Over a hundred years ago, in May 1897, an Irish fair was held at the Grand Central Palace on Lexington Avenue, New York, to raise funds for an Irish Palace Building, intended to contain a library, a shooting range and a riding school. The most popular exhibit was a giant topographical map of Ireland. In a long, rectangular room, surmounted by a huge green shamrock and surrounded by five columned archways, the map was spread across the floor. It was divided into thirty-two parts, each representing the exact contours of a county. But the special attraction of the map was that each of these ‘counties’ had been filled with ‘the veritable Irish soil of the county … duly attested as truly genuine’. For ten cents, the visitor to the fair could walk the length and breadth of the island. The Irish immigrant could feel underfoot the land itself, the literal ould sod.

As the New York Irish World reported, ‘many a pathetic scene is witnessed daily’. One day, an eighty-year-old Fermanagh woman called Kate Murphy paid her ten cents and stepped across the coastline and made for her native county. She knelt down and kissed the soil,