From Dublin to Georgia: A Leap, a Bus, and a New Life

Billy Galligan - Author

Welcome to the show, everybody! I'm Billy Galligan. And I want you to picture a scene from November 2015. I'm standing in Dublin Airport -- a place I knew inside out because I'd spent years working airport security there. But this time, I wasn't checking badges or scanning bags. I was standing there with two suitcases, a dog crate containing my loyal Border Collie Lassie, and a one-way ticket to Atlanta, Georgia. I was forty-eight years old. Most fellas my age are thinking about paying off mortgages or settling into comfortable ruts. Me? I was about to jump off a cliff because of a single question asked over a transatlantic phone line: "What if the ocean wasn't in the way?"

Billy Galligan - Author

And when Leanne said those words to me, my mouth didn't even wait for my brain to catch up. I just said, "Then I will move." Bold? Aye. Reckless? Probably. But when you know, you know. I packed up a lifetime in Ireland -- forty-eight years of memories, the cobbled streets of Inchicore, the rain-slicked platforms of Irish Rail, and twenty-three years of service in the Irish Defence Forces -- and tried to squeeze it all into a couple of standard-issue bags. But the heaviest things you carry when you emigrate aren't the things you can weigh at the check-in desk. It's the people you leave standing on the other side of the glass.

Billy Galligan - Author

I left my adult son, Robert. He was my first-born, my beginning, the lad who taught me how to be a father long before our other three scallywags came into the picture through adoption. Leaving him behind was like ripping out an anchor. And then there was my dad, John. He was ailing, fading slowly back in Dublin. When you sign up for that K-1 fiancé visa, they don't put a warning label on the box. They don't tell you in bold letters about the "travel restrictions" during the adjustment of status phase. But in 2016, while I was trapped in bureaucratic limbo stateside, waiting for my green card papers to clear, my dad passed away.

Billy Galligan - Author

I couldn't go back. If I boarded a plane to Dublin for his funeral, I wouldn't have been allowed back into America to my new wife and the life we were trying to build. That is the raw, unpolished truth of the immigrant's bargain. It's a poignant scar I carry to this day, a quiet tax paid in grief. You stand in a quiet room in Georgia, thousands of miles away, listening to a funeral service through a crackling phone line or a computer screen, wondering if the leap was worth the fall. But as my dad himself used to say, you have to look down the road you're on, not the one you left behind.

Billy Galligan - Author

So, how does a middle-aged former Irish soldier, airport security officer, and military photographer find his footing in suburban Atlanta? Well, if you guessed "by driving a forty-foot, bright yellow Gwinnett County school bus while wearing a red-and-black Atlanta United jersey and a rotating collection of fedoras," then you've got a very specific imagination, and you're also completely right. Bus number 2538 -- my yellow chariot of chaos, as I affectionately call it.

Billy Galligan - Author

Now, people often look at me when I'm steering that massive beast through the winding roads of Peachtree Corners or Norcross, and they ask, "Billy, how on earth do you keep your cool with seventy screaming teenagers in the back?" And I just laugh. I tell them, look, before I ever wore the uniform of the Defence Forces, I was a seventeen-year-old Junior Porter for Iarnród Éireann -- Irish Rail. Back in 1985, on the Dublin to Westport line, and later the Belfast run during the height of the Troubles, I learned the art of observation. You watch faces. You scan the carriage. You defuse a row before it starts with a quiet joke or a change of subject.

Billy Galligan - Author

And if that didn't prepare me, my years as a Public Relations photographer for the military certainly did. I've been embedded with peacekeepers in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Liberia. In Monrovia in 2006, I was wedged in the back of a boiling hot armored personnel carrier, dust getting into the camera lenses, documenting our lads doing extraordinary work in fragile places. When you've stood in the ruins of Sarajevo or patrolled under the blazing sun of Chad, a couple of middle-schoolers pushing each other over a missing soccer trading card in Gwinnett County doesn't exactly throw you off your stride. You just pull the bus over, walk down the aisle in your Five Stripes jersey, and use a bit of that old tactical diplomacy. No shouting. Just quiet questions. "Is that card really worth losing a mate over, lads?" They look down, mumble an apology, shake hands, and we're rolling again.

Billy Galligan - Author

There's a real, grounding peace in this job. Every bump, every tricky turn, every kid's stop is memorized. And sometimes, you get to be the exact person they need to see on a tough day. Like this little freckled lad on his first day at Peachtree Elementary, sitting stiffly right behind me, clutching his oversized backpack like a life vest. I saw him in the mirror, looking anxiously at my Atlanta United crest. I turned around and said, "Don't you worry now, lad. It's a grand place. By the end of the day, you'll have a pack of new friends, and if you're lucky, I'll teach you about the Five Stripes. You'll be grand. Off you go." To see the fear leave a child's eyes because of a reassuring word in a thick Dublin accent... well, sure, why not? That's as good a mission as any I had in the army.

Billy Galligan - Author

But let me tell you, the transition wasn't all smooth sailing and scenic routes. The culture shocks when I first landed in Georgia were something else. Back in Inchicore, if it didn't rain for three days, we called it a drought and started worrying about the grass. In Tucker, the summer sun hits you like a hot, wet blanket the second you step outside. And don't get me started on the wildlife. In Ireland, the worst thing that'll happen to you in the grass is getting your socks damp. Here, my first week in the yard, I stood on a little mound of dirt and suddenly felt like my ankle was being branded with hot needles. Fire ants! I was hopping around the lawn, cursing in Irish, while the local squirrels looked on with great amusement.

Billy Galligan - Author

And then there's the language. It took me a solid year to realize that "Hey y'all" is actually one of the most efficient grammatical constructs ever invented by human tongue. It's the Southern equivalent of "lads and lassies," but with a bit of extra honey poured over it. But even as you embrace the heat and the sweet tea, you still need a small anchor to the soil you came from. For Leanne and me, during that first exploratory visit in February 2015, we found that anchor in Decatur Square. An Irish pub called Mac McGee's.

Billy Galligan - Author

I remember walking in there by myself one afternoon, just needing a quiet second to process the massive leap I was contemplating. The smell of the dark wood, the logos on the taps... it felt right. I ordered a pint of Guinness. The fella behind the bar poured it -- proper two-part pour, beautiful dome on the creamy head -- looked up at me, and said, "Dublin?" Turns out he was from Antrim in Northern Ireland himself. We sat and chatted about home and the quality of the stout for an hour. It felt like discovering a tiny patch of Dublin green right in the middle of the red Georgia clay. Leanne and I ended up having our after-wedding gathering right there in Mac McGee's with our friends and family.

Billy Galligan - Author

That's the beauty of it, isn't it? Life doesn't keep to the main roads. It takes you on these wild, unscheduled detours. If you'd told me twenty years ago, when I was marching in a saffron kilt playing drums with the Air Corps Pipe Band, that I'd end up in Georgia, raising three beautiful adopted kids -- Calvin, Kaylee, and our little dinosaur Carter -- and driving a yellow school bus, I'd have told you to not to have another pint because you've had too many. But when the Department of Family and Children Services called us about fostering a newborn, and then we found out he had two older siblings who needed a home too, Leanne and I just looked at each other. We didn't have a map. We didn't have a grand plan. But we looked at each other and said, "Sure, why not?" And that little phrase turned the scariest detour of our lives into the most beautiful destination we could have ever reached.

Billy Galligan - Author

So, whatever detour you're facing today -- whether the road's blocked by flashing lights or you're looking at an ocean you're not sure you can cross -- just remember: sometimes the scenic route is the exact road you were meant to take all along. Take a breath, tip your fedora, and as we say on the bus... hop in, we're already behind schedule. You'll be grand. Bye for now!