Monaghan native, Frank McNally has released his memoir, Not Making Hay: The Life and Times of a Diary Farmer.
Mr. McNally is an Irish Times columnist, writing the Irishman's Diary column for The Irish Times on a daily basis.
After being raised on a farm in Carrickmacross, Mr. McNally worked in the Department of Social Welfare for years, before entering journalism in his mid-twenties.
Speaking on the Joe Finnegan show this morning, Mr. McNally recalled growing up on a farm in south Monaghan.
He said: "I grew up on a farm, not quite a small farm, but not a big one either. It was a fairly standard drumlin farm in south Monaghan, of the kind Patrick Kavanagh wrote about. In fact, I stole a line from Ragaln Road for the main title: 'Not Making Hay', so some of the memoir is about making hay. Then of course, I end up in Dublin writing a daily column called 'An Irishman's Diary', hence the diary farming joke.
"My parents would have said, 'study hard and go to Dublin, get away from farming'. I don't know how sensible that was in retrospect.
"I worked in the Department of Social Welfare for most of the 1980s', and then I got to the point, in my mid 20s', where I had to have a try at doing what I really wanted to do in the first place, which was some sort or writing / journalism. That world was a complete mystery to me, I just didn't know any journalists growing up. My uncles, who used to give me career advice, used to say, 'forget about journalism, that's a closed shop for Dublin journalists, and their family," McNally added.
After stints in Australia, and later London, the Monaghan man found himself in Dublin in the early 1990s', where his career as a journalist began.
