Seven-year-old Diarmuid Murphy has thought often about someday moving back to the US and the Marin-Sonoma border area, where he spent his first two years.

His mother, Tomales High graduate Susan Furlong, met Diarmuid's father, Tony Murphy, on a quest to find her Irish roots in 1983. They were married in 1987, and the family finally settled in Ireland

"Mummy, why do we have to live in Ireland?," Diarmuid asked his mother during an hour-long drive along the Beara Peninsula in western County Cork, one of the most postcard-worthy spots in all of Ireland.

"We don't have to," his mom responded, "but Ireland is a nice place, don't you think?"

"Yes, but when you've seen a place for a long time, you get bored of it," said young Diarmuid, completely serious. His three younger siblings sat quietly beside him in the back seat.

Diarmuid's mother said that when he plays with his toy cars, he sometimes pretends they are driving to Petaluma, even though he was just two years old in 1992 when they left California for good.

"America is there [in his memory] for him," she said, "but he can't really reach out and grab it. It's kind of a magical place."

The westward path from Ireland to the United States has been clogged for 200 years. Susan Murphy is an exception, having moved the other way.

"When I was a little kid, I always had a fantasy of living on an island, but it wasn't a big island," Murphy said. "I didn't think it was going to be Ireland."

Her father's family - the Furlongs - have roots in the Republic of Ireland. Her great-grandfather Patrick Furlong was one of four brothers who emigrated from farmland just outside the town of Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in the southeast of the country.

The brothers' father, a blacksmith who was also named Patrick, was just 40 when he died in 1853, the same year his youngest son, John, was born. His widow Margaret was left to care for four young boys at a time of extreme hardship; the Irish were still reeling from the Great Famine of 1846 and 1847.

Yearning for a better life, James Furlong, the family's eldest son, sailed for California in 1866, when the vessels crammed with miserable emigrants were still known as "coffin ships" because of their wretched conditions.

The young immigrant settled in southern Sonoma County, and before long was joined by brothers Patrick and Thomas. Younger brother John and the boys' mother immigrated later, leaving no one from their branch of the Furlong family in County Wexford. (The Irish phonebook, however, lists hundreds of Furlongs, which is a still a common name in the country's southeast.)

and his descendants

Like most Irish immigrants in Marin and Sonoma counties, the brothers worked on dairies. Patrick Furlong married Sarah Gallagher (unrelated to the Gallaghers now spread throughout West Marin), and the couple began their life together on a Bodega ranch. Before long they moved across the Marin County line to Fallon, where they continued to produce children.

Sixth among their 12 offspring was a son named Tom. Tom was the grandfather of Susan Murphy, who moved back to the Old Country, and her cousin Tim Furlong, a Tomales contractor who is currently a director of Marin Agricultural Land Trust and a trustee of Shoreline School District.

Tom Furlong spent most of his years in Sonoma County, first as a dairyman like his father, then switching to sheep in 1948. Among his seven children were Tom Jr. (Tim Furlong's dad) and Edward (Susan Murphy's father).

Intrigued by her family's roots, Susan in 1983 traveled to Ireland to do a bit of genealogical sleuthing. She visited Enniscorthy and saw the now-fertile farmland where her great-grandfather was born during an era of dire poverty.

But she also toured other parts of the country, including rainy West Cork, where she met her future husband, Tony Murphy, a fisherman working through the summer tourist season shuttling visitors by boat from the tiny town of Glengarriff to Garinish Island in scenic Bantry Bay.

"He asked me to go for a drink a dozen times, and I kept saying, 'No,'" Susan recalled. On his 13th try, she acquiesced. "We say it was fate because we get along pretty well."

After a couple of months touring Ireland, she went back for a final visit before returning home. "It was a full year before I saw [Tony] again," she said. "It was an unusual courtship, I suppose, to say the least."

The two visited each other's country about once a year for three years before marrying in 1987. It would be another five years, however, before they were living together permanently. In the meantime, they produced Diarmiud.

In the time since she started receiving her mail in West Cork, Murphy has had three more kids, filling out a squad of bright-eyed blondes that includes Siobhain, 4, Daniel, 2, and Megan, nine months.

Glengarriff, home to just a few hundred people, becomes a lively tourist destination in summer months. Like some West Marin towns, Glengarriff is essentially a main street well-lined with restaurants, bars, bed-and-breakfast inns, and tourist-oriented shops.

Tourists moving between the city of Killarney and the scenic Dingle, Iveragh, and Beara peninsulas stop at Glengarriff, which sits at the foot of a rocky ridge and has its own sort of Tomales Bay - Bantry Bay - although it's three times bigger. Hereabouts too is one of Ireland's last, lush forests.

The Murphys have decided to cast their lot with tourism. They're now renovating a large building on the main street into a 10-room hostel that can sleep 42 people.

Given the deep troughs of Ireland's fortune, "most people said, 'You were foolish to come this way,'" Murphy said. "But it's a great place to raise kids." Moreover, Ireland is in the midst of one of the world's more extraordinary economic booms.

"Financially, it's probably easier to be here [than in the US]," she said. "Wages aren't high, but neither is the cost of living." Indeed, she and Tony bought 13 acres of waterfront property a few years back for 39,000 Irish pounds - about $60,000 at today's exchange rate.

"You'd never touch 13 acres at Point Reyes for that," she said. The couple later turned around and sold the property for twice the purchase price.

"Tony and I are happy here," she said. "I wouldn't give up my house here even though I desperately miss my family." Nevertheless, she added, "I could get Irish citizenship if I wanted to, but I would have to renounce my US citizenship, and I would never do that."