Going Home To Mayo, By Paul Durcan A Top Irish Poem Number 85

Going home to Mayo a lovely poem about Paul Durcan travelling with his father as a child.

I loved this poem, there’s something about the journeying that draws you in and opens up thought.

Paul Durcan talks about a trip to Co. Mayo with his father to his grandmother’s house. I feel in this poem he really transports you on that journey that he took. His use of imagery brings you right there. I hope you enjoy my notes on this brilliant Irish poem.nbsp;

Welcome, this week I have number 85 from my list of top 100 Irish poems.

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Going Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949
by Paul Durcan

‘Daddy, Daddy,’ I cried, ‘Pass out the moon,’

Going Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949 is a memory of a night drive from Dublin to the west. A five-year-old boy sits beside his father in an old Ford Anglia, watching the moon keep pace with the car as the towns on the road west slip by.

Mayo is everything Dublin is not. At his grandmother’s house in Turlough there are oil lamps, farmyard noises in the morning and long evening walks by the river, where father and son can really talk. Then comes the drive back, and the poem darkens. The city closes in around them, and Durcan sees in it the shrinking of his father’s life and the end of his own childhood.

It is one of the best loved poems about fathers and sons in Irish writing. Paul Durcan was born in Dublin in 1944, spent his childhood summers in Turlough, and died in May 2025.

Read the full poem: you will find Going Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949 in Paul Durcan’s collection Sam’s Cross (Profile Poetry, 1978) and in later selections of his poems.