Cork author: 'Finishing the book after losing my mother felt impossible...I hope she'd be proud'

I grew up on the northside of Cork city in the 1980s, but I was always regaled with tales from the 1960s by my father, who I think of as a founding member of the northside, having lived there since houses began to make their journey northwards out of the city.

One of the great stories of the 1960s was the visit of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy to Cork, and it was a famous photo of his motorcade passing through Patrick Street that inspired me to write a novel.

That book, called Two Weeks In June, was published 20 years ago, after two years of writing and many drafts. It was a great success, and a 20th anniversary edition of the book is now being made available, ahead of a sequel later this year.

My father grew up on Cathedral Road, in the house where my fictional family in the novel, the Horgans, lived.

I spent many a night of my youth around a table after a card game of five lives or sevens, listening to my father recount stories from his own experiences growing up and living on the northside; some comedic, some sad, but always captivating.

From his adventures in Denny’s Meat Cellar in Blackpool to the Templeacre Tavern on Gurranabraher Road, each story held its own special magic. It was these nostalgic stories that I didn’t want to lose to history.

The visit of President Kennedy to Cork has long been part of local folklore. On June 28, 1963, he arrived in Cork as part of a four-day trip to Ireland where approximately 100,000 people flocked to see him.

The famous picture of his motorcade passing through Patrick Street motivated me to write my novel. The result was a story set in Cork during Kennedy’s historic visit in 1963, five months before the tragic events in Dallas when he was assassinated.

I used excerpts from the Cork Evening Echo in 1963 at the beginning of each chapter, weaving these articles into the plot of the story as well.

A mixture of love, violence and political intrigue, the novel was launched to great reviews in 2005, and nationwide distribution ensued through stores like Easons and Waterstones.

Not long after the book was published, I started to receive emails from people who had read the novel. People from Cork started sharing their experiences with me about the time the novel was set. People who had been present for JFK’s visit to the city, people whose parents were in the picture that inspired me.

Soon, I was receiving emails from as far as Australia and the USA.

Although the novel had only been released in Ireland, it was finding its way abroad to Corkonians who had spread their wings, but still felt the pull of love and nostalgia for their home.

I still receive emails to this day, from people who were handed a copy of the novel, or found a tea-stained copy sitting on a shelf in a second-hand bookstore.

Soon after publishing Two Weeks In June, I started writing a sequel. I wanted to continue the exploits of the Horgan family from Cathedral Road, and particularly Jack Horgan and his mysterious past.

I wrote some chapters, but then stopped, as other writing distractions took priority.

I sold the film rights to Two Weeks In June to Fastnet Films in Dublin, but after a lot of development work, they were unable to get financing for the project, so the rights reverted back to me.

I had just completed a screenwriting course in the University of Wisconsin so I decided to adapt the novel into a screenplay.

In 2007, I won the BBC Tony Doyle Bursary Award, which led to a screenwriting agent in London and writing assignments with the BBC, RTÉ and TG4 over the years.

The highlight for my parents was a stint writing some episodes of Fair City, which superseded any other writing achievements I might have had in their eyes, I think.

The idea of the sequel was never far from my mind, so in 2024, just after publishing another novel called Memory Road, I decided to dust off the old pages of the sequel and start again.

It wasn’t easy going, and when I was halfway through, we got the news that my mother had cancer and hadn’t much time left with us.

She was naturally the biggest fan of Two Weeks In June, and asked me if she could read the sequel. I started printing and feeding her pages daily, first in the Mercy Hospital and eventually in Marymount Hospice.

She devoured each page and loved returning to these characters and their new adventures, but, sadly, time was against us and she never managed to finish the novel before her own story came to an end.

Finishing the book after losing my mother felt like an impossible task, but after a lengthy break, I returned to the keyboard and started again.

What I ended up with, I hope, would have made her equally as proud as she had been, back in 2005 when the first book was published.

Two Weeks In June was originally published by a U.S. company which closed down some years ago. So, the novel has been out of circulation for some years now, except for an eBook version online.

With the sequel novel completed and scheduled for publication later this year, I thought a hardcover edition of Two Weeks In June, with an exclusive excerpt from the upcoming sequel, would be a nice build-up to the launch of the new novel, as well as making the original one available again for people who wanted a physical copy.

The Two Weeks In June 20th anniversary edition is currently vailable exclusively on Amazon, 20 years after its original publication, and 62 years after JFK’s historic visit to Leeside.