Welcome to our site
A Long Road To Freedom-The Life of Patrick McCrystal
No amount of self-inflicted misery, regret, victimisation or revenge can change one moment of the past. Freedom can be bought at a huge cost, but remember that it is worthless if you sacrifice or enslave others in its pursuit and nothing can take the freedom inside your soul, unless you decide to sell it yourself.
Patrick McCrystal
Translate This Page
New Release August 2011
Review of ‘Long Road to Freedom’ by Frank Galligan
Charles Kingsley, author of ‘The Water-Babies’, once wrote: “Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead, - from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.” My sentiments exactly, having read ‘The Long Road to Freedom’ by Patrick McCrystal, who sadly passed away some months before it’s publication but perhaps, that is how this most remarkable and humble of men may have wished it….no fanfare, no fuss, just closure.
Just after Christmas, in early 1937, at the age of seventeen and a half, Patrick McCrystal hitched a lift to Omagh and walked into St. Lucia’s barracks. He had convinced himself that he wanted to see the world and his “family needed the five bob a week.” He died on January 7th 2011, having survived a World War and losing his beloved daughter Geraldine in the Omagh Bomb. In his final year, he reminisced:
“Even the Berlin Wall came down in 1989and the Eastern European countries found their feet again relatively peacefully. What was wrong in Northern Ireland? Borders seem to sort themselves out after time everywhere else, but here we just didn’t have patience to wait. Revengeful attacking just strengthened the border and the resolve to keep it. We were in a state of bully boy-rule on all sides and the peace loving people had no voice. My family knew how to keep out of trouble and if we kept our head down and our noses clean we could manage through the remainder of this conflict. And so we did, right through all those years to the bitter end, as we thought. I’d forgotten about the dying kicks of a war. My daughter was killed after the war was supposedly declared over and when the community had dropped its guard. “
Thanks to his grand-niece Mary McCartan, Patrick raised his noble head up during his final years and ‘A Long Road to Freedom’ is the result. It is one of the most moving evocations of war and peace I have ever had the pleasure to read. This book is the eighth medal on the breast of a true hero, Patrick McCrystal.
This is a story for anyone interested in history or anyone who is interested in hearing one of less publicized voices of the Northern Ireland community. It is time for the middle ground to have a say.. Patrick particularly hoped that this book would attract the youth as he felt his life had been manipulated by economic, social and political issues in the 1930’s, which are similar to what young people may have to face now or in the near future. Patrick loved young people as they are the future and they have the energy to make a difference, but he worried that in their quest for justice their passion may find them following a piped piper of evil. We see war everyday on our televisions or in video games etc, but we only get the satellite view. Patrick wanted people to hear the individual emotional impact of hatred and revenge and consider the long reaching damage one decision to attack can make on a family for many generations after.
In this book Patrick attempts to explain the circumstances and attitudes that lead to war in 1939 and we have to ask if humankind has learned anything by 2011 from the mistakes of the past. We are very vulnerable again of letting hatred and lack of understanding about our inherited emotional psyche lead us on a path to destruction especially in an economic crisis. War benefits some people but millions of innocent beautiful souls pay the price.
A Long Road To Freedom
ISBN: 978-1-4567-8119-4