During that time, he became a nationally recognized writer and commentator who specialized in raising unpopular issues of public importance, some rooted in Irish history, others persisting in plain sight.

Three decades after his arrival in the capital, with the dust settling on his departure from Irish journalism, he finds himself writing his tenth book, back in the parish in Sligo where his father grew up a century before.

In Give Us Back the Bad Roads, he seeks to outline the facts of his departure from Irish journalism, and finds himself writing to his father as he looks back over the arc of his life, thanking his lucky stars to have escaped from the ideological cesspit the Dublin media had become.