Based in part on his father’s emigration from Dunnamore, outside Cookstown, to Canada as an indentured servant nearly a century ago, Traveler was an idea that grew out of Heagney’s search for his family history. That search led to the shocking discovery that his 16-year-old father was shipped off alone for three years of indenture to a series of Ontario farmers. His indenture ended in 1932, a secret his father hid until the day he died.
Advertisement Advertisement Did you know with an ad-lite subscription to NorthernIrelandWorld, you get 70% fewer ads while viewing the news that matters to you. But Heagney also found that his father had been swept up in what became known as the British Home Children scheme that scattered poor Irish and British children – some as young as 4 – as free labor to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Involving the British government, Catholic Church and 50 other religious and secular organizations, this global program of human trafficking operated for more than 80 years before ending in the late 1940s.
Traveler is the story of teenaged Neddy McKenna who is shipped off to Canada from his parents’ small Dunnamore farm during the Irish War of Independence. He takes with him just a battered suitcase and his dreams. But in those dreams, he encounters again and again an enigmatic stranger calling himself Traveler who challenges everything Neddy knows .
.. or thinks he knew.
But who is Traveler? An apparition? A guardian angel? Or som.