Jockey

A Book Of Irish Tales

Six months of working on final drafts and checking and re-checking quotes and dates and it is finally done. Vol 3 in the 6 volume set of short stories. Publication date is 15th June and you can pre-order the book at www.mikeharding.co.uk £10 + P&P. The first 250 copies are signed and numbered - after that the copies will be signed but not numbered. There's no bookshop distribution as yet - but we live in hope (which is a village in Derbyshire where I once got snowed in in Easter.



Entitled Jockey the 7 stories are set in Ireland and among the Irish community in the UK. They came together over many years; years of wandering, of listening, of digging holes in the roads of Lancashire with men from Sligo, and working on the building sites of Manchester with men from Mayo and Clare.
They come also from more than sixty years of traveling in Ireland; walking all the high hills along the western coast, from Cork to Donegal, fishing on lonely loughs in Connemara, and from countless nights making music in trad Irish music sessions in Britain and Ireland. For twenty eight years I also had a house in Ireland, which I built up from a ruin and which I still miss terribly.

Am I Irish? No, my father was from Devon, but he died on Sept 23rd 1944 when his Lancaster bomber was shot down over Holland and, sadly, I never knew him. But I was brought up in Manchester by three women whose roots were in Dublin and Tipperary; my mum, my Aunty Julia and my Nanna. So for the formative years of my childhood I lived in a terraced house, a Catholic in a Protestant street, with everything that entails including a different way of seeing things, and nights that, until we got a telly, were filled with storytelling and song. I am an inxile, a man exiled within his own land.
I am often asked, ‘Are these stories true?’ Of course they are true; they are true in and of themselves like all stories; otherwise, how could I be telling them?

Here’s the opening of one of the tales

Cuplá Focal Gaeilge

(A few words of Irish)


Easter was early that year, too damn early, as far as Anthony Quinlan was concerned. As he stood shivering, cold, alone and hungover, on a wind-scoured Connemara strand he asked himself what in God’s name was Easter doing coming on the first Sunday in April with an icy breath and battering gales? Why didn’t the Church do something sensible and give it a fixed date? Instead they seemed to work it out every year, as though they were surprised amateurs. It was something to do with Easter having to be on the fifteenth Sunday after the full moon before Rogation Wednesday, divided by the Pope’s height in inches multiplied by the square root of the number of pigeons on the Vatican roof. Bollocks! If Jesus died on the 3rd of April AD33, then Constantine, or whichever wanker it was who decided the date of Easter, should have stuck to that date. They don’t shift Christmas around every year, Quinlan thought, you don’t hear people say, Christmas is really early this year - it’s in November.