{"id":542278,"date":"2026-07-10T06:04:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T06:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/542278\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T06:04:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T06:04:11","slug":"ive-been-very-lucky-in-life-but-leaving-ireland-broke-my-heart-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/542278\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I\u2019ve been very lucky in life but leaving Ireland broke my heart\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

I grew up in Castleknock<\/a>, just over the wall of the Phoenix Park<\/a> in Dublin<\/a>. It was a lovely place to grow up, because it\u2019s very quiet, and feels like you\u2019re a long way out of town, even though you\u2019re not. In the 1980s, Castleknock was much less developed than it is now. <\/p>\n

There was a corner shop, and the church. Mount Sackville was the main school for girls, Castleknock College the main school for boys. That dictated the rhythm of life in the area \u2013 when it was term time, you\u2019d have the students coming and going, and not much else going on. I went to Mount Sackville from when I was four until I was 17.<\/p>\n

I credit my sister with my decision to go to university in Oxford. She got into one of the colleges to read law. She was very happy and had this amazing life, and I thought I might as well apply. I was only 16 when went over for the interviews. I think they could see how young I was, so they offered me a place, but I had to take a gap year. <\/p>\n

I was also really shy. I had never spoken to a boy before in my life. I ended up going to DIT and doing the first year of the journalism diploma. I did a lot of growing up there. <\/p>\n

In the meantime, I got the medal for English in the Leaving. I was feeling fairly confident going off to Oxford. That was a mistake. I was totally out of my depth from day one. It wasn\u2019t bad \u2013 it was exciting and interesting and I was surrounded by these very clever people, but I really found it hard to be in this totally different environment.<\/p>\n

England was different, and Oxford another level of different. It was a very weird place to be for three years, but I wouldn\u2019t change it.<\/p>\n

In 1998 I came back and did the Masters in Anglo Irish Literature in Trinity College Dublin. At the time, I was in a fairly serious relationship. For almost five years, we had a long-distance relationship. He was training to be a barrister, so that was very London focused. <\/p>\n

I was working for the publisher, Mercier Press. When they decided to close their Dublin office, instead of getting another job, I decided I would try my luck in London. I came over in 2003, but I never thought of it as emigrating \u2013 never thought: I\u2019m leaving Ireland and going to live in another country.<\/p>\n

I really had my heart set on trying to come back and live in Dublin. My family and I came back in 2017 and had a run of appallingly bad luck. I was writing a book at the time and it just didn\u2019t work. That was my income for the year. I\u2019m self-employed. My husband is self-employed. <\/p>\n

\u2018I was really nervous about it. I thought: what if I\u2019ve lost touch too much?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Jane Casey<\/p>\n

He was spending a lot of money travelling back and forth to London for work. We got to Christmas. We were living in Rathmines. I took the boys to the shop and while we were out, somebody burgled the house and stole all their Christmas presents. It just made me so sad. Then my older son was in a freak accident at school.<\/p>\n

He was very lucky \u2013 he could have died. But I thought: this is not working. In the end, we moved back to London. In my life, I\u2019ve been very lucky generally, and that is probably the only thing that has broken my heart.<\/p>\n

When I came to England first, there was a lot more anti-Irish sentiment. When I was at university, the IRA were on ceasefire and there was this huge bomb in Canary Wharf that ended the ceasefire. I got a lot of stick for that. I think that hostility has receded, ironically, even while they are more suspicious generally.<\/p>\n

Most of my novels are about Maeve Kerrigan, who is London-Irish \u2013 her parents are Irish, but she\u2019s grown up in London. There\u2019s a huge population of people who have that experience who are unrepresented in culture. We\u2019re better at talking and writing about Irish people abroad than people with Irish heritage trying to balance that with other ways of living.<\/p>\n

My latest novel, Everything She Didn\u2019t Say, is my first set in Ireland. I started thinking about it while I was living in Ireland in 2018. I was really nervous about it. I thought: what if I\u2019ve lost touch too much? <\/p>\n

I got a retired guard to read from the point-of-view of procedure and she was amazing. I won\u2019t give spoilers, but there\u2019s a bit at the end and she said something exactly like that happened to her. It made me really happy to think that the thing I\u2019d made up actually happened.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s set in Mayo. My mum grew up in Westport, and it was always the place she cared about most in the world. She passed away during the pandemic, but every spring my aunt and my sister and I go have a holiday there.<\/p>\n

We went up to north Mayo when I was thinking about the book \u2013 down the little boreens and to beaches and historic buildings that were well hidden from view. It\u2019s a magical place. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m always conscious that my books are read all over the world, hopefully in lots of different languages. Some of it is saying: look, there\u2019s this extraordinary place!<\/p>\n

Telling the world: this exists, you can go and see it, this is waiting for you, if you want it.<\/p>\n

In conversation with Niamh Donnelly<\/p>\n

Everything She Didn\u2019t Say by Jane Casey is published by Hemlock Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I grew up in Castleknock, just over the wall of the Phoenix Park in Dublin. It was a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":542279,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[88009,615,105129,61,60,99,709,1454,43,303,42415],"class_list":["post-542278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-castleknock","tag-dublin","tag-dublin-institute-of-technology","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-london","tag-magazine","tag-me-myself-and-ireland","tag-news","tag-united-kingdom","tag-your-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=542278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/542279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=542278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=542278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=542278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}