‘Do you remember,’ asked my brother on the family WhatsApp, ‘when Daddy bought an entire cow and put it in the freezer?’

“Do you remember,” asked my brother Dara last week, “when Daddy bought an entire cow and had it butchered and put in the freezer?” I did not remember this, since it sounded completely insane, but this is par for the course in our family group chat. Well, more accurately, our other family group chat, the one that’s just for me and my siblings, free from the prying eyes of our aforementioned dad or any of our long-suffering partners.It’s in this group that we marshal grand plans of state, workshop different gifts for birthdays, Christmases and Father’s Days and mount fiddly travel plans for get-togethers. Mostly, it’s where we reminisce about old times and prompt reveries of our shared history together. This was, indeed, its initial design. It was begun by me for the entirely selfish purpose of mining my family for information while writing my memoir. In this, it was miraculously successful. My family are a chatty bunch – I did not, as the fella says, lick it up off the stones – and there are few prompts you can give them that won’t immediately result in the emergence of some previously unplucked nugget from family lore.READ MOREAs my father’s alleged cow purchase implies, “shared” is a relative term. Even if I ask something categorically mundane like if I had gotten bitten by a donkey in Westport, I need only sit back for 90 seconds before half a dozen of my siblings fight to the death over when it could have been, what we were wearing while it happened and whether it even happened at all.A good example is the anecdote which formed the title of my aforementioned memoir, which describes me, aged five, greeting appalled mourners at my mother’s wake with the cheery greeting: “Did ye hear Mammy died?”I have no memory of this happening, nor do several of my siblings. Yet, at least four remember it precisely as it appears in the book, while still others claim I was jumping around and delivering the words in full song. This arrangement pervades for almost every event in our collective memory; multiple overlapping versions of events, each adding more detail and complexity, sometimes directly contradicting several others. Combing through each of these accounts, with all their gaps, disputes and hallucinations, has become a larger part of my writing process than I would have predicted a decade ago, and one I can’t imagine living without.Having 10 siblings has had its drawbacks: the diminished financial means we were subject to in childhood; the prison-like lack of privacy that buffeted our teens; the constant, gnawing, unseemly need for attention, with which we’re all still saddled well into our collective middle age. However, as a repository of information – true, false or indifferent – it’s miraculous. It’s like having 10 external hard drives, all operating slightly out of phase with each other, but seemingly laser-guided to remembering, between them at least, every single embarrassing thing any of us has ever done.When other writers tell me they use large language models in their work, I find the idea blasphemous. The notion of plugging a prompt into an unthinking vortex of bland sycophancy, and publishing what comes out of it, makes me want to put my foot through a screen. I now realise that this is only partly due to my wise and brave hatred of AI.No, I’m forced to admit, the real reason I could never imagine asking ChatGPT to do this work for me is that this position has already been filled, by human beings with a miraculous, if unstable, hive memory of every insane thing that has happened to us throughout our lives.So it was with my father and the cow. A swift call home reveals that this purchase did, indeed, happen, although my dad is typically chagrined by its framing. “You lot exaggerate everything,” he scolds me. It was only half a bullock, he says – “half a beashte” in his exact words - sold to him by a farmer friend, who arranged the butchery through a third party. He did this a further two times due to his love of a bargain and the necessity of feeding 11 hungry, gossiping mouths day in, day out.“That’s not half a cow, then,” I say, “that’s one and a half cows. So, if anything, Dara was underselling it.”“I suppose you’ll be repeating all this to the rest of your siblings?” he asks, after a long pause.“Among other people,” I reply.