The Society has 3 copies of ‘Out of Ireland’ by Mark O’Neill for sale (£15 plus postage).  Contact the Librarian for more details - phsilibrarian@pcinet.org.

This is a story about the author, a journalist who now lives in Hong Kong but has Belfast family connections and spent time in Belfast as a reporter during the Troubles in the 1970s. The author is the grandson of the Very Rev FWS O’Neill, one of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland’s missionaries in China from 1897 to 1942. Mark’s father, Desmond, was the son of this missionary and who turned his back on the church perhaps because his parents left him in Belfast to be educated while they returned to China. Desmond subsequently buried his Belfast connections so that it was only after talking to the Rev Jack Weir who was then Clerk of the General Assembly and a former missionary in China that Mark found out about his grandfather.

The book is more than just Mark's personal story.  It relates the contribution which people from Ireland have made in China and Hong Kong as missionaries, doctors, judges, authors, administrators, jockeys, musicians and much more. It will inspire us and widen our horizons written by a man who lives and thinks within those wide horizons.

Mark has also written about his grandfather, FWS O’Neill, in ‘Frederick: the Life of My Missionary Grandfather in Manchuria’ which can be ordered from our on-line bookstore.