STEPHEN Connolly's piece for us on his experiences at Listowel Writers' Week has exploded across the Irish media. Stephen was on holiday when the storm broke and today he writes of how he processed the controversy to the sound of cowbells on an Swiss mountain. 

I AM writing this on a train bound for Zürich Flughafen, where I’ll get a flight back to Dublin Airport (Terminal Two), and from Dublin Airport (Terminal One) I’ll get a bus to Belfast (Glengall Street).

I’ve been up in the mountains of eastern Switzerland while a weird media storm has played out about a few hundred words I’d written in this column a few weeks ago about one small part of my experience working for Listowel Writers’ Week in County Kerry.

I’ve had lots of emails and messages from people who have been reading about it, and some angry older men have been positively outraged that I’d have the audacity to talk about experiences that had a serious effect on me. They’ve taken to Facebook: None of them have noticed how much I’ve said about the friends I made and the people who made me feel welcome, and one of them has even tried to teach me about Seamus Heaney and Ballymurphy.

On this train, I’m quietly eavesdropping on the people around me who have just struck up a conversation (in English) about where they’re from: We’re from the US, but, well, the Philippines originally, one man says. You look like you’re from India, their new friends (who I can’t see) respond. And where are you from?, the first man replies. Trinidad and Tobago, but Tobago really, but we’re Swiss-German now. Their conversation continues about countries they’ve visited. Amsterdam is quite far, one of them says, but then Germany is very close and so is Austria. Neighbour countries, all of them, we used to go over there for shopping.

Their discussions of geography go wider: What is the elevation of Tibet compared to the highest parts of Switzerland? And where were we in Peru? In my simultaneous writing and eavesdropping, I have forgotten who’s from the US (or Philippines) or Tobago (or Trinidad and Tobago, or Switzerland). I’m getting closer to Zürich.

When I think of Zürich, I think of the final words at the end of Ulysses, where Joyce notes where he’s been: Trieste-Zürich-Paris 1914-1921. I think of the pilgrimages people take to visit his (final?) resting place. I can’t pretend to know a huge amount about Joyce, but A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was a mind-expanding read when I was seventeen or so. He talks about nets that are ‘flung around you’, a school-teacher who encouraged my reading told me, referencing nationality, language and religion.

I have been thinking a lot about my maternal grandfather, who would have turned one hundred this week. He was born about a quarter of a mile from where the Boundary Commission would eventually draw their line between the two newly-established states. His family farmhouse was on the Fermanagh side of the line. If he’d been born slightly west of there, he’d have grown up in the Free State. He moved to Belfast for work and spent the late 1960s and early 1970s living in Clonard Gardens, working in the shipyard by day and in bars by night.

He would’ve been retired around the time of my third birthday when he was working in The Rose and Crown on the Ormeau Road. Years and years later, my mother told me (quietly) about the pints he’d set up on the bar for men who went out to place a bet in Sean Graham’s on a Wednesday afternoon and never returned. She said (more quietly) that it never left him.

Every now and then I walk from where I live on the Ormeau Road to where he lived in Clonard Gardens and think about the changes between then and now. Since everything’s fluid, it doesn’t enter my head that he wasn’t living on that street in 1992. It doesn’t enter my head that the house he would have lived in on that street has been knocked down and replaced. But it was him, Jimmy Martin, that I thought of right then at the moment I was told in Listowel that the parochial argument about a book festival was ‘the same’ as what happened in the North in 1969.

The train is approaching Zürich Flughafen and I’m going to close my computer and check for my passport one last time.