Because it is completely counterintuitive that an island with a population of five million could manage to have that same small population link to someone everywhere they go. It doesn’t make sense, or does it?
The story begins in Ballysallagh, a townland within the village of Doolin on Ireland’s rugged Atlantic coast in County Clare, a place the family remembers as breathtakingly beautiful, with rolling green fields, stone walls, and music in the air. Patrick Joseph Byrnes was born there in 1902, the second of 14 children and the oldest son.