Doohoma is a thumb of land jutting into the Atlantic on the northwest coast of Kiltane Parish in Erris, fifteen miles southwest of Bangor Erris. From the western beaches you look out across Blacksod Bay toward the long line of the Mullet Peninsula; to the south, on a clear day, you can see the high ground of Achill Island. The townland covers roughly 1,075 acres and includes six smaller villages: Doohoma Head (Cean Romhar), Crook na Mona, Bunnafully, Tallaghan, Roy Carter and Roy Bingham. Two pubs, one shop, a Roman Catholic church dedicated to Pope Pius X, and the Doohoma National School - these are the institutions of community life. The beaches are popular with surfers and kiteboarders; the wind that scoured this coast for centuries is now an attraction.

Fishing alone could not sustain Doohoma. So every June, beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing well into the twentieth, whole families left for Scotland to dig potatoes. They were known as 'tattie hokers' - tattie being Scots for potato, hoking being the Donegal-Mayo word for the back-breaking work of pulling tubers from the soil. So many people left from Doohoma each summer that ships moored off Doohoma Head to take them across. They came home in October with cash that carried the family through the winter. The pattern lasted for over a century. It was not glamorous - the work was hard, the pay was poor, the conditions in the Scottish farm bothies were grim - but it was steady, and it kept families on the land at Doohoma when other places had emptied entirely.

In the 1970s, the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ produced a documentary called simply 'Doohoma' that dealt with the emigration of young men from the village to England and the effect on the families they left behind. The film captured something true about Erris in that era - the sense that the people who built the walls and the road and the cemetery were watching their own children leave for good. But the story did not end there. Over the following decades, as Ireland's economy slowly improved, a number of first- and second-generation Doohoma natives began to return. The shop reopened. The school stayed open. The pubs filled up at weekends. In 2016, the Central Statistics Office formally designated Doohoma as a census town - small enough that the designation surprised people, large enough that it qualified.

In 1972, a man named Padraig Coyle founded Eagle Isle Seafoods at Doohoma, smoking wild Atlantic salmon for export. It was the first real industry the village had ever had. In 1987, the council financed a £2 million water scheme that piped fresh water from Carrowmore Lake to households that until then had drawn from wells. The 18-hole Doohoma Golf Club overlooks the Atlantic and is, on a clear afternoon, one of the most spectacularly sited courses in Ireland. None of these things are dramatic. They are the slow accumulation of decisions made by people who chose, again and again, to stay. The cemetery wall built in 1926 is still standing. So is the village.