My Father Left Me Ireland

My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son's Search for Home by Michael Brendan Dougherty, 217 pages

It's a cliche - the American travelling to Ireland to visit a "homeland" his family left generations ago.  For Michael Brendan Dougherty, however, Ireland is closer than that, for not only was his mother of Irish descent, his father was from Dublin, and after siring his son he returned and started a permanent family there.  Back in America, Dougherty's mother nurtured her son with Irish culture, even taking the trouble to learn Gaelic.  It's another cliche - the outsider who had to fight for his inheritance and therefore values it more highly than those who received it as an undoubted birthright.  Yet Dougherty's story of coming to terms with his father's absence - and even more important, his invisible presence - is so compellingly personal that cynicism surrenders.  

My Father Left Me Ireland takes the form of a series of open letters from Dougherty to his father, centering both on their personal history and on the history of the Easter Rising.  Through this lens, the author explores what he characterizes as "an age of disinheritance", revealing the illusions of those "realists" who imagine fatherhood to be a biological accident and nationhood a geographical accident.  What is really Real, he discovers, is built on and through sacrifice.