The Bird Woman. Kerry Hardie

       Every year in Ireland about twenty thousand people go to healers looking for cures for an extraordinary range of things: burns, brucellosis, skin cancer, bleeding. And many claim to be cured.

       [These healers are not] chiropractors or homeopaths or that whole section of alternative medicine: those who have developed unorthodox skills and knowledge to put at the service of the sick…They claim neither special training, knowledge, nor skills, but a gift passed from God. Or from nature. Or from inheritance. Or passed on from someone else. Ultimately they do not know whence the gift comes…

       They are not faith healers either. An infant who heals can hardly be said to have faith…Faith healers rely on prayer and faith: these do not. The phenomenon of these healers is comparable to water diviners in that they use a gift that nobody can begin to understand, yet many avail of…

       The more you know of these gift healers the more baffled you become. No one seems able to offer an explanation for their extraordinary abilities. The more baffling this mystery grows, the more fascinating it becomes. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

      —FROM The Gift Healers BY REBECCA MILLANE, BRANDON PRESS 1995