Lumper

They had nothing. They gave it away.

In 1845, eleven people slept under one roof in Clondrohid, County Cork. They had a cracked bell nobody believed in, a crock with a stone on the lid, and a sow called Lumper.

Three years later the house was pulled down with the family standing in the road, and Denis Muldoon swore that the dead of that house would be named out loud, once a year, for as long as there was anyone left to say them.

This is the story of the people who did the saying. Cork Harbour and the soup yards. A hold below the waterline. A Glasgow room twelve feet by fourteen. A Lanarkshire pit. The Somme. Clydebank under the bombers. Kilburn. Paisley. The Maze. And a kitchen in Belfast in 2026, where nobody has ever been hungry and the drawer is still kept full of the heels of the loaf.

Nobody in this book is thanked for anything. A penny goes into a cap at a close mouth and no man looks at what another man put in. A man goes into a burning stair four times for people he has never met. A husband breaks the ice on a shared pipe before his wife comes down, every morning of one winter, and neither of them ever mentions it.

Six generations. A hundred and eighty years. Nothing explained, and nothing spared.

It ends with this year's figures for Ireland and Scotland.