On his first day in Carrick-On-Shannon, 11-year-old Zak Moradi went exploring in the local supermarket with his parents and eight-year-old brother Makwan. They had just arrived from Al-Tash refugee camp in Iraq and had never been in a supermarket before. The boys bugged their mother to be allowed to buy a drink and she told them they could have one each. They grabbed the biggest ones they saw.
Five minute later, Garda Martin Cunniffe was firmly explaining to the Moradis why cans of Guinness and Budweiser weren’t appropriate for their two little boys. Years later, when Cunniffe was manager of the Leitrim hurling team and Zak Moradi was an All Star forward, they never forgot their first meeting.
Moradi’s book is a story of sport but it’s also a story of a search for connection. He has always had a rootless existence. The first bombs of the 1991 Gulf War dropped the day after he was born. His Kurdish family were moved to a succession of refugee camps, where he spent the first decade of his life.
They eventually got out and landed in Leitrim but it could have been anywhere – on the 10-hour bus journey to the airport from Al-Tash, there was a family bound for New Zealand and a girl destined for Australia.
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Once in Ireland, Moradi’s life changes when a teacher in his new school hands him a hurl and a helmet. For a sports book to leave the introduction of the actual sport until halfway through is a brave choice but also the only one that makes sense.
The picture painted of Moradi’s refugee experience is one of chaos and worry and purgatory, right up until the point when sport comes in and provides him with that connection.
“Once I played sport, I started to feel at home,” he writes. “It was the one time when the language barrier didn’t seem so challenging.”
The chapters are short – extended vignettes, essentially. The story-telling rattles along without ever reaching any particular crescendo.
The Moradis eventually move to Tallaght, Zak traverses the country hurling for Leitrim, they win the Lory Meagher Cup in Croke Park in 2019, he becomes an Irish citizen in 2021. Through it all, the GAA is the touchstone he has been looking for since long before he knew it even existed.
