(It's a Long, Long Way) From Clare to Here

"It's a long, long way and it grows further by the day."

The Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Eireann.

CONTAE AN CHLÁIR • County Clare sits on the west coast of Eireann, tucked neatly under Galway, sustained by the River Shannon and its gigantic estuary, and needless to say absolutely hammered by the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a small county, home to just over 100,000 (living) people.

I know all of this now.

But I had no idea when I landed at Shannon Airport in October 2023 that I would find out so much about myself in Clare.

It’s not as if I had no idea of who I was or where I came from before arriving in Eireann. I’ve always known that my grandmother’s family is Irish. But until recently I perceived this Irishness as something that had long passed out of time. Something that had disappeared from view, a jigsaw puzzle in reverse.

Does any of this Irish stuff mean anything to me? Previously, I would have retorted: “Of course, it’s about family!” But now I’m not so sure. It is and it isn’t about family. Everyone carries a family inside them. Sometimes, families live and grow and stay; at others, they become dispersed.

The longer I live, the longer my list of dead relatives grows.

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SONGS AND STORIES • I travelled to Clare on little more than a hunch: a memory of my mother informing me that the Irish side of the family emigrated—free settlers, not convicts, mind!—from there in the second half of the 19th century.

So, I began my search for my roots in Clare based on the (not-unreasonable) assumption that the story my mother told was true. All my life, I’d accepted it as a fact, like our grandmother’s Irishness, and listened along whenever our parents played Irish folk songs on long drives.

Funnily enough, one of the songs they loved to play was called “From Clare to Here” by Ralph McTell, although the version we knew was sung by a guy called Red Hurley, and appeared on an album called My Ireland.

Did I, as a kid, put the title of that song together with the Clare origin story? Is that how my Irish identity became real? But there was more: around the time we were all listening to that tape with the song about Clare on it, our parents gave our newborn youngest sister a beautiful middle name: Clare.

Writing this down now, the links are clearly tenuous. I can see that. Nevertheless, they remained buried in my past. So, when I decided to go to Ireland to find out the truth (always a doomed pursuit), I needed to hear mum confirm it, for old times’ sake.

“By the way,” I texted her, casually enough, in early October 2023, just weeks before my departure, “just off the top of your head, when did the Hurley ancestors emigrate to Oz from Co. Clare?”

“I think about 1860,” she replied. “J— [her cousin] would know more. It may be earlier.”

“Arriving in IRE next Friday and heading straight to the genealogy centre in Clare,” I later messaged, hoping this might evoke a more detailed response (or denial). Mum simply replied that she’d forward my message to J— but then I heard no more.

Having run out of time, I did the only thing I could: I booked myself a room in an old farmhouse just outside the village of Corofin, which is about as Chláir as Clare gets.

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CORA FINNE • On my arrival in Corofin, I began to notice family connections everywhere: signs for real-estate agents with the Hurley name on them; the same name chiselled on headstones at the Dysert O’Dea monastery graveyard; even details of the exploits of a certain Patrick Hurley in a local genealogy magazine, impeccably footnoted and referenced.

I really was convinced that I was experiencing a sort of homecoming: I only needed to open my eyes to see the correspondences, literally, lying around all over the place.

The Hurley family name inscribed on a funerary monument in the Dysert O’Dea monastery graveyard, County Clare, Eireann.

So, primed with my “evidence”, I visited the Clare Heritage and Genealogy Centre in Corofin, thinking I could stroll in, announce my family name and gain access to all the details of my forebears who’d emigrated—of their own free will, mind!—from Clare many long (long) years ago.

Of course, it being Friday afternoon, a walk-in appointment was not possible.

I relayed all of this, once more, to mum via WhatsApp.

“I’ve got an appointment with the genealogy people on Monday. Hoping they can help find out more. I don’t know where Gran’s grandfather William [Hurley] was born though. Are we sure it was in Clare?”

“I am not sure,” mum replied. “Could have been anywhere. Cork?”

Wait, what??

“I know there was some affinity to Cork,” she added.

But I dismissed this assertion as a red herring. I had to.

The following Monday, as planned, I found myself in an upstairs room at the Clare Heritage and Genealogy Centre that held four large desks, each cordoned off by head-high plastic screens.

I was greeted by a rather severe woman, A—, who I could tell immediately would not stand for any nonsense from me. Nervously, I outlined my “case”, such as it was. A—listened without reacting, which was pretty easy, as it was over in a matter of minutes.

A— asked me if I’d found any evidence of my connection to County Clare, and I explained that I’d searched the Internet and found a list of people who’d emigrated from Clare to Australia in the 19th century, one of whom was named Michael Hurley.

Then she asked me, calmly, which Internet sites I’d been visiting and I replied, truthfully enough, “Oh, you know, those rubbishy family history ones.” This seemed to unlock a hidden sense of humour in my interlocutor, who treated me more warmly from that moment on.

She asked for my grandmother’s name and date of birth, and for the name of her father, and his father, which I was barely able to remember. Then she left the room, returning maybe fifteen seconds later.

“The Hurley surname was relatively strong in Co. Clare during the 19th century with there being several hundred families of the name on record,” she informed me.

But then came the bad news: none of the Hurleys I’d told her about had any kind of connection to Clare at all.

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FROM CLARE TO HERE • The interrogation continued. A— asked me to provide details about my mother’s Clare origin story, but I had nothing to share apart from my belief that it was true. I didn’t think to mention the Ralph McTell song, but that was probably just as well.

Soldiering on, I presented what I hoped might be the jewel in the crown of my argument: the fact that my youngest sister’s middle name is Clare. Prepared to rest my case, I cleared my throat and waited.

“And how would your sister spell that middle name of hers?” A— asked.

“C-L-A-R-E,” I replied, hoping this was the actual spelling of the name of the fine county in which we found ourselves that day, while also half expecting her to use the Gaelic spelling (C-H-L-Á-I-R).

“Okay,” A— admitted, grudgingly, “that’s correct but it’s just not enough.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, Mr Prater. To put it simply, you’ve started in the wrong place. I suggest you do some actual genealogical research on your relatives in Australia, starting with your great-great-grandmother, and then work your way back here.

“Will you be paying for today’s consultation by card?”

And with that, my bubble was well and truly burst. I drove in the pouring rain to the town of Ballyvaughan on Clare’s north coast, which I had been told was a nice place for a walk by the ocean. But the weather was far too wild for anything like that.

Sitting in my hire car, I found my great-great-grandmother’s death certificate on the Victorian Births, Deaths and Marriages website. My hands shaking, I entered my credit card details and moments later received a copy of the certificate by email.

Then I went and ordered a serving of fish and chips and an alcohol-free Guinness at the local pub. Waiting for my food to arrive, I opened the PDF and read the bare details of my great-great-grandmother’s life.

It turned out that neither she, nor my great-great-grandfather, emigrated from County Clare at all. Instead, they were both from the village of Ballyhahill in West Limerick.

“I’m so sorry,” an Irish colleague of mine later confided when I told him about this almost-comic case of mistaken self-identity.

I understood what he meant: if Clare is a picture-postcard county, packed with unforgettable sights and the strains of melodious yet far-off musical instruments, then West Limerick is a truck-stop, littered with the remains of bad ideas and many, many unmarked graves.

I calculated that Ballyhahill was just over 90 minutes’ drive by car from where I was sitting. And yet that strangely named place, which I’d never even heard of, is a long, long way in both time and space from the place I once believed in.

In fact, to borrow the lyrics from Ralph McTell’s song, “It’s a long, long way and it grows further by the day.”

I texted my mum and also my brother, letting him know about our Limerick origins.

“Really?” my brother replied, “I thought they were from Clare or something?”

Perhaps none of us will ever really get “to here” at all.