My brother Donal moved to Perth in 2019.
I won't get into the why of it, because the why is the same as every Irish family's why, going back about two hundred years. There was no work that paid. There was a fella out there who knew a fella. And one wet Tuesday in October he stood in the kitchen with a printout of a flight confirmation and couldn't look our Mam in the eye, and that was that. Off he went. Himself, his wife Karen, and the baby — Saoirse — who was eight months old and asleep in a car seat the last time I held her on Irish ground.
She's six now. SIX. I keep saying it like it'll change.
So here's the thing. Perth is eight hours ahead of Ennis. Which is mad when you think about it — by the time I'm having my breakfast on a Sunday, half her day is gone. We do a video call most weeks. Donal props the phone up against the fruit bowl, I prop mine up against a stack of CDs, and we shout at each other across (and I had to look this up) something like twelve thousand miles of ocean and rock and the curve of the actual earth.
And a few months ago, I started teaching her the song.
I didn't plan it. It just sort of happened, the way the best things do. She was bored — she's six, that's the natural state of a six-year-old on a call with two grown men talking about nothing — and she started spinning around on a kitchen stool. And I said, sure I'll sing you something. And I sang her the chorus. And the green grass grew all around, all around. And she stopped spinning.
That was the hook. The "all around, all around" got her. It's such a sticky little phrase. She made me do it again. Then again. By the third time she was doing the second "all around" with me, a half-beat behind, the way kids do.
If you've ever wondered why this song refuses to die, that's it, right there. A six-year-old in Western Australia who has never set foot in Ireland latched onto it in under a minute. It TEACHES ITSELF. (I've gone on about this before, in the song that teaches itself, so I won't repeat the whole sermon.)
Now we've a system. Every Sunday we do one new verse. Just the one. We did the bog. We did the tree on the bog. We did the branch on the tree. Last week was the nest, and she informed me — very seriously, with the gravity only a six-year-old can summon — that her nest is a "kookaburra nest," not whatever boring Irish bird I had in mind, and honestly? Grand. The song's been changing to fit whoever sings it for hundreds of years. Why would a child in Perth be any different. The bog goes wherever it's carried. If you want the proper running order we keep it on the lyrics page, but Saoirse's version has a kookaburra in it now and I'm not arguing.
Here's what gets me, though.
When Donal and I were small, our father used to sing this. Not well — he had a voice like a tractor turning over — but he sang it. And now I'm singing the same verses to his granddaughter, except instead of being three feet away in the same kitchen, I'm a small flat rectangle propped against a fruit bowl on the other side of the planet. Same song. Same words my father gummed up half the time. Same hand gestures, even — I do the little "feather" flutter, she does it back, half a second late on the satellite delay.
Distance is a fierce strange thing. I can't smell that kitchen. I can't ruffle her hair. I missed her first day of school and I'll miss a hundred more days I don't even know are happening. But for about four minutes on a Sunday, the lag drops away and we're just two people doing the same thing at the same time, and it doesn't matter which hemisphere the thing is happening in. The song is the room we both stand in.
I think that's what these old songs were always FOR. Not concerts. Not records. They were for the people who left and the people who stayed, having one thing in common they could carry in their head, no suitcase required. Half of why Ireland has so many of them is because Ireland sent so many of its people away. Emigration wrote our songbook as much as any composer did. Every emigrant ship that ever left Cobh was a thread being pulled long, and the song is what stops it snapping.
Saoirse will be eleven by the time she gets to the flea verse at this rate, the way we're doing one a week with breaks for Christmas and her getting distracted by the dog. That's fine. There's no rush. She'll have the whole thing eventually, and one day she'll sing it to someone, and she won't be thinking of me when she does it, and that's exactly as it should be.
She just won't know it came across an ocean to get to her.
But I'll know.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Saoirse asked to "meet the cat" last Sunday, so I held Rattlin up to the camera. He stared at the screen, then at me, then walked off in disgust. She thought this was the funniest thing she had ever witnessed in her short life. So now the cat is part of the Sunday call too, whether he consents or not. He does not consent.