Zak Moradi

Kurdish man and one-time refugee lived in Carrick-on-Shannon for two years, but the town made an imperishable impression on him.

And the lads in the highest class, they might have a government job, but they might be earning five, six hundred quid a week. 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. He had a great life, but he didn’t have the freedom of speech we had here.” To me, Jobstown is like the upper class in some countries In 2010, his father returned to Zahaw to see his parents for the first time in 20 years. “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.” 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. 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. 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. 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 was the summer of 2002: Ireland was in the throes of the ill-fated delusion remembered as the Boom. It was where he learned how to speak English, and where he absorbed the local attitudes and ways like a sponge.