Zak Moradi: ‘Every time I come to Leitrim, my whole face just brightens up. I’m home’

A few hours after arriving in Carrick-on-Shannon, the Moradi family decided to explore the town. It was the summer of 2002: Ireland was in the throes of the ill-fated delusion remembered as the Boom. The new arrivals were still a little dazed. The parents, Gohar and Safar had spent almost 20 years living in Al Tash, a refugee camp for Kurdish people outside the Iraqi city of Ramadi. Eleven children in a mud-constructed house, arid lands, scorching summers and dry cold winters: that camp was the only home their children had known.

To be transported to Leitrim, over the course of two long flights, was fabulous and alien. The lushness, the frequent bursts of rain, the neatness of the estate, the luxuries of an electric oven, of hot running water, the green of the gardens; everything was a novelty and an excitement. It took them ten minutes to walk from the house to the centre of town. Their parents wanted to pick up a few groceries and discovered Paddy’s, a general shop opposite the Bush Hotel. This, too, was a sensory overload for two of their children who came along for the walk.

“I had never been inside a supermarket before and neither had Makwan,” remembers Zak Moradi, who was then 11, in his new memoir. The boys — successfully — lobbied their parents and were allowed a fizzy drink each. None of the family knew anything about the labels or brands, so the children plumped for the designs they found most attractive. Ten minutes later, they were strolling home, the children taking dubious sips of their chosen drinks, which did not taste as they had imagined: they were Budweiser and Guinness. A passing guard did a double take when he came upon the sight. Somehow, he hurdled the language barrier to convey to the Moradi elders that this lark was not on.

“It was a one-sided conversation, and Garda Martin Cunniffe was the one doing all the talking,” Moradi recalls.

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The cans were binned. The guard shook his head and the family made their way home, mystified by this strange Irish officer of the law. Neither party knew it then, but almost a decade later Cunniffe would find himself as the Leitrim senior hurling manager. Zak Moradi was one of the players on his squad.

Moradi lived in Carrick-on-Shannon for just two years, but the town made an imperishable impression on him. It was where he learned how to speak English, and where he absorbed the local attitudes and ways like a sponge. Although he is, as an adult, simultaneously an out-and-out Dub and an energetic advocate for Kurdistan nationhood, he slips into his Leitrim skin very easily. We meet on a blustery Friday, sudden showers drifting across the Shannon and the town easing into the last of the summer weekend hordes. Moradi has driven up and intends staying the night, catching up with a few friends. Aaron McPartland, with whom he formed a friendship through the international language of football, still lives in the locality, and Moradi forecasts a tour of the pubs.

Everything just opened up in Leitrim. Language. Sports. Everything just started here

“Every time I’m driving past Longford and I see ‘Welcome to Lovely Leitrim’, it means a lot to me,” he says.

“Every time I come up here, my whole face just brightens up. I’m home. It is a second home. Kurdistan is a third home. But everything just opened up in Leitrim. Language. Sports. Everything just started here. It was like getting your college degree in Leitrim. For the whole family. We came from nothing.”

Or rather, they came from the chasm into which all Kurdish people have been coping with for a full century. The Moradi family story is both extraordinary and typical. For generations, they had lived in the mountainous borderlands close to Iraq. The outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War forced his parents to move to Ramadi, where they spent 20 years in the Al-Tash camp with 13,000 other Kurdish refugees.

“Previously, they had a good life. My father was driving had his own car when he was 16. He had his own house. And all of a sudden, everything was taken away from them. You can have everything in life and then lose everything.”

Moradi still has vivid dreams of the place of Al-Tash. His childhood was defined by a series of promised relocations dashed before an older brother, working for the United Nations, managed to help them to achieve a move to Europe. Moradi had the perfect disposition to thrive in Ireland: happy-go-lucky and inherently curious and resilient. He quickly intuited that the GAA was a shortcut to the epicentre of local life in Leitrim. He was playing midfield for the U-14 hurling team, using his speed and fearlessness to compensate for the fact that he was still learning to strike the ball. When the family decided to move to Tallaght, he quickly joined the Thomas Davis club and never looked back.

[ Zak Moradi’s unique journey from refugee camp to moulding a new generation of Dublin hurlers ]

Except, of course, within the GAA that is never true. Leitrim was his adopted if not his native county, and when Cunniffe invited him to play in 2010, he couldn’t say no. For eight years, Moradi became part of the unsung devotees to the “weaker” GAA counties, embarking on midweek cross-Ireland trips to train with his county team, leaving the city at four o’clock each Tuesday and Thursday for team sessions in Leitrim, falling into bed sometime after midnight. He was one of the doughty veterans of the division three and four county hurling scene, whose games are never on television and where the players sometimes outnumber the crowd. What glory exists is internal.

His career finished in dreamlike fashion: Leitrim won a graded All-Ireland hurling title, the Lory Meagher Cup, playing in Croke Park in 2019. Moradi, injury rived all season, came in to score a point. He had 24 family members in the famous stadium, and others watching on live streams around the world. “It wasn’t just the happiest moment of my life,” Moradi writes of meeting his mother afterwards in the Croke Park hotel, “it was the happiest of hers since the day we first arrived in our new home 17 years earlier.”

My father loved it in Ireland. It was a safe haven. He had a great life, but he didn’t have the freedom of speech we had here

In the book, Moradi writes affectingly of his parents’ dignified stoicism throughout lives uprooted and in particular of his father, Safar, whose prized possessions were grainy video tapes harvested from halcyon days in the Kurdish mountains sent on by his brothers. “There was nothing special about them,” he writes. “They were just camcorder footage of village life, normal people going about their everyday business, tilling their land and tending to their crops and animals. They were his only way to see the place he had grown up in, the fields he had played in as a child.”

In 2010, his father returned to Zahaw to see his parents for the first time in 20 years. Three years later, returning on a flight from another visit, Safar had a heart attack and had died by the time the pilot made an emergency landing in Tehran. His remains were brought to Kurdistan; he is buried in Zahaw. He was just 57. Moradi was unable to bring himself to attend the funeral and he has yet to visit his grave.

“Yeah, he would be my number one hero. He had a diary that we still have from 40 years ago. He had all the exact dates of what was happening — how they lived in a tent for six months, escaping to the north, getting out of the refugee camp for two years. Those diaries kind of made the book. He would have had a lot of relations fighting in the Iran-Iraq War. He loved it in Ireland. It was a safe haven. He had a great life, but he didn’t have the freedom of speech we had here.”

Moradi is 31 now. In the book, he explores the evolution of his political outlook: in his boyhood, influenced by the non-stop propaganda in Iraq, he “wanted to be Saddam Hussein. Everybody did.” But in his teens, his interest in Kurdish nationalism began to deepen and now, he is an unapologetic supporter of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), despite there terror-group status in Europe and the US.

“If you talk to Kurdish people, the PKK are their heroes. Why are there so many fighters in the Quandil mountains fighting for basic rights? They want to be able to give their kids a Kurdish name. Like my parents weren’t allowed to give two of my brothers Kurdish names.

“The Kurdish girl who got killed [Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died after being arrested in Tehran in September, sparking widespread protests] her name Zhian means freedom. But on paper, her name is different. Same with my cousins. On their passport they are Ali or Hamad but in reality they have different Kurdish name. I’d like to see a united Kurdistan. The big issue is in the Middle East. We are very Westernised as people and are multicultural. There are Kurdish, Muslims, Christians, Jews. And, unfortunately, we let the divide happen in 1923 when the French and the British promised us — and the Kurds were betrayed. Go back another 1,000 years and 90 per cent of Kurdish people were not Muslims. We were forced to be.”

I live in Tallaght and sometimes you hear of Jobstown in terms of poverty. To me, Jobstown is like the upper class in some countries

In the book, he devotes several chapters to the Turkish-Kurdish conflict; the family continued to watch Kurdish television channels in Ireland, so Moradi could return from training with Thomas Davis and spend the evening thinking about home. His extended family is scattered: in Iran, across Europe. His life in Ireland has left him perfectly placed to retain a clear grasp of his original life, while appreciating what he believes to be the absolute privileges in this country.

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“The people that were around you, you miss,” he says of Al-Tash. “Friends and relations growing up. We are all spoilt rotten here. Including myself. My nieces and nephews. We are giving out about the price of heat and oil — I’m the same. But we didn’t have heat there; you stuck on an extra coat or jacket and that was it. Some people could barely feed themselves once a day, but nobody died of hunger. I live in Tallaght and sometimes you hear of Jobstown in terms of poverty. To me, Jobstown is like the upper class in some countries. Most people have cars. They have houses. We don’t have the Red Cross or the UN coming in.

“I know that the prices are rising here but we find a way. And I know of Kurdish people who came here with nothing, and they have become successful barbers or butchers. They mightn’t be book smart, but they are working. If you put your head down here, you can always make your way forward. I have seen lads from my club who are now successful business people, lads in my class in the LCA [Leaving Cert Applied] and other kids would have slagged us. But some of these lads are plumbers and electricians earning two grand a week. And the lads in the highest class, they might have a government job, but they might be earning five, six hundred quid a week. There is something for everybody here.”

All of this is delivered with a smile and with persuasion. Moradi is brimming with energy and ideas. During the earliest days of Covid, he ignored everyone’s advice and made a down payment on an apartment in Dublin when everyone warned him that he was crazy.

“And I didn’t even listen to anybody in my own family. I didn’t listen to anybody: I said, you know what, I am going to take a gamble. And it has gone up massively in value. Everybody [was] saying no. Because the population of Ireland is growing. Everyone is crying out about rent. There were 150 people queuing up to rent anywhere before then. I was living in me mother’s. It was time to spare up a room for the little brother! She tells me she misses me,” he laughs.

“There are two other lads at home. And I still go home nearly every day for my dinner. Because I can’t cook. I’m a disaster.”

Life Begins In Leitrim (From Kurdistan to Croke Park) by Zak Moradi with Niall Kelly is published by Gill