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The Swallows of Jones Road: The Extraordinary Annual Migration of All Ireland Final Tickets
Paperback
AthletesSoccerGeneral Psychology
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 4 2026
Pages: 146
Weight: 0.39
Height: 0.34 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
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)
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