Nostalgia and innovation - Sheila Cannon on unbreakable Donegal connections

My father, Frank Cannon, stands in his family home. Along with my mother, Maura, they renovated it so we can all continue to visit, but no one lives there year-round anymore. He left to go to secondary school in Letterkenny when he was 14. Until then, he lived with his grandparents, Johnny and Kitty Cannon, his own parents, Patrick and Mary Agnes Cannon, and his five siblings. That house was part of a vibrant lively community, full of farming, storytelling, mending, sharing, worshipping and surviving.

Many houses in Ballymichael on the Fanad peninsula in Donegal stand empty. Some have been turned into holiday homes, places to visit and reminisce about the past. The local primary school stands empty and derelict for many years. Young families don’t move into this area. Like villages all over Ireland, and all over Europe, education and industry drew people away. Despite best efforts of rural development strategies, investment in the Gaeltacht, and farming subsidies, how can you make a living, or a life, here anymore?

Frank lived through the end of a way of life. Losing your culture is a kind of grief that follows you around. Throughout his life in England and the US, where he contributed to science he always missed home.

Before Frank was born, Johnny and Kitty raised eight children in the thatched cottage with dirt floors. In 1932, Johnny’s son, Patrick, turned the cottage into a modern house. Plastered over the stone walls, laid concrete floors, built a second storey, and even topped it off with a Bangor slate roof. There was no electricity for another 20 years or so, nor indoor toilet.

David McWilliams: The British act of genius that Brexit couldn’t kill

---

Pay close attention to what Intel does next. It’s a test case for Ireland

---

Homeless asylum seekers find ‘happiness’ at sunny cricket session at Railway Union Cricket Club

---

Roddy Doyle: The hate mail and death threats started in the spring of 1994

---

When the ESB men came in the 1950s with poles for electricity, dragged by horses across fields, there was resistance. Residents didn’t want poles erected in the middle of their fields and some were wary of the unknown consequences of bringing electricity into your home. We don’t need it. We’re fine without it. But the priest came round to those houses and assured people that it was safe, good and necessary. So they had light bulbs and radios, and eventually refrigerators. Later they got a phone line; it was shared with six houses along the line. Ours was the last, “Doaghbeg 6″. In the 1980s during visits home in the summers, if the phone rang six times, we knew the call was for us.

Like so many, education took Frank away from that home, and brought great opportunities. He completed his PhD in microbiology from University College Galway, as it was called at the time and secured a postdoctoral position at the University of Sussex to study nitrogen fixation.

In Sussex, Frank was part of an interdisciplinary group that advanced knowledge on the genetics of nitrogen fixation. A US biotechnology firm recognised the commercial potential of their work and offered Frank a job in Boston. So the five of us – they had three children by then – went to the front of the queue for shiny green cards and started a new life in the US in 1983.

At Biotechnica International he led a team to discover that plants have access to the gene pool of bacteria, published in Nature in 1987. Next, they genetically engineered certain bacteria to increase their nitrogen fixing ability. By adding these to the soil, farmers could increase their crop yield without adding fertiliser. This innovation was bought by US company, Land O’Lakes. So, Frank found himself presenting the product first to the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington DC, and then to farmers on a makeshift stage in a field in Wisconsin. Like the priest had done with electricity, he reassured the farmers that this innovation truly was positive progress. They believed him.

When Frank and Maura renovated the old house in Ballymichael, they left one wall of the old stones exposed. You can see how the stones from the earth around were fitted together. No machines and no cement, just sand and lime to bind them. Bogfir was used to make door and window lintels. Rough hands building shelter from local materials. It is easier to romanticise it if you didn’t live through it. While Frank led on innovation, he still missed the connections in those communities.

What are you yearning for when you miss where you are from? It is an old theme – the longing for home and for homecoming is the purpose of the great tomes, the Odyssey and Ulysses – nostos, in Greek. The root of nostalgia.

It’s not the old phone, or the stone thatched cottages, it’s the connections, the shared culture with embedded meanings that need no explanation, who we were and what we called each other, part of a community. We know that collectives can be oppressive, but humans are pack animals after all. Despite progress and innovation, or maybe because of it, we yearn for our clan.