My father’s name was Joseph and he was a carpenter, but that’s where the similarities between myself, and a certain notable personage, end.  My mother’s name was not Mary and I have no reason to think she was a virgin at the time of my birth.
My arrival ought to have occurred in Ireland, more precisely in the county of Sligo, where both of my parents had been born and where their parents had been born and theirs and theirs and so on to time immemorial.  On my mother’s side I am descended from a tenth century king of Connaught and on my father’s from the legendary Nials of the Nine Hostages whose empire covered all of Ireland and Britain and which he was extending in to France, where he died and was buried in the Loire Valley.
With the exception of one interloper, a Venetian sailor who survived the wreck of the “Trinidad Valencera†in Sligo Bay in 1588, a consequence of the Spanish Armada, my entire ancestry hails from the ancient kingdom of Connaught.   My parents were married on the anniversary of the apparition of the Virgin Mary at Knock and I was born, nine months to the day later, in the fine English town of Warrington, at that time, in the county of Lancashire.
The Duke of Wellington was born in Ireland; he considered this actuality to be a misfortune. “Not everyone born in a stable is a horseâ€, he would say, simultaneously giving vent to his Messianic delusions and excusing his Irish birth.  My own nativity having occurred in England, I could, perhaps, make the same observation. However I am not in any sense dismayed at having been born in England, although my entire heritage is Irish and there is no love lost between the two nations.  I am very happy, indeed delighted, to be part of both.
I would, no doubt, have lived out the whole of my life in the land of my ancestors except for the intervention of two individuals.  The first was a certain Right Honourable Clement Atlee who, in the wake of the Second World War, defeated an esteemed gentleman, the Right Honourable Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, in the British general election.  In power Mr Atlee introduced a splendid, and completely free, health service for Britain, the National Health Service.
The above is an excerpt from the ebook “The Voyage to the Promised Land†by Will Keyes Byrne (my quasi-autobiography).  You may download a FREE sample from Amazon:
http://tinyurl.com/bovf37k [1]
No Kindle? No worries!
This ebook is published in Kindle format but if you do not have one don’t worry you can download a FREE app to read it on a PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Smartphone or Android Tablet.  I don’t actually own a Kindle myself; I read Kindle format on my iPhone. I love it â€" I can read on the bus, train, or while waiting for… anything.
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