THEY nearly died when their daughter Deirdre got a green card and a job in Texas. She was the eldest and had been their only child for nearly nine years before her siblings were born. They feel somehow betrayed that she left and went so far away.
Deirdre is in computers and doing very well. She has been in Texas for a year now. She is 26, working too hard to have a proper social life, and is at times a bit lonely - when she hears Irish music, goes to an Irish book signing, sees Riverdance on the video... well, she thinks about home a bit. Like everyone does.
It's not the blues, nor feeling that she made the wrong decision nor an aching to swing a scythe again through fields of Irish wheat. Just the ordinary feelings - she'd like to know what's going on at home, what friends are doing, what her family is up to. Small things so that she won't feel a stranger when she goes back and hears people say that such and such a place was sold ages ago, or that so and so's husband died last year, or their son wrote a song that was in the charts.
And her family are not e mail kind of people, they wouldn't know what she was talking about if she mentioned it, and her friends aren't on the Internet, and her mother keeps saying that this is costing a fortune every time she rings, so she relies on the old fashioned letter.
Every Sunday her mother tells the family that they have to write a page to Deirdre over there thousands of miles away in America. And she can imagine them sitting in the kitchen just before lunch - two younger brothers and a sister with their ballpoint pens trying to think of something to say. Her father adds about three lines to the end of one of their pages, always but always saying that he was never any good at letter writing, which is odd, considering he has spent his whole life in the Civil Service where memos and letters form the central core of his life.
And the boys write about school and hated teacher who has been put down again brave pupils who outwit him and make him foolish. And sometimes they write about matches that have been played and lost on technicalities. And about the lack of anything to do in the small town where they live, and the cost of getting the bus anywhere out of it. And the half cracked career guidance teacher . . . as if there a future for many of them, no matter how much they studied or how many points they got.
Deirdre's sister writes about the awful clothes that the teachers wear at school. And about how she wouldn't mind working, really she wouldn't, if there was any sense in any of it. But they taught things that nobody in this century and this planet would want to know. It was such a waste.
And then Deirdre's mother writes. Recently it has all been about murder. Deirdre has lost track of the murders, because there are details of this one and that one, and the man who was mad and the one who wasn't mad, and the one that had to do with drugs and, God forgive her, but she couldn't cry over the death of a drug dealer.
Deirdre reads these accounts out in faraway Texas and wonders is it telling her anything at all about Ireland, or much more than she wants to know about her mother?
For a while Deirdre tried to keep away from the subject of murder in her own letters home. She would write bland things about the world certainly having changed a lot, but of course these sad things happened everywhere and really Ireland was lucky to have been spared so much of the violence ... but she might as well have been talking to the wall.
Her mother wrote back testily saying that Deirdre had been gone a long time and may well have got used to different ways and lifestyles, but if she wanted to know how her country really was, then she should take heed of what was being written rather than brushing it all under the carpet.
It was also a case of confused signals: on the one hand her mother was writing about awful, plain girls in the parish getting married to fellows with terrific prospects and buying houses at £167,000 on the road out of town, and how all the rich and famous were coming to spend holidays in Ireland nowadays, from choice mind you. And yet on the other hand she continued writing pages about people all over the country going mad and it not being safe to leave your house or stay in it.
I'm always a great one to see the commercial angle in such things maybe she could get the Saturday edition of The Irish Times sent to her, I said, with the glow of a goody goody ever ready to help. It was a non starter. She got The Irish Times on the Internet anyway. No, that wasn't what she wanted, it was some reference to the feel of her own life back home.
Maybe her friends could write to her, I wondered? If the family was so predictable and doom laden, then possibly friends might offer more insights.
The laugh was hollow. What planet was I living on? Friends write letters?
WAS she unreasonable in wanting to know about home? About what real people thought, and what they were talking about? What would be the subjects they brought up when they met for a bottle or two of wine on a Friday night in Dublin? Or on a Saturday lunchtime if she went home to the country town where her family lived?
But they wouldn't write letters. Even if you begged people to write letters they always spent a page saying how much they hated writing because there was nothing to say.
You couldn't exactly send them a questionnaire, to fill in, or a multiple choice paper asking them their views on various topics.
How did you find out what was happening if you were from an extrovert country where people prize their ability to communicate? Emigrants don't necessarily want to be reaffirmed in their decision to go or be wheedled into a decision to return. They just miss the flavour.
There was an older Irishwoman in the group at the book signing. She said that we might find this ridiculous but she had arranged to have her county's weekly paper and the parish newsletter sent to her. That way she knows about the planning permissions, the concerts, plays or talks; the litter problem, the visitors . . .
She pays a sum each year in advance and even though she is not a religious person she is touched by the small note the priest always sends with the publication.
I thought that was a great idea for Deirdre and said that she might also ask her pals who met on a Friday for wine to write her a page to fax between them every week. She said she didn't want to look too pathetic, starved of news, lonely, wretched.
I said in my teacher's voice that you can't have it all. "You don't know what it's like," Deirdre said.
I don't? I remember being in Australia when we were getting a new attorney general and a new Taoiseach every hour - I will never forget the friends who faxed me the details. And the ones who wrote letters saying what it was all like with the human bits put in.
Years ago I remember when they began an Emigrant Sunday where we were all meant to pray for the boys and girls who had gone. I suggest writing to them - not instead of praying, but as well as. Prayers are fine, but letters are great in the here and now.