Renvyle Revisited an Irish Odyssey

Your narrator of the adventures is me an American, the sort of fellow the Irish might refer to as a boyo. The times recounted are before Ireland joined the EU, when it was the “old sod.”


If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to visit relatives in Ireland my stories will be warm and enlightening. There is something magical about visiting where, but for a generation or two, you’d be living and laughing everyday with cousins.


Renvyle Revisited is a bit of a mystery. I had told my American first cousins a story about their father and I’d promised to tell another about his adventures a generation earlier in Ireland with my father’s Connemara side of the family. The thing of it is, I didn’t know exactly what I was promising. I had not reasoned out what it meant. It took me more than nine and a half hours of yammering to get to the bottom of it or at least my version. The mystery regarded a grudge with non-family that was renewed with my visit 17 years later. How Irish is that?

To make sense of the revisited story one needs to know about The Irish Civil War, and hardly any one of Irish descent a generation or two American has a clue about it.