A Lambing Season in Ireland

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Maria Coffey, born of Irish parents, is married to a vet who likes to
work with sheep. In 1998, the couple left their Nanaimo home for the
west coast of Ireland so that he could help a local vet during the
season of lambing and calving.

One resident opined that old Ireland was being ruined by “forestry
and foreigners,” but the people around Dingle Bay soon discovered that
the Canadian vet was good at his job. He and his wife were made welcome
and made friends. They rented a cottage, settled in to the busy country
life that revolved around sheep and cows, and even adopted an orphan
lamb in spite of warnings from neighbors who had done the same and lived
to regret the experience. Dora the lamb followed the author around as in
the nursery rhyme, needed to be bottle-fed at regular intervals, and
generally behaved like a baby on demand while Coffey developed extreme
maternal anxieties.

With some reluctance, Coffey also found herself lending a hand at many
birthings and at some of the grizzly complications of animal life and
death. After a harrowing cesarean to extract a lamb, the ewe’s owner
commented that, unlike cows and pigs, sheep never complain: “they’ll
never show you their fear. They have principles, you might say.”

The pages dance along with stories of midnight crises, of neighbors
helping each other and always caring for the animals, and of some of the
history that makes these people what they are. As a background to the
births and deaths that attend the veterinary adventures, Coffey never
lets us lose sight or sound of a countryside coming to life in the
spring.