Dublin, Ireland

Dublin, Ireland is a recurring but temporary setting in the family’s story: a city where medical advice is sought, illness is discussed at a distance, and Susan McGahern waits before giving birth to her seventh child. Rather than becoming a new home, it remains a place of consultation and hospital stays, linked to family life in the countryside by letters, journeys, and decisions made elsewhere.

Medical Correspondence

During Susan McGahern’s illness, Francis (Frank) McGahern wrote to a doctor in Dublin, Ireland to ask whether his wife should give up teaching and what her chances of recovery were. The questions cast the city as a source of medical judgment at a moment when the family’s future depended on an uncertain prognosis. He had written at the beginning of the illness and received a detailed report; a later reply was addressed from 30 Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin, Ireland.

The correspondence did not give Susan access to the information being gathered about her condition. Francis (Frank) McGahern kept both the earlier report and the later communication from her and from everyone else, then proceeded with his own plans. The city’s medical authority thus enters the narrative through a marked gap between the information sought by her husband and what was shared with the patient.

Hospital and Family Separation

After an operation, Susan McGahern was allowed out of hospital for a few days and travelled alone by train to Dromod, where Pat McManus (uncle) met her. She stayed with him and Maggie at their shop in Ballinamore. The visit was too brief for her to go on to the barracks: she felt that leaving would be difficult once she arrived. When she returned to Dublin, Ireland and the hospital, she wrote Francis (Frank) McGahern a long account of the visit.

The episode makes the distance between the city and the family’s rural life more than a matter of geography. Susan’s short release allowed her to see relatives, but not to return fully to the household or to linger at the barracks. The memoir also notes that Francis (Frank) McGahern did not travel the eighteen miles from Cootehall to see her while she was in Ballinamore, leaving the visit and its account to carry the weight of a separation that remained unresolved.

Waiting Before Childbirth

In 1943, while waiting to enter Holles Street, Susan McGahern stayed at the small Cumberland Hotel in Westland Row. The city brought back the memory of being in Dublin, Ireland at Percy Place nearly nine years earlier, when she had been expecting her first child. Now she feared that the birth might be delayed and that she would have to remain at the hotel into the middle of the month.

Her seventh child was born on November 4, 1943, described in the memoir as a healthy baby. There was disagreement over his name: Francis (Frank) McGahern wanted Jude, invoking the patron saint of hopeless cases because of Susan’s cancer, while she objected that the unusual name would set the child apart. He was christened Frances Jude Anthony and grew up as Frank, although his father insisted on calling him Jude in his early years. Dublin, Ireland is therefore tied both to the strain of Susan’s illness and to the arrival of a child whose naming she firmly shaped.

Narrative Significance

The city appears through precise addresses and short stays rather than through a sustained portrait of urban life: 30 Fitzwilliam Square, Holles Street, Westland Row, and Percy Place mark separate points in medical consultation, childbirth, and remembered family history. These locations make Dublin, Ireland a practical destination for doctors and hospitals, but the memoir’s focus remains on what distance does to family knowledge and presence.

Letters connect the city’s medical world to the household, yet they do not ensure that the patient herself is informed. Journeys out of hospital briefly restore Susan’s contact with relatives, while the hotel before childbirth recalls an earlier pregnancy and anticipates a new member of the family. In this way, Dublin, Ireland functions as a threshold between illness and home, and between the family’s earlier history and its next generation.