What’s The Best Way To Cook Hedgehog?

I edited a book recently about growing up in rural Ireland in the 1950s — and it was fascinating.

Now it’s just a memoir about a townland in Co Meath (Jamestown near Rathmore parish, Athboy) and there are no violent drunks or abusive priests. In fact, it’s warm and funny. Not everything has to be dark and brooding and packed with social commentary.

But it actually does have social commentary because living in the country in the 50s wasn’t quite the paradise Dev wanted it to be. Particularly, if you were a hedgehog — because they were food.

My daughter, Hana, was born two years after the invention of the first smartphone, the iPhone, and has not known a life without the internet.

I was born in an age of three channel TV, predating the age of 24-hour news and the background noise of an ever-hungry media.

My father, Michael, grew up not only in an age without either of the above but in a special period in Ireland’s history. As Ireland wrestled with what kind of country it would become — and in an era where the Celtic Tiger could never have been imagined — my father, and many others like him, were blossoming into a 1960s Ireland which was wrestling with the vision laid out by DeValera and the modernity knocking ever-louder on its doors.

In editing this book, I came to a deeper understanding of my own Irish heritage and the colourful characters that make Ireland such, and still, a place of charm and welcome.

At the very least, I now know how to cook hedgehog.

And for that, I shall be ever grateful.

Skilligolee is available in softback at mybestseller.co.uk and amazon.co.uk