Middletown

The Committee for Education and the Committee for Health held a joint meeting in Middletown, County Armagh on Wednesday 19 February.

She also takes issue with the fact that JD Vance never actually lived in Appalachia — he grew up in Middletown, Ohio, and spent summers with family in Kentucky — and was not born a Vance like her, but changed his name to his maternal grandmother’s last name.

Middletown is located in rust-belt Ohio, but Vance identified closely with his extended family’s roots to the south in Appalachia, the vast mountainous inland region that stretches from the Deep South to the fringes of the industrial Midwest and north-east.

By the time the book came out, Vance’s own bootstrap-tugging had slung him far away from Middletown: first to the US Marines and a tour of duty in Iraq, and later to Ohio State University, Yale Law School and a job as a venture capitalist in California.

Vance rose to national prominence with his best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, the story of his family’s origins in eastern Kentucky, their struggle with poverty, his mother’s fight with addiction and the joblessness and blight of Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up.