Born in Dublin on 12 November 1934 to John McGahern, a police officer, and Susan McManus McGahern, a National School teacher, the future novelist was at first raised by his mother in Ballinamore, County Leitrim, in the west of Ireland. Regulations at that time did not allow a sergeant's wife to hold any employment; hence his parents always lived apart so Susan McGahern could work as a teacher. When his mother died in 1945, McGahern and his five sisters went to live with their father in police barracks in Cootehall, County Roscommon. As his father was friendly with the Moroneys, Protestant neighbors, McGahern was allowed to read his way through their nineteenth-century library. In a special McGahern issue of La Licorne (1993) he remembered how he "read for nothing but pleasure, the way that a boy of that age would look at endless television movies." He received his secondary education at the Presentation Brothers' College in Carrick-on-Shannon and then attended St. Patrick's Teacher Training College in Drumcondra, from which he graduated in 1954. He started to teach in Drogheda, County Louth, and at the same time became a night student at University College, Dublin.
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