The Irish are great travellers and all through my life I lived with the urge to travel. I was no doubt influenced by my father who travelled to Canada in his youth. My brother Terence and I used to be enthralled by his fireside stories of the forest trails, the Rockies and their glaciers, the old Red Indian villages with their totem poles, the construction of roads across the face of towering cliffs and the primitive bridges constructed across raging mountain torrents. We used to marvel at his descriptions of the Aureole Borealis and were entranced by his photos of bears rummaging through the food cache outside his tent in search of molasses. He became expert at constructing log cabins and was responsible for a number of them on the Lisselane Estate near Clonakilty.
‘The Boss’ as we called him was unfortunate enough to strike Canada during the Great Depression and often went hungry. There is kindness in the most unlikely places as he claimed he owed his life to a Chinaman who gave him one meal a day during the cold winters when work ceased due to the ground permafrost that made excavation impossible. The temperature was so low that he wore a mask over his face and if he expectorated there would be a sharp explosion as the liquid turned solid before it hit the ground. Many of his co-workers were Remittance men and there was great excitement when one of them walked out of his tent one evening in the middle of nowhere to answer a call of nature and disappeared in the wilderness.
Life was very lonely for him out in the forests and he spoke of his loneliness when passing houses during Christmas and seeing the happy family celebrating inside. Once when he collected his post he received two letters from home, he opened the one with the earlier post mark and he learned that his twelve year old sister was ill in hospital. Without opening the second letter he knew what was in it and went out into the forest to cry his eyes out. Often when in search of work like O. Henry’s hobos he rode the rails. When a train slowed down at an incline or a water tower he would clamber into a wagon and take a free ride. Years later, in his forties, when he was going into hospital for tests associated with throat cancer, he gave my mother instructions, that in the event of his death, she would send some money to the Canadian Railways as a payment for the rides he had not paid for.
All these tales made an indelible impression on my young mind. They spoke of strange places and experiences but also of deprivation, sadness and loneliness. I resolved that given the opportunity I would throw myself into the unknown, test myself similarly and validate myself as a man.
When I qualified as an engineer I was offered a job on the construction of the American chain of Dew Line tracking stations along the Arctic Circle. These were to warn of a Soviet Missile attack. Now I had a chance to pit myself against the cold and the solitude. I also had a technical interest in the servomechanisms of Missile control systems and was offered a job on the Australian Woomera Test Range, home of the British Blue Streak Missile. My cup certainly runneth over. I was also offered a stab at an PhD on a Plasma Physics project at University College Cork. However all was set at nought when I was offered a place in the Irish Electricity Supply Board (ESB) in Dublin. This was a time when parents had a greater say in the affairs of their children and it was a given that I should take up the safe job in Dublin. Being the eldest son I accepted that I put my shoulder to the wheel and with Terence help with the education of my younger siblings.
For the next thirty years I learnt my profession in all aspects of Utility Engineering in the ESB. Every aspect of my work was done in-house so everything from the theory to design to construction and finally operation had to be mastered. I made sure I rotated through all of these disciplines and at all system voltages from 230 Volts to 220,000 Volts.
At this time I was married with six surviving children. These had to be educated so I entrusted the monies I had saved for this to a neighbour with financial acumen, or so I thought, who was to invest them for me. You guessed it, he embezzled the money and so I was back to square one. I realised at once that the only option available to me was to earn money on foreign consultancy. The first project I was asked to consider was to take a shipload of electrical components to Lesotho and install a Rural Electrification scheme there. A second project was to go to Mogadishu and identify and rectify the substantial system losses there. Consideration of these options awoke my earlier dreams of working in some of the remote areas of the world and I realised that the wheel had turned and I was finally on track to begin my dream adventure. Suddenly the wished-for project appeared on my screen and I grabbed it with both hands. The EC required someone to go to the Ukraine and instruct the Utility Engineers there on how to present their case for finance to the international funding agencies in order to refurbish their collapsing electricity networks. These had been severely depleted by lack of maintenance as the Soviet Union diverted all their funds to counter Ronald Regan’s star wars project. I jumped at the chance. The project had many of the ingredients I was looking for:
It enjoyed temperatures from 300C to -250C. It supplied in practice cultural isolation with its political isolation, strange language and Cyrillic alphabet. The country groaned under grinding poverty having descended to the barter system and workers were largely unpaid. Having lived through the collapse of a super-power I have no fears in coping with the possible collapse of any of the Western economies.
Towards the end of my time in the Ukraine I was asked to go to Zambia and redesign the network of the Copper-belt for the World Bank. Again this had most of the ingredients I was looking for. Extreme poverty where corpses wrapped in sacking were dug from their graves for the sacking. Aids was widespread as well as malaria that I contracted and of course a tropical climate with monsoon rains and very high temperatures. Adventure here derived from the civil war taking place in the Congo next door. The rebels there developed a taste for four-wheel drive vehicles and used cross the border into Zambia to capture some. At least once a week at least one 4x4 would disappear on the Kitwe to Chingola road that I travelled every few days. If the occupants were lucky they would escape with their literally naked bodies. Consequently my instructions were to drive at 100mph and not to stop for anything, not even after causing a fatality. I was advised to be especially wary of policemen and was not to stop for one. This was because the rebels often masqueraded as police and if one was unlucky one would be confronted by 20 of his comrades hiding in the tall grass. I found this instruction difficult to accept. The Police usually stationed themselves on the centre line of the dual-carriageway and as a back-up had some soldiers manning a machine from behind sandbags about 20 yards behind them. This was a Catch 22 to cap all Catch 22’s.
Finally Iraq beckoned, for me the crème de la crème. I was asked to be the Technical Manager of the Electricity sector, the largest module of the largest aid programme in UN history. For me Iraq ticked all the boxes. It had a mad dictator, a secret police that left the Gestapo far behind in terms of brutality and sadism and a temperature range that varied from -150C to 500C. As the icing on the cake it had for me the archaeology of prehistory from Ur to Babylon to Nineveh. I had a personal interest in prehistory and the origins of the world’s religions and looked forward to working in a country that was the setting of the first emergence of a civilized society from a mountainous hunter-gatherer tribe.
When I completed my assignment there and I returned home with all my stories and photos I was advised by all who listened to write a book on my experiences. This was easier said than done. My first draft incorporated the technical aspect, UN Politics, the wonderful people and the country itself, the cradle of civilisation. This first draft came to 1,500 pages. I returned to plan B. I decided that few lay people had much interest in HV lines and substations so I removed most of my technical work. As regards UN politics I decided that it is the main secular instrument for good in the world and at the cutting edge of its work are the most noble and self-effacing people one would wish to meet. I had no intention of hurting these wonderful people so I removed most references to the UN. Finally I deleted a large section dealing with the gifts the early people of Mesopotamia had conferred on the world.
I ran into further difficulties. Roughly 80% of the photos I took in Iraq and New York went missing when I worked abroad after my stint there so I had to replace them with equivalents from the internet. This took many years and I am indebted to the US government who make all images taken by their employees freely available to all. In Kurdistan up to recently attitudes to copyright law were, to put it mildly, very laid back so I had to pass up on some excellent photos. However individual Kurds were very forthcoming and made their cache of photos freely available as did former UN workers, members of the US forces, individual Iraqis and various travellers/adventurers. To all of these I wish to express my heartfelt thanks.
Names of places also posed a problem. I was advised, out of deference to Western readers, to use one spelling for each place through the book. They say that Shakespeare spelt his name in six different ways. So it is in the Middle East. The name of the capital of Kurdistan is typical. It can be Hawler or Hewler in Kurdish, Erbil or Irbil from the Akkadian (Arba-ilu), Arbil in Arabic and Arbela in Syraic-Aramaic.
Finally I ended up with the present work which is a travelogue of an ancient and haunting country together with cameos of its beautiful and long-suffering people. Like Saint Patrick when talking of the ancient Irish said he heard them calling to him in dreams. I too, long to return to Iraq and Kurdistan and wander their plains and mountains.