You may recall the furore that erupted some 18 months ago when it came to the public's attention that, throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, had been busy shipping good Catholic infants off to the States for adoption by good Catholic families.
The reaction to these "revelations" bemused me. Why all the fuss? Sure, I'd known about it for almost 40 years. After all, I was that infant. I owe the good Dr McQuaid eternal thanks: in my case, it was the best thing that could have happened.
So, I am a card-carrying member of that elite section of society who share the most intimate insight into adoption. And thus we share something else, an insight into one aspect of human nature which those of you who are not adopted can not fully appreciate: the power of identity. You can not, because you are too secure in it.
You take for granted the blood that pulses through your arteries. You have no reason to question its provenance, its history. You are who you are, undeniably. You are sure of your story. You own it.
But an adopted child has two stories, one known, one elusive. Each is as real as the other, each as true, each as full of love and loss.
This is my family
But only one is in his possession. The adopted child can say: "This is my family, this is my father, my mother, this is my sister and brother, and it would be impossible for me to love more or be more loved."
And that story includes identity as history, as memory: grandparents, cousins, hometowns, summer holidays, the family farm, birthdays, heirlooms, reunions. It includes the heart-wrenching loss that can come only from love. The adopted child can survey his world and say: "This is who I am."
But the adopted child's other story? It is identity as mystery. That enormous collage of time and place and person to which we point to know ourselves is blank. What blood is this I carry? What past can I claim? What place is mine? The adopted child can say, without existential irony: "Who am I?"
This is a question of ownership: the adopted child yearns to repossess that missing history, to be able to say not only, "This, too, is who I am", but also, "This, too, is my history, my memory".
For many adopted children this yearning can grow to obsession, as I can all too readily confirm. But I was blessed (in ways too numerable to count, let alone mention); my search was relatively short and almost uniformly sweet. I can now walk the streets of northside Dublin, or stand beside a run-down farmhouse on a wind-swept hillside in far west Kerry, looking across the sea to North America, and say: "I am of this place, too. This, too, is mine."
A certain closure.
These ruminations grew out of an encounter with a remarkable man and a remarkable book. Michael Coady is of Carrick-on-Suir. Michael - writer, musician, teacher, historian, photographer, husband and father - is of Carrick to a depth I find difficult to fathom. Envy is a strong word, but there are times when I wish I enjoyed Michael's sense of place, his sense of continuity and of belonging.
Several generations
The Coadys have lived beside the Suir for over 200 years, their places dotted along a stretch of shore not more than a few hundred yards long. For several generations the Suir was also their livelihood: they were boatmen, at the heart of transport and trade between Clonmel, to the west, and Waterford, to the south-east. In the heart of Carrick there is a place known to all (until recently) simply as Coady's Slip.
Yet, amid all this continuity, this certainty, Michael came to understand the nature of identity and obsession.
The tale has no single beginning, but I choose to enter this stream of memory on the day in February, 1876, when Michael's grandfather, also Michael, was christened in Carrick.
More than a century later, Michael stood in that same sacristy examining his grandfather's name in the registry.
As Michael writes: "This child's birth foreshadows a family story out of which, over a century later, I fashion a poem. The process of the poem's making has brought me here to the silence of the sacristy. But that poem, when I have completed and published it, will not rest easy. In a wholly unforeseen interaction of art and life it will cause a lost part of its own story to be uncovered in America. `Poetry,' wrote Auden, `makes nothing happen.' Not true for me, not in this case."
The poem is "The Letter", and it introduces the extraordinary, final section of memoir ("The Use of Memory") in Michael's sublime compendium of poetry, prose and illustration entitled All Souls.
Pain and poverty
The lost part of this family story is, essentially, the life and times of that infant's father, James, and, inevitably, its repercussions, in Carrick and abroad. It is a tale of abandonment, of exile, of death in childbirth. It is a tale of pain and poverty, of a late letter home seeking forgiveness and of final rejection. It is a tale of coarse pathos which, until Michael rescued it, offered little in the way of redemption.
It is in his years-long search for James that Michael became familiar with obsession. "The Use of Memory" recounts that search, from a half-remembered story of his father's, to the dedication of American friends encountered through coincidence and a never-ending thread of other serendipity, through to the final ceremony of closure in a Philadelphia church. If an adopted child's search is a question of ownership of the past, then Michael has reclaimed James, and reconciled him with his son.
If all of this sounds unremittingly doleful, take heart. All Souls overflows with beauty, compassion and humour like a heavy Suir ready to burst its banks for fun. Before we meet Michael's great-grandfather, we find ourselves with his young, wide-eyed father and uncles at the New York Met listening to Rosa Ponselle in a Verdi opera, we learn the blood-engorged legend of Peadar na Peice, and we are warned about the worst thing a woman can say to a man in three, two-letter words.
I hope Michael will understand when I describe All Souls, with typical perversity, as the finest novel you will read this year. James, his son and all the souls of Carrick will become part of your memory.
And perhaps you'll have a clearer understanding of the adoptee's need to know.
(All Souls, by Michael Coady, Gallery Press, £7.95).