By Kathleen Hegarty Thorne, MS '92 (speech: theater arts), and co-author Patrick Flanagan
This literary venture focusing on the Irish War of Independence and subsequent Civil War in Ireland chronicles events in County Mayo from 1920 to 1923. It spotlights the people of the times, not the politics, not the church pronouncements, not the British view of this wayward colony, but the actual humans who stood against and withstood the winds of war. Kathleen wanted to beam the light on the young men who tramped the fields, the venturesome who sailed across the Irish Sea to obtain weapons, and the women who sheltered, at great risk, those passionate, fiery, soldiers of rebellious Ireland . . . boots . . .those boots that tramped the heather of Mayo to help create a free and independent Ireland of the twenty-first century.