For 30 years or so I have been curious about my Irish roots. I’ve always known that I come from an Irish family on my father’s side and a Welsh family on my mother’s side. But I could never quite fathom how, given my celtic heritage, I ended up being born in a council flat in West Bromwich, an industrial town in the Black Country, north of Birmingham, UK. And no one was telling.

I’ve always wanted to find out more about my family but for some reason or other, they seemed reluctant to share, playing down the Irishness. Looking back, as a child of the 1970’s when, thanks to the “Troubles”,  being Irish was about as popular in England as syphilis, I can understand why aunts, uncles, cousins were so keen to throw off their “‘tik” paddy shackles. I have had several surname changes, been given a decidedly royal first name and constant admissions from my mother that she had “married beneath her” and that I shouldn’t really be here.

Yet despite attempts, the Irishness of my culture was too ingrained in my paternal family, so that I dipped in and out of a strange world of Roman Catholicism – crucifixes over the bed and in each room; tin trays with a picture of the Pope on, a boss-eyed Mary in the kitchen, the priest who my grandmother Kate had framed in a photo in her lounge… a world of McCarthys and Clarkes who could never tell me where they really were from, they just “were”. A world of music and dancing, of “would ye ever just behave?” A family who were always pleased to see me, yet who seemed to be kept away from me. A secret family.

I knew that somewhere, someplace, there was a cupboard just brimming full of secrets… but where to begin?

My family is fractured, I am isolated. Nothing to do with this history and so irrelevant other than this making it more difficult for me to find the key to the cupboard. For years I have been unable to find information about them. Irish census records are few and far between following a fire in Dublin in 1922, so that whilst I could find out about my maternal ancestors, my paternal tribe remained elusive. Until recently….

Thanks to the internet, I have found my family. And this summer I am off in my mini, to visit the land of my fathers and to reconnect with the people who are in my blood. I found the key to the cupboard of secrets. I have opened the door…and for the first time in my life, I know who I am… yet I feel that I already knew.