Listen to me tell my story:
My name is Maggie McDonagh. I have twelve kids and I was born in Galway. I was born in 1965 and my mother had ten children.
My mother made something like what the women is doing in the book. She’d make her homebread, she’d make current cakes, she’d make apple tarts. She’d boil potatoes, she’d ate rabbits, hares, chickens, and pheasants. My father got a baby goat one time. I wanted him for a pet, he was all white. At night he went to cook the goat, I don’t think he ever got over it. Years ago we didn’t really have anything. I used to go with my father and go to houses, he would ask for a hen or sometimes in the fields, the farmers would give him cabbage, potatoes and he used to make buckets and saucepans and whistles and things like that, he would sell them and swap for food.
We travelled, when I was about seven when I came to Dublin.
I enjoyed travelling. My father could be in Cork or could be down around the North, they were always in a different place. And when you get to know new friends, you would be always crying cause he would say ‘we were leaving now’. That kinda used to hurt you as well. See my father was good because I suppose tinning was in the family. He’d always find a school for us no matter what county you went to he would find a school. I remember been in school in Clifton. Years
after we were coming near Dublin then I went to school in Maynooth for a while and then in Dublin and then the inner city. I made my Communion here in Dublin with the nuns in William Street and then I made me Confirmation in Gardiner Street.
