An Irishman's Diary

"I believe," the neighbour addressed my mother archly, "that Timothy has run away to America with an old prince?".

The year was 1984 and the only surprise for me in the tale is the equanimity with which the mother took the news. However, the truth, as is usually the way in these tales, was less exotic. I had indeed gone to New York, at the behest of my father, then resident in London, with his old prints.

The prints of Ireland's legendary Celtic twilight were intended to break the heart of many an Irish emigrant, and in the process generally ease my father's arrangements with his turf accountant. At least, that is, until his horses learned to be as fast as the ladies he knew.

The prints were made from original watercolours, the works of Alex Williams RHA, which I was assured were out of copyright. Each print set was individually numbered, signed and guaranteed. The first was presented to that well-known member of the diaspora, President Ronald Wilson Reagan, to mark his visit to the auld sod that year. They were expensively packaged and billed as works-of-art-in-their-own-right but the trip, from a sales point of view was a disaster. The Irish in America I was told repeatedly, don't buy art. "Haven't you got any Cadbury's Flakes or Claddagh rings?" snapped the woman in the unlikely sounding Mattie Haskin's Irish Gift shop.

Sales plummeted

As the days went by, and I trudged back and forth across Manhattan looking for the Irish Americans who buy art, I became more and more dispirited. I had started off on Labour Day - a national holiday - and from there, sales, as they say, plummeted.

My father, who had been heading for the races when I flew out of London, had not actually furnished me with the kind of money then needed to stay in New York City. His final act at Gatwick was to buy me $1 million insurance from a man with policies attached to a clipboard at the departure gate. "I would hate anything to happen . . ," he had mumbled, looking thoughtfully at the cases.

The money for posting brochures to the galleries throughout the US was quickly spent on a room with six locks on the door at the USIT hostel which I discovered was also the YMCA, then, I think, at West 34th Street.

After a few days of despair, I left the prints in two cases at the YMCA, and headed out to Montauk, at the end of Long Island, where I knew Lena and Donal Casey could be relied upon for company, accommodation and the occasional lemonade.

My time up, I redeemed the prints and brought them back to London. To my everlasting shame the brochures also returned to Britain with me but remained in the overhead rack of the London to Holyhead boat train. I had intended to post them from Ireland, but in truth when I discovered later that they were not still with me, I cared very little - callow youth that I was.

My rush home was to join five other lads on holiday to Spain and the travelling had started to turn my head. In my bag in Spain I unpacked a set of prints. For all I know it is still there. I cared little as a consequence for the estimated 40 million people of Irish descent who remained tragically ignorant of the tearful potential of their heritage in relation to the Celtic twilight. Or indeed for a man's modest ambition to provide for a comfortable retirement. Youth can be very callow indeed.

Real prince

But time has a way of wounding all heels and before too long the prints were to return to my life. My father passed away in 1987 and not long afterwards I was contacted by a real prince among men. Jack O'Connell, dealer in antiquarian books, of Schull Books in West Cork wrote to say his understairs had become the repository of the prints. They were still my father's property and . . . well you can see where the conversation was headed.

So it was that the prints which had accompanied me over and back across the Atlantic, which had I believe been made by my father in Asia, which had travelled with him to Australia in the early 1980s, were now bouncing along the rough roads of west Cork headed for my home in Wicklow.

Now, when an inheritance is in the air, siblings often seek a share in the well-loved mementoes - for sentimental, rather than commercial reasons, of course. And so one set of my father's prints went back again to Australia, another set to Madrid. Some, inexplicably started to appear at booksales in Dublin, while most went to an attic in my house in Wicklow.

E-commerce

Last year, a news report about a boy and the Internet caught the imagination of the world so much that it appeared in bulletins in Australia, Madrid and Dublin in the same week. The boy, it might be remembered, was selling Waterford Crystal through the Internet, having successfully established an e-commerce business and turned over about $1million dollars, before his mammy and daddy told him to stop.

"There are 40 million Irish Americans out there," the siblings said. "Limited editions," they said. "World famous artist," they gushed. "The Internet, dummy," they insisted, while steadfastly refusing to put their hands in their pockets for the cost of a web site. One was kind enough to suggest that I pay for the site out of the profits. Their shares of profits could be posted to their local bank accounts. Simple really.

And so the eye was drawn to notice in this newspaper for Irish Times Training. "Design your own web site" it read. And I began to think . . .

There are, after all, probably more than 40 million Irish Americans out there now. And the Internet could take in those in Canada and Australia as well. Added to that there is probably still some Irish in Britain. Just recently the sibling in Australia wrote to say she was coming home. With her will come a scanner and all the necessary technology. With her also will come all the unbearable enthusiasm.

I'm thinking of running away to America. Without the prints.