The Personals

by Brian O'Connell

  Feck off recession, in other words.

  By the time Jean got married for the second time, she was well over 40. Her first marriage had lasted over a decade, and while she and her current husband have been married for several years, they have been together a lot longer. There’s a reason they had to wait so long to get married which I’ll come to, but looking back, Jean is now able to see clearly why her first marriage failed. ‘I was very young when I got married first time,’ she tells me. ‘Too young, to be honest. I was 19 years of age going on 20. I only knew him about eight months. My own mother got married at 17, so it was the done thing back then. I was in love and he was my first serious boyfriend.’

  Jean’s father had died when she was 17. He had still been a young man. Looking back on it she says she endured a very controlled upbringing in which her father had a strong hand in her personal life, something that’s probably totally alien to today’s teenagers. This meant she had to be in bed most nights at 9 p.m. and had very little choice to do anything socially. So when her father died, she naturally responded to her newfound freedom.

  ‘I went a bit crazy and I was a bit of a handful for my mother,’ she says. ‘The environment was so strict for me when I was younger. All my friends would be going out dancing in the local hall over the weekend. I’d come into school Monday and I wasn’t even allowed to go to the cinema or the shops hardly. I had nothing to talk to them about. Parents think by doing this they are keeping their kids closer to them and shaping better what they want them to be, but in reality, they are pushing them away and into the thing they fear most.’

  Although Jean married young, at first it went well, but after a few years problems arose. She and her ex-husband split up at one stage and she says she went back to him because he promised he’d change. She spent several more years living with him, time she now says was a ‘waste’. ‘I went back believing things would change and they didn’t,’ she adds.

  She met her present husband out socially. Every Thursday night she used to go with a friend to a local bar. Her husband was from a large family and she knew his sister-in-law and they would pass each other from time to time in the bar. One night he joined them. She was still living with her previous husband at the time. ‘I was with him physically, but emotionally, I wasn’t with him. We hadn’t shared a room in a long time.’ Jean and I discuss how often people think they’re doing the right thing by children in staying together, but how often this can have a far greater negative impact than adults realise. Reflecting back, she said her children became pawns at times in the disagreements between her and her ex-husband, especially after their separation.

  Having left her husband, she had her wedding to her new partner to plan. A deposit was paid and the limousine was booked. Jean had assumed that divorces took up to five years to complete, when you take into account the time they had spent living apart, and then the time needed to go through the legal process. Instead, the process dragged on for several years more, as difficulties between her and her ex-husband played themselves out in court. This meant that much like her teenage years, her life was on hold again. Eventually the process was complete and she attended court for one final time to have her divorce finalised.

  ‘I will never forget that day,’ she says. ‘I went to the courtroom and the judge said to me, what do you want? He meant financially, but I told him all I wanted was my divorce, nothing else. The judge said I was entitled to certain things, but I just said please give me my freedom. I walked out of that courtroom feeling as happy as if I had won the lottery.’

  Within a few weeks, the wedding was back on, but now they could only afford a much smaller gathering of about 30 or so guests. This did not go down well with either extended family. At this point she and her partner had been living together for well over a decade, and the hassle about numbers and who would be left out was turning her off the idea of marriage. ‘It was really important to my husband that we get married,’ she tells me. ‘As far as I was concerned we were a married couple anyway, but he thought differently. If I suggested not getting married, he would say, “Don’t you love me enough to marry me?” He’s a lot younger than me.’

  Her husband got his wish and they committed to each other on a beach in the Caribbean where she wore a light summer dress. The dress for sale in the ad is a heavy chiffon dress more suited to Irish weather, and comes with a large train. When she took it out to photograph it, part of her still regretted not getting married in it. If she sells the dress, the money will be spent on children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She may not have had the wedding she wanted, but she says in the end she ended up in the marriage she wanted. ‘I come first as far as my husband is concerned,’ she tells me, proudly. ‘He puts up with me and he is very quiet in fairness. I could nag the life out of him and he never reacts. The most he might say is “bite me” or something off-hand like that.’

  The secret to a happy relationship she says is to marry someone who is a friend first and with whom you share similar interests. She says that looking back, she and her first husband were too similar in terms of their strong personalities. ‘You almost have to have one person in the relationship who compromises a lot,’ she says.

  She says she can’t think of a single complaint she would make about her husband – he is the love of her life and her best friend. ‘He is so easy-going,’ she tells me. ‘He never says anything bad or is ever coming out against me. If I said to him jump off a bridge, he would do it if he thought it would please me. And that’s saying something, because the same fella has an awful fear of water ...’

  Part Two

  EQUIPPED FOR LIFE

  The Car That’s Bulletproof

  For sale: armoured car – can withstand a 9mm, .38 Special, .44 Magnum and all smaller calibre ammunition as well as a small bomb. Irish Independent, 2015

  It’s not every day you see an armoured car for sale. And this was in the Irish Independent classified section, where I’ve rarely found stories. So, one Friday in 2015, I went to the west of Ireland to meet the seller, an Eastern European who told me he had imported the car. It had cost €100,000 when manufactured, and he was hoping to get €15,000. A bargain, surely. So how could I tell it is armoured?

  ‘OK, if you go around the car with me and lift the door, for example, you see how heavy it is,’ he explains in a pronounced west of Ireland accent. ‘You can also knock on the roof of the car. It’s not empty, it’s like knocking on concrete. Rock solid.’

  And it really was rock solid – the thing must have weighed several tonnes and here it was in a car park outside an industrial estate, having been imported some months earlier. Who had owned it previously, I asked. ‘It belonged to an Italian government minister,’ he told me.

  Assuming that it’s a little on the heavy side for the school run, who in the name of God wants an armoured car in Ireland? ‘People who can afford it,’ he says, ever the salesman. He’s done this before, clearly. Sensing my scepticism, he goes on. ‘You see Irish people have the wrong perception of armoured cars and only associate them with criminals. I would say 80 per cent of people who buy armoured cars are from the government or NGOs.’

  And while he’s telling me this, I have a vision of an Irish cleric turned NGO worker driving around in this bombproof, armour-plated BMW, the latest Snoop Dogg album on high volume, cruising through the ghetto that is Mount Melleray or Glenstal Abbey.

  There’s a serious point here: given the recent spate of gangland killings in Dublin, how can the seller verify that the person buying it from him is doing so for purely legal reasons or activities?

  ‘This is not a piece of military equipment,’ he says defiantly. ‘We will do a Garda check on somebody. Everything is bulletproof. Windows, doors and the roof. It’s the first armoured car I’ve brought into Ireland, but I’ve sold lots of other armoured cars over the years so I know what I’m doing. Lots of them sold to the Middle East and a few of them s
old to America and Canada.’

  I sit in the driver’s seat and turn the key, get her ticking over just to hear the sound of the engine and feel the weight under me. It starts on cue and sounds good for a car weighing 2.7 tonnes and laden with armour plating and bombproof windows.

  A few weeks later, I phone to find out how he’d got on. Did a curate or a criminal try to buy it? ‘I got no calls,’ he tells me. ‘So I had to export it back to Eastern Europe. It seems there’s not much demand among Irish government ministers for armoured cars.’

  ‘You were about 100 years too late, mate,’ I tell him.

  For Your Eyes Only

  For sale: eavesdropping bug for hidden voice recording, transmits up to about 200 square metres and can enable listening through a wall. Evening Echo

  The seller behind what must be one of the strangest ads I’ve seen would only meet me at a petrol station, and gave me instructions to park in a part which was flooded with light. She was very specific in her directions and I suspect she parked some distance away and observed me for a few minutes before walking over to my car.

  She was very polite, and happy to tell me something of the backstory to the items and the ad. She didn’t grow up in Ireland, she told me, sitting in the passenger seat, but she had moved here some years previously. Once we were convinced that neither of us was a double agent, we travelled to a remote country cottage where she was living. She offered me poached eggs, which was weird. It was 6 p.m. I declined and instead she made a cup of tea, and then sat down in her living room, where she began to unpack several items from large cardboard boxes piled up against one wall.

  I could scarcely believe what I was seeing as she laid out a spy camera pen, a false smoke detector with a hidden camera, a pair of reading glasses also with a camera hidden in them, and a listening device that could pick up conversations from 45 metres away. By the time all the items were unpacked, thousands of euros worth of high-tech surveillance equipment was laid out in front of me, all of which had been put up for sale in the classified ads from time to time.

  ‘I bought all this for a particular reason,’ she tells me, ‘and I had a hard time finding these in the first place. While it was difficult to locate this equipment, I am having a harder time selling them.’

  The seller came to Ireland a few years ago for a holiday. She had worked in a fast-paced work environment in the private sector and needed to get away for a while and had thought Ireland would be calm and peaceful. While on a two-week break, she fell in love with the place – mainly the countryside – and thought that the slower pace of life would be a nice change, so she decided to stay for a few months after that. ‘Somehow along the way I met somebody – a local man,’ she tells me. ‘I rented a house from him, actually. We began a relationship and later, we decided to get married. But before that, while I was renting from him, I found out his own marriage was not a regular marriage, in the sense that the wife was not there. They had separated. He was trying to get access to some money in an account that he told me belonged to both of them and he told me he was left with a mortgage to pay.’

  Because of the divorce laws here, she says they had to contact the man’s ex-wife as they needed to show that she had lived away from the family home for a period of time. At some point his ex-wife returned, and disputes began between the parties and it became difficult to verify the truth of what either was saying. After these disagreements, there were conflicting accounts of what was said and the tone of the engagements.

  ‘Every time after she came to the house she would make accusations,’ she said. ‘I wanted proof that this is not true, you see, so I searched around for stuff to film covertly. Our idea was to make some recordings and some covert filming so that if she said at one point in time or date that he was doing something to her or they were arguing in a certain way, then we wanted to prove at that point in time he was somewhere else or it didn’t happen that way.’

  And so she trawled the internet for something that would help prove that her partner was behaving correctly. The idea for surveillance equipment came via Hollywood. ‘We were on the couch watching Irish TV, and one of the Bond movies was on, one of the old ones,’ she tells me. ‘In my head, I was thinking about all the stuff we were dealing with and I thought, wait a minute, I can buy these things to take footage just like James Bond so I hunted around to buy it and take the footage.’

  It’s somewhat surreal to be sitting in this cottage in rural Ireland hearing that James Bond inspired this woman to become a sleuth. I tell her I admire her resourcefulness.

  Eventually she says an order was made that the house should be split between both parties, and that her partner should leave the house while their assets were divided. The situation continued for a few years until they were able to buy back the house and move in again. All seemed to be fine, and finally life for the new couple could begin. She thought about getting rid of the equipment then, but held on to it and the footage she had gathered just in case it was ever needed.

  And, sure enough, one day some months later, someone from social welfare called at their door, looking to confirm some details, as they were concerned the address was being used to make claims, including for disability. ‘The welfare inspector asked me for any tapes or CCTV we had associated with the house. He wanted it to prove that the person claiming wasn’t entitled to do so. Eventually there was a charge and a prosecution and we’ve had very little contact since,’ she says.

  And so, not needing the surveillance equipment any longer, she has been trying to sell it for some months through the classified section of the Evening Echo. Had she had many phone calls? ‘I had one call and I sold one item. It was sad, actually,’ she tells me. ‘The man who bought it said that he suspected his wife was having an affair and he wanted proof so he could confront her about it. He called here and I took out some of the equipment and showed him how you work it. In the end, he bought the button camera. I don’t know how he got on afterwards. To be honest, I don’t really want to know.’

  That had been over a year before our chat and since then she hasn’t had one phone call. When I ask if she is worried that someone may buy this equipment for the wrong reasons, she assures me she is careful to screen prospective buyers. I’m not sure how well you can screen people in practice, but I guess if someone really wants this equipment they can buy it online anonymously anyway. She begins to pack up the items, carefully putting each piece of surveillance equipment back in its box. I’m left wondering why anyone would want to buy this stuff, aside from trying to find out if their partner was having an affair – and how much it would cost them.

  ‘People may need it for security, or to gather evidence in case you ever need it, like we did,’ she says. ‘I’m selling parts of it for €160 but it’s worth more than that and I don’t mean in terms of monetary value. Frankly, you can’t put a price on your integrity and honour. You know with this kind of thing you only look for it when you really need it. You might think it’s James Bond type stuff, but it exists and it can really change your life.’

  Running Up That Hill

  Power chair for sale. Adult size 20. Complete with charger, manual and receipt. Bought for €10,200. In excellent condition. Genuine reasons for selling. €6,500 ono. Evening Echo, October 2018

  Last April, I was in my sitting room when I got a phone call to say that one of my closest friends – the musician and songwriter Brian Carey – had died. I’d thought there was some mistake, that the caller, a mutual friend, had mixed me up with someone else. He’d got the number wrong maybe or this was some elaborate hoax or prank. Good one. Ha. Ha. Ha.

  I remember having to sit down on the couch to physically take the details on board. Brian was dead. The friend was sorry. It looked like, well, you know ... There wasn’t much more he could say. The coded unsaid was clear.

  Brian and I had been friends for about 17 years. We were both blow-ins to Cork. He was from Dublin,
I from Ennis and we shared something of an outsider’s view of our adopted city. We both became fathers at roughly the same time. We lived together at times, took a holiday together, shared a passion for boxing and Bob Dylan. Over the years, we’d developed our own wink and nod language of delight, our own shorthand, and had jokes that ran for years, pretending often that we were old prize fighters ready at any moment to come out of retirement. ‘I think you’ve still got a little bit left in the basement, Brian,’ he would say, as I’d shadow box fervently and we’d both break into laughter.

  Brian came to my fortieth birthday party that summer, and as he always did, brought his guitar and played and sang. On birthdays, weddings, New Year’s Eve, Brian was always there with a guitar. I knew his songs by heart and many of them are now on a YouTube channel he created. Of course, when I listen to them now all I can hear is depression. Like this one, for example, called ‘Running Up That Hill’.

  And you know sometimes we can admit

  That all the barriers broken down

  Just how hard it can get

  When the walls we build are too high to climb

  And you know sometimes you can escape

  When all the days they’re so ordinary

  The wind blows hard but who can tell

  When there’s every which way to turn

  Oh, yeah, I know

  We’re only running up that hill

  Only to find

  There’s nothing there ...

  Ultimately the hill proved too high for my friend. In the days and weeks after Brian died the grief hit me in waves, crashing violently at first, unrelenting, then getting into its own rhythm, ebbing and flowing. I could have done more. I should have done more. Why hadn’t I been more present? The day he died I had been working very close to his house and it had crossed my mind to call on him. I didn’t. We hadn’t seen each other much in the weeks before he died. Now I know it was because he was struggling. I wasn’t alert enough to it. Suicide leaves so many questions, and part of me will always feel guilt. I’ll always feel I could have done more, could have been a better friend, could have saved him. Looking back, there are things I would have done differently.