This morning a photographer came from the local paper and took my picture with the administrator of the Cathedral parish, Fr. Eamonn Kelly, to accompany the article that is scheduled to appear on Friday. Afterwards I did some work on my research.
I concelebrated the 10:00 Mass, visited the perpetual adoration chapel, and then stopped in at the diocesan archives, where I was given a good welcome, a cup of tea, and a tour. They will look out for material that might be helpful for me.
After dinner I went and got a cell phone with a local phone number, so the locals don't have to make an international call to reach me. Then I went back to the County Library and continued research there. I found a very useful article by Patrick Fitzgerald, whom I met at the American-Ulster Symposium at Quinnipiac College a number of weeks ago. What he says about Irish emigration, that it all needs to be seen as one continuum, and not the Scotch-Irish Protestant emigration followed later by the Catholic emigration of the famine. The emigration to Belleville in the 1810s-1820s was Protestant and Catholic. I will be going to the Center for Migration Studies, where he works, before I leave Letterkenny. It is about an hour by bus from here.
After "tea" I went with Father Eamonn and Fr. Steven Gorman, one of the curates, to the wake of one of the parishioners. The wake was held in his house, with the casket in the bedroom on the bed. Funeral parlors have not caught on here.
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