The family moved to New York in 1929, when Padraic was 5 years old. She wanted us to go to America and she was telling the girls at work that she wasn’t going to go on a boat if she had to go steerage, which the Irish had to do because they didn’t have the money, so one of the girls said, ‘Have you ever bet on a horse?” and she said ‘no’, and she did and won £91 …so that got us second class.” She watched over me, it was dicey sometimes. My grandmother lost her mind and I was left with her. “ My mother’s people were burnt out of Lisburn. They had been forced to leave Lisburn because of anti-Catholic demonstrations and he lived with his maternal grandparents in the Markets area of Belfast. Padraic remained in Belfast with his mother. When he was a child, his father, a barman from a family of shopkeepers, left for America. The First World War had ended and Padraic remembers that “everybody went half mad when the war was over, and my mother was what you’d call a flapper, she went half mad too, loved style”. Poet Padraic Fiacc was born Patrick Joseph (Joe) O Connor in Belfast on Elizabeth Street in 1923.
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