Returning Home: ‘I'm back where I belong’

Marie, a woman in her late sixties, grew up in the prosperous south Dublin suburb of Blackrock. Her mother, Catherine, born into a Fermanagh farming family that worshiped in a Plymouth Brethren congregation, had decided at the age of eighteen after a life-threatening experience to convert to Catholicism. As a result, Catherine was expelled from the family home in Fermanagh forbidden ever to return, so she travelled to Dublin where she made her conversion official and subsequently married a man from a middle-class Catholic family. Marie was born the following year but when only two years old, her mother Catherine died suddenly of a congenital heart condition and Marie's father, unable to cope with a young child, left her with a local shopkeeper in Blackrock who raised her. Her father's family wanted little to do with her because they considered her a ‘Protestant’, her mother's Fermanagh family likewise because to them she was a ‘Catholic’. The confusion surrounding Marie's identity persisted throughout her childhood and while attending a convent boarding school, she felt the nuns attributed her every failing and misdemeanour to her ‘Protestant’ background. Marie, nevertheless, apparently put all this behind her when she left school: she lived through a troubled first marriage, raised eight children and in the mid-1980s emigrated from Dublin with her second husband first to Spain, then to England and back again to Spain where they ran several successful businesses. In 2003, Marie and her husband returned to Ireland because she felt a strong pull to be at home. Although they returned to Dublin, Marie felt unsettled and delayed purchasing a house. One day she persuaded her husband to get into the car and drive to Enniskillen. She described her feelings on arriving in Fermanagh for the very first time. ‘I had this feeling now that I'm here, I'd come back. Now I'm back where I belong.’

They made an immediate decision to relocate to Fermanagh and only a few days after moving into their house outside Enniskillen, Marie answered a knock at her front door to a man who introduced himself with, ‘Hello, I believe I'm your cousin David.’