixture of different personalities and I would mix them all up. I would use a little a little kind of a mold that would mold them together, you know, and have maybe six or seven personalities in one person. I would pick out some not not without knowing this, you know, realizing that I'm doing this, but what I basically do is I take six or seven personalities that I like, you know, and they could be younger, older, middle-aged, whatever the case may be, and I would put them all into one person, and then I would write a story about that fictional character that I have just created, you know, and the whole, and they come alive. They come alive in my, you know, in my abstract mind as I'm writing, they all come alive. And uh, and it's amazing when they've come alive. I mean, it uh I fall in love with all of these characters. I really like them. I mean, every character that I've written about, all the characters that I've written about, I don't write characters that I don't like. I I could never sit down and write a story about someone who's cruel or unkind to other people. All my characters are very kind people, very kind. And therefore, they mean so much to me. And I leave a lot of my stories unfinished. Unfinished for the reason that I can always come back and I can start up another story later on about their life. I mean, I basically write about moments, moments in their life, you know, and so those moments I can actually pick up wherever I left off. It could be five years' time, it could be, it could be tomorrow morning, I don't know, you know, but I could actually pick up and write as continue what happened to them over the last five years that I haven't been with them, you know. But I always tell my readers, I tell every one of them that when I write my stories, I wait, I wait for a visit. A visit always comes to me from Ireland, from the old Ireland. A visit always comes here in the wind, in the wind. You know, I always imagine someone is sitting, coming to me, they tell me their story, and they ask me, will you write my story? But definitely keeping Ireland alive, the old Ireland alive, is very, very important to me. You know, always has been, and uh, you know, I never forgot where I came from. That's something that I'm very proud of. But you know what? I never look back on my life with animosity. I never look back on my life with any kind of a grudge or any kind of anything against anyone else. When I look back at my life, I feel privileged, very, very privileged that I had that childhood, you know, and I feel very privileged that I had someone, the great friends, you know. I always talk about great friends and great everything, but you know, like my my neighbors, as I said, the Murphys, they were amazing. They were the best, you know. I mean, they'll probably be embarrassed with me talking like this about them on this, you know. They will be listening to this, by the way. But and I'm and I hope they are listening to it, because they were treasures in my childhood. They were brilliant, they were the greatest neighbors you could ever have. And I learned so much from them. They were a little bit older than us, and I learned so much from them, and I looked up to them a lot, you know. Even Mary, she taught me how to dance, you know, and I went along and I became a great dancer. Not an Irish dancer. I was a great driver, great foxtrot, the walls, I did all of that kind of dance, ballroom dancing. I did all of that, you know. And uh, I can do Irish dancing, but not, but I'm not but I'm not really good at it, you know.

SPEAKER_01 35:50

Um so so these the stories that you tell and the stories that you heard your family tell, and you the stories that you heard the Murphys tell, would you consider all those storytellers shanokies?

SPEAKER_00 36:07

In a way, yes, every one of them was shanokies. I mean, like they had great, incredible memories. The only thing, see, shanoky usually came from um in the old days. They were they were um they were ramblers. They never really lived anywhere. They would live, they would live in your house, they would come to your house tonight. They would be the beginning of the night in the storytelling. Now, this was before my time, right? Um, probably maybe the the 30s, 40s, 50s, not so much in the 60s. It was we had our own story, but it was very rare that you ever saw a rambling storyteller coming in, you know, and well no, I know they were there in certain parts of Ireland, but they weren't around our area. Those stories, the Shanikes, you know, they would come. And on the night they would be coming, everyone was expecting them to come. There would be, you know, they would be told, oh, he'll be here tonight. You know, that was this is not as I said in my time. But there would be music, there would be dancing, you know, and stuff like that beforehand. And the storyteller, the shaniky, would always come in quietly, very, very quietly, and he always got the chair by the fireplace. Whoever was sitting in that chair got up, and he got the chair by the fireplace. They always carried a stick with them. They always had it, you know, stick at Uchaleli or whatever, and all walk. They always had it, you know, and he would get a sandwich, he would get a couple of cups of tea, and he would sit there, and he might a lot of them smoke the pipe, you know, and he would sit there and he would watch everyone dancing, singing, and have his own, and then tun us, quietness, stop. And he wouldn't make a big scene out of it. Most of them they would poke the fireplace before they started. They would bring some of the ashes out into the out onto the hurt, and he would just poke away there at the fireplace, and you could and everyone's eyes were on him, you know, and the very minute that he would start talking, it was the most the hairs would stand up on the back of your head. He had that gift, that gift to draw everyone into, you know. And when he started talking, most of the times, and I've I know myself, they didn't have a clue what they were going to say. They would just talk, and two hours later, all the stories were there. Sometimes you would cry, sometimes you they would tell ghost stories, you'd be afraid of your life, you know, terrified out of your life, you have to walk the neighbors home and everything, you know, all that kind of. But they were amazing people, and at the end of the night, they would sleep in that chair there for the night. That was it. That's what they would do. Sleep. Wake up early in the morning, but before, it depended on the house they went. Usually it would be people that had a bigger house, you know what I mean? So that a lot of the neighbors could come into their house, but they would always get a couple of shillings put into their pocket, right? The whole lot, and they would leave there, and then there was another parish, maybe two or three parishes away. And they would spend their day walking there, and then arrive there at night for another session again. It might be four or five years before they would make their way around. They used to travel all over the place, all over Munster, all over Connacht, all over Leinster, every everywhere, up in the north of Ireland. They would travel. Now, a lot of them would just do Munster, they would do more of them would just do Connacht, you know, stuff like that. But um, it would probably take them four or five years to make their way back. And when they would come back, it was like God was walking into the house. It was like God was coming. It was the most amazing thing in the Santa Claus. They were better than Santa Claus. The kids even loved him. The kids were amazing. You should see the kids with their eyes, you know, the way they would look at these storytellers talking. It was just amazing. You know. But they they were a gift. And you know, I remember one time I was down in a place called there's a place near house called Loch Gore. It's a very traditional place, Loch Gore. You know, it's very old, you know, and um there's a lake down there. And back then there was a bar down there called the Red Cellar. And I remember being down there one night at a function for our palace. There was some kind of a social dance or something on there the same night. And when we came out at night into the night, one o'clock in the morning, whatever time it was, um, it was the rain that was falling was unbelievable. And there was this guy, this man, standing on top of a butter box, out in the rain. The rain was just spilling down, right? And he was reciting a poem that was about 30 verses long about a Protestant in the north of Ireland marrying a Catholic girl. And I I was mesmerized by him. I went over by the by the butter box and I stood there, and now everyone was all around us, right? And everyone stood there, no umbrellas, no nothing. The rain was we were all soaked. And this man continued telling, reciting this poetry. He'd be crying, he'd be laughing, you know. He went through every emotion possible during this poem. And he was just, I swear to God, we were just absolutely flabbergasted by this man. I never knew his name, never found out his name from that night. I never ever saw him again. But to me, he was always the greatest poet that I ever heard in my entire life reciting Porter, because what he did that night was just unbelievable, you know. And it was a big, actually, it was a very big part of me and my stories as well. You know, I felt like, you know, you have to open up. He opened up that night. He opened up to all the emotions that were inside him. He opened and he poured them out heavier than the rain. We all felt it. We all felt it. And people were just amazed by it, you know. And I know some people probably remember him back there. I never wanted to know who he was. I never wanted maybe, you know, I just I was just happy that I was there that night and I witnessed him, and he was amazing. And uh, you know, if I if you would hurt him now, because you know, if you would be just absolutely, you know, enthralled by the way he he delivered this poem. You know, I've heard great deliveries of poems, you know. It's not something that I'm very fond of. I won't say that I'm I'm, you know, a lot of people tell me that I'm a poet. They tell me that a lot of my stories are poetry, you know, they tell me a lot of the the short things that I write are poetry, but I don't see myself as a poet, you know, and things like that. I think the whole the whole poetry thing is for people, you know, that um they have a different way of seeing things than me, than me with my writing, writing my stories, you know. And um and but that night, that man, whoever he was, he was a big influence in my life going forward as a writer, a massive influence, you know, because I knew, I mean I knew before that, but if I if I had any doubts, it was cemented that night that I knew exactly what this man was able to do. He was able to move an audience with just words, and he was able to move them. I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm sure I cried the same night, and I'm sure I laughed, you know, because it was so well done.

SPEAKER_01 43:42

Some people just have that absolute gift of doing that. And I don't know, you you probably you've heard of my friend Jerry Devine.

SPEAKER_00 43:49

Jerry Devine, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_01 43:51

Yeah, and he he's he's got a load of great poems, and one of my favorites is The Hurley Maker.

SPEAKER_00 43:56

The Hurley Maker, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:58

I think they even play that at Grope. Crow Park.

SPEAKER_00 44:01

Yeah, yeah. Jury was on your podcast, you know, and uh you know, and he delivered he delivered uh some really good poetry there on that as well. He's a powerful, powerful poet, you know. And he's again, he's not afraid. He's not afraid to express himself. You know, that's a that's a conscious decision that you must make. When you're a writer, when you're an artist in any way, you must get rid of this thing that, oh, if you want to live like um, oh, I'll write this, I'll write this, and I'll do this, and I'll control everything, you're never going to be a really good writer. You're never going to be a really good poet. The only way that you can get people to really like what you do and enjoy what you do is you have to open yourself up completely, you know, and not worry about what people think of you. As I said, I know people at home around my area probably look at some of the things that I write and they go, this guy's off his oracle, you know. But you know what, it doesn't worry me. It doesn't bother me. You know, I will still laugh, you know, and the whole lot, and that's that's the way I am. I tell things the way they are, and I I write the way they are, and um, but I do find that a lot of people come up to me still, you know, um when I'm on my own, and they like to have a conversation with me. Because you know what? When you have a conversation with me, it's open, it's open to anything, you know, and that's the way it is, you know.

SPEAKER_01 45:27

And we're you know what I'd like to do, Pat. Uh what I'd like to do is uh open up to any of the listeners to submit a question to you. Um, they can do it via my website or they could do it via our uh my my Facebook page, Instagram. Um, and based on what what our podcast is uh on any given day, they can uh submit a question to you, and then we'll we can open up the next chapter. Yeah, that would be great. That would be fantastic. And you can answer that question.

SPEAKER_00 46:02

Yeah, I think it's very important too that I actually say this because you know I came here to America. First of all, I went to London and um I had to learn to slow down a little bit in my speech over there. Uh, then I came here to America and it became a whole different level. I really had to slow down the way I was speaking. Because, you know, when you go to like when you go to a different place, it's okay to keep your accent. That's great. But you know what? You have to be very careful about the words you choose. Now, this podcast, I'm hoping I'm reaching out to Americans, I'm reaching out to Irish people, I'm reaching out to people in England, you know, I'm reaching out to people all over the world, basically, you know. And uh and what I'm telling them is I might use words like, you know, it's important for me to say the same things here as Americans say. Like I would, I would say a footpath at home, whereas here I would say the sidewalk or the pavement, you know, whereas we would never say that in Ireland. Maybe they do now, but back then we they wouldn't. So I do I do say a lot of things, you know, that are um very American, you know, in my best Irish accent, you know, in the hall of, and I say it because I want to be understood here. I don't want to say something that, you know, that um people would be going, what did he say? What did he say? So if you have any, all your listeners that are American, some of them may not even be affiliated with Ireland, you know, and if they have any questions about any of the words that I use sometimes, you know, yes, that could be one, some of the questions they could ask, they could ask on the on the podcast, what does this word mean or what does that mean? You know, yes, I'm I'm very proud that I never lost my accent. Very proud. But I'm also very proud that I learned to slow down. And if I was to give any advice to any young Irish boy or girl over there that leave their country to go to a foreign country, remember it's okay to keep your accent and okay to speak, but you must slow down so that the people understand you. And when you do that, you're going to be much more successful. And that's my one big advice to young people in Ireland. When you leave Ireland, if you're going to immigrate, become the place. You know what I mean? But hold on to your accent. It's very important you hold on to your accent. Everyone loves the Irish accent. Everyone. When I'm down in Manhattan and I walk into a deli blown Manhattan, I walk in there and I ask for a cup of coffee or something, people come over to me. You know, all the time, it always happens to me. Oh, I love your accent. The Irish accent is very, very powerful. It's one of the most powerful things we had as an Irish, as someone from Ireland. It's always been great, you know, but you have to learn how to slow down and use it properly and slow down. Crunch your words. You know, great advice. You know, and I I feel like, you know, if if um if anyone, as I said, I know I'm not saying some things here today on this podcast. I know I've said a couple of things, and there's going to be people out there that are going to go, what did he mean by that? What was that? I mean, I even say things, I even write things. I might write something like an old word from my group from my childhood in one of my stories, and people will will get back to me. They'll write to me, say, What did that word mean? You know, but I'm conscious of it. So I can uh I became more conscious of it the longer I went on into my writing. And now when I write something, even if you didn't know the word, you can fit it in with the sentence, it goes along with the sentence, and it makes it easier to know what it what it is, you know.

SPEAKER_01 49:52

So, how would you like to end the uh this this week's podcast?

SPEAKER_00 49:56

There were two things I missed. I missed the accordions, and I missed plucking the geese with my uncle Frank. My father was an accordion player, button button accordion, and my uncle Frank, who lived across the road from us, he was a button accordion. A lot of days, especially during the summer and in the nice weather, they would come out into the prospective yards or respective yards and cobblestone yards, and they would they would play the accordion. And I would be coming home maybe from the village after hurling, playing football, something like that, and we'd be coming down the hill road, and you could hear the accordions coming up against you, you know, and it I would I would I would start dancing, and not dancing, but I would start stepping to the beats of the accordions. I would start moving. And that was why the accordions became a big part of my of my own life, telling stories, telling, telling the or writing the stories, because it became like the rhythm of life for me, the accordion. And that is why the accordion still to this day is my favorite instrument. I I love it, you know. And um and also then there was my uncle Frank, who was a great storyteller, an amazing storyteller, you know. And uh I used to go with him when I was young, small, and uh we would be plucking geese. You go in the springtime, you always pluck the geese, the farmers always pluck their geese to get them ready for the summer so they wouldn't have too many feathers, you know, make it light, you know, so they wouldn't be too warm and overheated, you know. So I would go with him, and we would go into these farms, like they were way in the fields, way in off the main road, you know, and mostly it was always the woman at the house that was there. It could be the mother, it could be the grandmother, or it could be a sister, the farmer's sister. He never got married, she never got married, they lived together, you know, and the whole lot. But she, in a lot of cases, they never went anywhere. The women never went anywhere. It was always the men. The men went to the creamery every morning, right? The farmers, they live like, and they would have a chat with their neighbors, you know, they would go into the local shop inside in the village, get the few things that they needed, the few groceries, whatever they want, the paper, and then they would come back, and the woman was always inside in the farm with the animals, right? So basically, they were lonely people. A lot of them were very lonely people. And me and Frank, we were anything but quite. We were very sociable. So we would go in and we would start telling stories and start doing, you know, and the woman would be so happy to see us coming. So, so happy. It was amazing. You know, they would sit there and make tea for us and give us this and give us that. And when we were leaving, you could literally see some of them had a tear in their eye when we were leaving because they knew they were not going to get stories like that again or talk to someone like that again, you know, for a long time. You know, I mean, many of them, you know, they might have been married to somebody who wasn't a talker. They might have been a brother, the brother might not have been a talker. So they never really got into conversation. They spoke to the animals, basically. And here comes Frank and Pat. You know, oh, and they were delighted to see us coming. And I saw that too as a very important part of storytelling when I was when I was really young. It was amazing. You know, that was one of the best things that, you know, and Frank, I mean, he was just a character. He was an amazing character. He was everything that a storyteller should be, you know.

SPEAKER_01 53:41

Hopefully the storytelling continues and uh we get to sh you get to share a lot of those stories with us right here.

SPEAKER_00 53:49

I would love it. I mean, and like you just said there, that's what you just mentioned there about getting people to ask questions. I mean, you know, it's great. I think that's fantastic. You know, that would be a brilliant idea.

SPEAKER_01 54:00

What what would you like to what what can people expect on the next episode or have you planned that far ahead?

SPEAKER_00 54:06

Yeah, I mean, then it goes along to uh like you know, about about writing the book, and uh it goes along to me growing up here in New York, about coming to the London, coming to New York, you know, what it was like for me coming over to strange places. I walked in the crown in Cricketwood, as I said, which was like an amazing. I mean, I'm hoping also because I have a lot of my friends that actually joined your podcast and they're going to join it, and they live in they live in England, you know, they live in London. And uh and they um they want to hear my stories about the crown in Cricketwood, you know. They want to hear about all my storytelling over there, about my life, how it was like. I mean, I got married in London. I got married through London because we went back to Ireland, and then they want to find out what it was like for me coming over here to New York and adjusting to New York, this new way of life, you know, what I did, the job that we were illegal when we came here, you know. We were you know, and uh we were very lucky. We won the Morrison visa, you know, and uh we were only here a year and we won that. And um that was an incredible achievement. I mean the day uh the day that I got uh the green card up in the American Embassy in Ballsbridge in Dublin, I came out of Ballsbridge that day and I went down and I kissed the ground there. And when I got back, when I got back here to Kennedy Airport, when we got back, I came out of Kennedy Airport and I kissed the ground over from Kennedy Airport. I went down on my knees and I kissed the ground again because I was so great. I won a billion dollars that day when I got that green car. I won a billion dollars. That was my billion dollars right there, you know, and I've always loved being here, being a part of it, you know. And I said I'm a very proud Irishman, but I'm also I have two sons here. I'm very proud of them being American and everything like that, you know, and they're very proud. Both of them are very proud to be American, and they're also very proud to be Irish, and that means a lot. So there's a lot, there's a lot actually to talk about.

SPEAKER_01 56:10

There's definitely a lot to talk about, and we will uh I mean uh over the next couple of days.

SPEAKER_00 56:14

I mean, I will I will like I put up a couple of notes here. I didn't know you look at them because you know I should have, you know, but I'd be sorry.

SPEAKER_01 56:22

This was a this was a first, you know, we were just getting getting the ball rolling here. So I think that's all we have for today, but I really look forward to our next episode. And uh in the meantime, anybody wants to uh submit a question for Pat, please do. You could do it on uh the Irish Snug Podcast uh website or our Facebook page, you could do it on our Instagram page. Um I am going to include a menu item on the website for the fireside chronicles. So that'll be a way to submit questions as well, but I'm gonna work on that this week.

SPEAKER_00 57:02

That sounds great. Great. I've been looking forward to my next my next visit with a cup of tea and across the bread, right?

SPEAKER_01 57:10

Yep. That'll be great, Pat. Uh appreciate you. I really appreciate you coming on the show, and we'll we'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_00 57:16

Thank you, Tim. I really enjoyed it.