The Swallows of Jones Road: Extraordinary Annual Migration All Ireland Final Tickets

Every summer, close to one hundred and sixty thousand All-Ireland Final tickets begin the same quiet migration - out of county board offices, into kitchen drawers, across oceans to Belmullet to Boston, Tralee to Toronto, through the hands of people who "know a man." Nobody has ever written the story of one of them.Until now.The Swallows of Jones Road follows a single ticket on its journey from Jones Road to the final itself - passing through the hands of a ticket tout with his own code of honour, a hardware shop owner keeping a promise decades old, a family for whom the ticket means more than the match, and a man named Murphy who has quietly watched it all unfold for sixty years.Along the way, it becomes something more than a piece of paper: a small act of trust, repeated a hundred thousand times a year, that says more about Ireland than any match report ever could.Warm, wry and quietly moving, this is a novel about neighbours, memory, and the things we mind rather than own - for anyone who has ever rung somebody who might know somebody who once helped somebody else.The Swallows of Jones Road a novel by Patrick Downes. (A long suffering Mayo supporter)