A note from the Taoiseach

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For seventy years, when the O’Dubhda clan came together in Tireragh, we called it a Rally.

The 1953 Rally. The 1978 Rally. The 2003 Rally. These were real events with real names, and they will keep those names — they are part of our history, and history is not ours to rewrite. The men and women who organised those gatherings, who travelled across oceans to be there, who pitched tents on the strand at Enniscrone and toasted the chief at Easkey — they came to a Rally, and that is what the photographs and the programmes and the memories will always say.

But the word for what comes next is going to be different.

A word that fits the clan we have become

When the first modern Rally was called in 1953, the O’Dubhda were largely a clan of Tireragh and the surrounding parishes — Sligo, north Mayo, the families who had stayed close to the homeland. The word “rally” made sense in that context. It came from military and political English, where it meant to call your people back together — to regroup, to stand again where you had stood before. For a small clan reuniting on its own ground, it was the right word.

The clan we have become is wider. We are Americans and Canadians, English and Australian, South African and Argentinian and a dozen places in between. We are people whose great-great-grandparents left Ballina or Easkey or Skreen on a coffin ship and never came back, and whose descendants are now flying back across the Atlantic with the dust of three generations on their shoes.

For that clan, “rally” is the wrong word.

It is wrong partly because the word has drifted. In 2026, when an American member tells a colleague she is going to a “Clan Rally,” she has to spend the next sentence explaining what it is not. That is a small friction, but it is a real one. And a clan that wants to welcome everyone has a duty to think about what its words sound like to ears it has never met.

But it is wrong for a deeper reason than that. “Rally” has the shape of a campaign. You rally for something — for a candidate, for a cause, for a position you want others to adopt. That is not what we do when we come to Tireragh. We are not coming to convince anyone of anything. We are coming home.

Why not simply “Gathering”

We considered it. “Gathering” is warm. It is what The Gathering 2013 called the great national homecoming of the Irish diaspora, and it carries no baggage. It would have been an easy choice.

But it is also the word half the corporate retreats in America use for their off-sites, and the word every wellness conference in California uses for its weekend programme. It is everywhere. It says nothing specific. It does not name what we actually do.

Homecoming

What we do, when we come back to Tireragh, is come home.

Not to our houses — most of us will fly back to those, to other countries and other lives. But to home in the older and stranger sense of the word. To the place the body recognises before the mind has caught up. To the rain on the strand at Enniscrone that smells like something you have known your whole life without ever being able to name. To the green of the Ox Mountains and the grey of the Atlantic and the air, just the air, that makes you stand there and understand — without anyone having to tell you — this is the place I was made for.

You can feel it in your DNA. Geneticists will tell you that is not how DNA works, and they are right, technically. But every member who has ever stood on the field at Carn Amhalghaidh, or walked the foreshore where the Moy meets the sea, or laid a hand on the wall at Ardnarea Castle, knows what I am talking about. There is something in the body that remembers ground it has never seen. There is something in our blood that calls us north and west, to a county our grandparents may never have spoken of, to a townland we cannot pronounce, and tells us — this is where you are from.

That is not a rally. That is a homecoming.

What changes, and what does not

From 2028 onward, the periodic in-person assembly of the O’Dubhda clan will be called a Homecoming. The 2028 event will be The 2028 O’Dubhda Homecoming — held at Enniscrone in October, the same month our Taoisigh have always been raised on the mound at Carn Amhalghaidh.

Looking back, every one of these events was a homecoming. The men and women who travelled to the 1953 Rally from England and Boston and Australia did not come to be rallied — they came home. The members who pitched tents at Easkey in 1978 did not come to be persuaded of anything — they came home. We are not changing what these events were. We are simply naming them correctly, at last.

Past events keep their original names in the historical record. The 1953 Rally was called a Rally. The 1978 Rally was called a Rally. The timeline on this site will continue to honour them by the names they were given in their own time. We are not editing the past. We are choosing what to call the future.

If you are reading this from Boston or Brisbane or Buenos Aires, and you have ever wondered whether you would be welcome at one of these things — yes. You would be welcome. That is, in the end, the whole reason for the change. We wanted a word that said it out loud.

Come home in 2028.

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Sean O’Dowda Stephens
Taoiseach, Clan O’Dubhda