Maggie O’Farrell

Yeah.

And that date just stopped me in my tracks and I thought I couldn't imagine what it would have been like to be doing revisions to the map, the whole map of Ireland on that date when given that the whole country had undergone this cataclysmic change.

Yeah.

I mean, when the Ordnance Survey began mapping Ireland in the 1820s, they had a rule that no Irish people were allowed to work on the maps.

But they discovered about 10 years in, the whole mapping was supposed to take seven years.

It took over 20, partly because the Irish weren't involved.

Of course, there were terrible language barriers and

Yeah, and also get accurate place names, you know, because of various, you know, people who've owned the land in Ireland and the land is being passed on or, you know, in the Ordnance Survey, they describe it as land being redistributed.

But I think that's not a very accurate word.

It's more...

Well, I saw in the archives in Dublin, there was a letter from a man called Seamus O'Sullivan, and he was employed like my great-great-grandfather.

And he said, please, can I call myself Seamus O'Sullivan?

And the answer was no.

You are James Sullivan in the Ordnance Survey.

I was deeply shocked.

I thought I knew quite a bit about the famine, but I read as much as I could lay my hands on.

And the true stories were so shocking that I tried to put them into the novel.

So the story about the character in the novel, Fina, whose name is changed on entering a workhouse and is based on a child that I read about,

Also, there was another child who the person who recorded her entering into the workhouse said she was from Killarney, and actually she was from Killarney.

When her father came back from the States to try and find her, he couldn't find her because of this administrative problem.