The Many-Coloured Land

'To be one third Prussian by descent, another third English, and a final third Irish, is a situation fraught with ambiguities . . . it would have been much simpler, I've often thought, to have been able to choose the Irish third alone . . .'

As a youngster, Christopher Koch was intrinsically aware of his mixed heritage. When Margaret O'Meara, his Tipperary born, rebellious great-great -grandmother, boarded the Tasmania to travel as a convict to the southern hemisphere, there began a new dimension within Christopher's family tree; a secretive past that his mother refused to discuss. Many years later it was in Tasmania that the young Christopher grew up, and here that he began his lifelong quest to better understand his ancestral roots, a quest which rears its head in his travels around Ireland in the 1990's.

As Christopher tours modern day Ireland he glimpses signs of tradition amongst the variegated landscape and, with his yearning for meaning, is reminded at every turn of the political and literary figures who have shaped its history. He traces the paths of Yeats and Michael Collins and talks to the IRA's leading biographer. Over his shoulder always is the young Margaret O'Meara, the rebel whose mysterious adventures placed the first seeds of curiosity in his mind.