My Story

The crucial events in modern Irish history--the Great Famine, the `48 Rebellion, movements for Tenants' Rights and Home Rule, the Easter Rising and the War of Independence--are here related, not with the detached precision of the historian, but as they were experienced by the rural poor. In My Story, first published in 1915, well-known writer and priest Peter O'Leary recorded his observations of late 19th-century Ireland: families sustained by tiny plots of land, confrontations with landlords, and famines that drove people to workhouses. Translator Cyril Ó Ceirín has rendered O'Leary's Irish in the colorful, colloquial English of a well-educated Munster clergyman.