Tipperary man's book about his granduncle is labour of love

A book written by a Clonmel man now living in Cork has been a labour of love for the past few years, and is the result of painstaking research carried out into the life and times of an Irishman who spent much of his life in the Southern Hemisphere.
Goodbye Kit was written by Vincent Murphy about his granduncle, Michael C Kickham. Born and reared in Mullinahone in 1861, Michael C Kickham was a descendant of the renowned Charles J Kickham, novelist, poet, journalist and Fenian.
Michael Kickham was ordained in 1884 for the New Zealand missions. A row with his bishop over his nationalist views, as proclaimed in a St Patrick’s Day speech in 1888, resulted in him moving to Australia. After a brief and unsuccessful spell with the Jesuits in Melbourne, he refused to comply with his commitment to return to New Zealand. He eventually received permission to remain in Australia.
In 1899 he returned briefly to Ireland, when he celebrated the wedding mass for Vincent Murphy’s grandparents, before departing for an undisclosed destination. In 1907 his family discovered he was in Buenos Aires, having left the priesthood and become a teacher. He died there in 1909 at the age of 48.
“I can’t define a moment when I decided to write a book about Michael Charles Kickham, my grand uncle. It was more the evolution of an idea than any Eureka moment,” writes Vincent Murphy in the foreword.
Vincent’s cousin Catherine Delahanty had letters that Michael Kickham had written home and she shared them with Vincent, who also obtained more letters of his from church archives in New Zealand, Australia and the Vatican. Further information about him was gleaned from newspaper archives in New Zealand and Australia and various archives in Ireland.
Vincent says that while there was precious little to work on in Argentina, he succeeded in building a picture of his life there from information obtained from current day descendents of some people he knew in Buenos Aires.
“Much of the book is written as though it was Michael’s autobiography. I felt this would allow for a more interesting story than the mere reproduction of articles and letters. I hope that has worked,” he says.
The full title of the book, Goodbye Kit, It May Be For Years and May Be Forever, is a quotation from a letter that Michael’s sister Kattie wrote to her sister-in-law, where she says: “you remember what he said to me when he was leaving.”
Vincent Murphy was born in O’Connell Street, Clonmel, where his grandfather Raymond Murphy had a shop and grocery store. He is son of the late Anthony K Murphy, the former managing director of The Nationalist newspaper, and Mary Murphy (née Hally).
The family later moved from O’Connell Street to Davis Road and Vincent attended the CBS High School and Coláiste na Rinne in Ring, Co Waterford, where he spent a year as a boarder. He received his secondary education at the Franciscan College in Gormanston, Co Meath, before studying engineering at UCD, and from where he graduated in 1971.
However he wasn’t sold on the idea of taking a permanent job for life at that stage and moved to Guatemala in Central America, where he spent two months learning Spanish. He then moved to Panama, where he spent two years working as a teacher in a rural vocational school in a remote area of the country, and where there was no electricity or running water.
Returning to Ireland in 1974, he spent a short time working with Cork Corporation before moving to Mott MacDonald Pettit, where he became a partner of one of the largest engineering consultancies in Ireland, before his retirement in 2008.
In 2020 he was co-founder of a group in Cork called The Next Step, a voluntary mental health support group that provides activities including art and crafts, book groups, yoga, creative writing, mindfulness and singing. The Next Step is now part of Cork Mental Health Foundation and Vincent is on the board.
He has also produced The Wild Patagonian Way, covering three trips to Patagonia in the southern region of South America. One of these trips was taken as a lone traveller, hitchhiking in 1981, followed by a trip with his family in 2005, and in 2016 leading a group of hill walkers to El Chalten in Argentina and Torres del Paine in Chile. This book, originally produced for family and fellow hill walkers, is currently being reworked for publication.
He has also published Me and My Relations, a family history; Southwards, a narrative and photographic record of a trip with his wife Sarah to the Falkland Island, South Georgia, the Antarctic Peninsula and Chile, which is also being reworked for publication; and Picos de Europa, a narrative and photographic record of a hill walking expedition to the national park of the same name in Spain.
He is currently involved in planning the commemoration of Conor O’Brien’s circumnavigation of the globe between 1923 and 1925, the first person to do so under an Irish flag, and in a boat designed by himself.
Goodbye to Kit is on sale at The Bookmarket in Clonmel, The Cabin in Carrick-on-Suir, Lonergan’s Gala in Mullinahone and The Book Centre in Waterford. It’s also available online at Print my Book, an online bookseller based in Carrigtwohill: https://printmybook.com/shop/category/history/product/1256.
“Though challenging and at times frustrating and heartbreaking, I enjoyed every minute of it (writing and researching the book). I hope you, the reader, will enjoy the result,” says Vincent, who lives in Douglas Road in Cork.

Tributes as Tipperary county registrar steps down after 40 years' service