A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Every clan should have a clansman like Joe Mannion in their midst – because if a family tree is made up of many branches, it’s going nowhere without someone to feed it at the roots.

To describe Dr Joe – and that is to accord him his proper title – as passionate about the Mannion Clan is like saying the Pope doesn’t mind Mass; he lives and breathes the history of his family through the centuries; he revels in reuniting distant cousins, and he is fanatical in telling the story of a clan that is firmly embedded in the heart of East Galway for well over half a millennium.

Last weekend Mannions from the United States, England, Scotland and all over Ireland gathered in their ancestral village of Menlough to meet; to learn more of their roots; and to visit the many sites around Menlough, Moylough, Abbeyknockmoy and surrounds that bear witness to their integral place in the history of Galway.

They were in their dozens rather than their hundreds – although the launch of the Mannion Clan a few years back did pack the Community Centre to the rafters – but their sense of pride and their delight in being among their own was more uplifting than if they had filled Croke Park.

And that was all down to Dr Joe, whose passion for his subject knows no bounds. The son of Mannions on both sides, he’s in every sense a thoroughbred whose love of history and pride in his family meant that the Mannion story was the obvious theme for his own PhD.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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