What happened about that publisher?

Ah yes, there was the promise of a "strong recommendation" to a publisher.   Well, she backtracked, but for a good reason.  The publisher under discussion has a tricky habit of acquiring your world rights and then not exploiting them... so you could have a bestseller in Ireland, but the rest of the world would remain ignorant of you.  This happened to a friend of mine... so it was decided that I would try and get some other, more reasonable, publishers to take an interest.  There are several small Irish publishers that will look at unagented books, and there are only about six agents there, of which only one is really active, i.e. has a website and an email address, two of the others have email addresses, the rest are wedded to snail mail.   So much for the Celtic Tiger - more like the Celtic Carrier Pigeon.   Sorry, not being rude, perhaps all that sort of development got stalled in the crash of 2008.  The Irish were terribly stymied after that, and are really only just recovering.  Besides, that sort of personal, quite intimate business model works well in a small country where there are only a couple of degrees of separation between people.