Fr Jim Mulligan was born in the village of Ederney in County Fermanagh in 1946. Although professing a great love for his native country, like many Irishmen of his generation he paid Ireland the compliment of leaving it.
He qualified as a teacher in his early 20s, but, with the restlessness that characterises his fellow Irishmen, he found it difficult to settle down and for a number of years travelled the world working, among other occupations, as a mining worker in Clinton Creek near the old Dawson City in the Yukon and as a construction worker in New Zealand (where he discovered he had a head for heights – and hence the charity abseil challenge).
