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It was a cold, damp day of the kind that the Irish call summer. I’d paid my respects at the modest grave of William Butler Yeats and then meandered over to admire a narrow, windowless tower built to guard against marauding Danes a thousand years ago. I was en route with my mother to Galway for dinner with yet another gathering of cousins. She had planned this trip to call a halt to any further erosion of my Irish identity by immersing me in our enormous Gaeltachten clan.