By Graham Clifford
By the time a fresh-faced Clotilde Courboin, as she was then, first headed west from her home in the Somme to the wilds of North Cork her sister Anne was already settling into life in Ireland.
“It was 1987 and Anne had been working as an assistant in St Colman’s College in Fermoy a few years previously. Anne met and married Tom Hyland from Mitchelstown, but in the early years I would travel over to visit her. And it was on one of these trips that I met Paddy,” recalls Clotilde.
She and Paddy Fitzgibbon continued something of a long-distance relationship while Clotilde completed her studies in International Business at University in Dunkirk, before they eventually reunited and married in 1991.
Full story in this week’s Print & Digital Edition
