Béal na Péiste – Winner – Gradam Uí Shúilleabháin 2023

When Réamainn Prút lands in Belfast in 1988, he is a stranger in his home town. He notes the huge adverts sharing the police phone number, encouraging you to call – to pass on information about terrorists, to lift a burden from your conscience.

But Réamainn is thinking of his youth, of the old rhyme the roadside preachers used to recite:

Come listen to my tale of Jonah and the whale;

Way down in the middle of the ocean!

He remembers too the fateful night in December 1942. The night he jumped out of a German plane on the coast of County Down, he made his way to his parents’ house in the dead of night.