On September 9 last year, 38-year-old Seamus Culleton was pulled over and arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Boston as he was driving home from work. Culleton is an Irish citizen, a Kilkenny man who has lived in the US for 17 years. He was legally working in the US and was in the middle of a green card application after marrying US citizen Tiffany Smith, but US authorities argue he overstayed a 90-day visa waiver from 2009 and can be expelled.
The detention prevented him from attending the final interview in October for that green card. He has since been transferred to a detention centre in El Paso, Texas, where he describes conditions as “torture”. Fearing for his life, he continues to plead with the Taoiseach for help.
His story is eerily similar to one in the new short-story collection The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín, one of Ireland’s most acclaimed contemporary writers and the author of The Master (2004), Brooklyn (2009), The Magician (2021) and Long Island (2024), among many other books and collections.
On January 20 2025 — the day of Donald Trump’s second inauguration — Tóibín sat down and wrote Five Bridges, a story about Paul, an undocumented Irish immigrant who has spent three decades in the Bay Area. He is a plumber, paid mostly in cash, who keeps rolled-up money in his socks in dresser drawers. He has an 11-year-old American daughter, Geraldine, who lives with his former partner. Paul has made mistakes, but by the time the story takes place, he has become sober and built a tender relationship with his daughter. That’s what makes his decision so hard. With Trump returning to power on a promise of mass deportations, Paul feels he has no choice but to leave. But what life will he return to in Ireland?
The story came out of a world Tóibín knows well. Over years in San Francisco’s Bay Area, he said in an interview, he had been thinking about undocumented Irish workers who had built hard-won, precarious lives in America. What gave Five Bridges its urgency was the political moment. Trump’s return to office made clear that undocumented migrants were once again in the firing line, especially those who had spent years doing the ordinary work that keeps a country running. Tóibín says he wrote the story quickly, over inauguration weekend, wanting to get Paul out of America before Trump’s triumphant inaugural address.
Five Bridges also speaks to the larger concerns running through the book. The News from Dublin, a collection of nine stories, is not about Dublin at all. It’s about what it means to live apart from family, community and country. Set across Ireland, Spain, America, Argentina and Catalonia, the stories return to Tóibín’s familiar concerns — exile, longing, grief, family ties and the moral ambiguities of everyday life.
In The Journey to Galway, a mother travels west after learning that her son, Robert, has been killed in action, knowing she must break the news to his wife, Margaret. Joe, newly released from prison and cut off from his family, tries to build some sort of life in Spain in A Free Man. In The Catalan Girls, sisters Núria, Conxita and Montse, who were uprooted from Catalonia to Argentina as teenagers, return half a century later after discovering that an aunt has left them a house in Spain. In Summer of ’38, a young woman is pregnant during the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.
Tóibín’s control of language is remarkable. He writes with such restraint that the most painful moments are even more devastating for being so plainly rendered. The stories are patient, exact and deeply humane. They speak of shame, tenderness, resentment and grief, and that people still have to keep going even after the worst has happened.
That is what makes The News from Dublin such a poignant, extraordinary collection. Its power comes from the slow build of each of these stories and from the lives they document with such care. Tóibín makes a clear, convincing case that exile is not just about leaving a place. It’s about the profound impact it has on families, memory, silence and on the private, unspoken ways we come to terms with ourselves. Few writers are better at showing how people live with what cannot be changed and still find a way to go on. Fewer still write about it with this much intelligence and understatement.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.