alcohol, so what was the use? It was time to go and he died in the Royal Victoria Hospital. My mother, the former Angela Sheehan, grew up in a Limerick slum with her mother, two brothers,Thomas and Patrick, and a sister, Agnes. She never saw her father, who had run off to Australia weeks before her birth. After a night of drinking porter in the pubs of Limerick he staggers down the lane singing his favorite song, Who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder? Nobody spoke so he said it all the louder It’s a dirty Irish trick and I can lick the Mick Who threw the overalls in Murphy’s chowder. He’s in great form altogether and he thinks he’ll play a while with little Patrick, one year old. Lovely little fella. Loves his daddy. Laughs when Daddy throws him up in the air. Upsy daisy, little Paddy, upsy daisy, up in the air in the dark, so dark, oh, Jasus, you miss the child on the way down and poor little Patrick lands on his head, gurgles a bit, whimpers, goes quiet. Grandma heaves herself from the bed, heavy with the child in her belly, my mother. She’s barely able to lift little Patrick from the floor. She moans a long moan over the child and turns on Grandpa. Get out of it. Out. If you stay here a minute longer I’ll take the hatchet to you, you drunken lunatic. By Jesus, I’ll swing at the end of a rope for you. Get out. Grandpa stands his ground like a man. I have a right, he says, to stay in me own house. She runs at him and he melts before this whirling dervish with a damaged child in her arms and a healthy one stirring inside. He stum- bles from the house, up the lane, and doesn’t stop till he reaches Mel- bourne in Australia. Little  Pat, my  uncle, was  never  the  same  after. He  grew  up  soft in the head with a left leg that went one way, his body the other. He never learned to read or write but God blessed him in another way. When he started to sell newspapers at the age of eight he could count money better than the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself. No one knew  why  he  was  called Ab  Sheehan, The Abbot,  but  all  Limerick loved him. My mother’s troubles began the night she was born. There is my 13