Cosgrave and O'Higgins rushed over to London, where they renegotiated another clause in the Treaty - the one dealing with their obligation to make financial payment for Britain's loss of the south. A deal was struck. The Commission's report would be stifled - the Six Counties would remain as they were - but Britain would write off the debt owed by the Free State. Cosgrave returned to the Dail in triumph - but Pat Connors was sickened as he listened to the speech. The Republicans in the north had been sold out for a handful of silver.
Such then were the years of Sean's childhood. Even after the civil war they were violent times. Fifteen thousand prisoners were released from internment camps when the fighting officially ceased - but those men never forgot their suffering. Nor did they change their minds about the Treaty, they hated it... and Dublin continued to teeter on the brink of violence.
For instance, Sean was only five when Kevin O'Higgins was gunned down in the street. Sean was on his way to mass, with Brigid and the rest of the family. Suddenly a man leapt from a car. He shot another man at point blank range. Miraculously the man seemed only injured - he turned and ran - but two other men appeared, both armed. They fired. The man fell. The killers raced off. It was over in a minute. Only later did Sean realise he had known the dead man, he had met him at Ammet Street, the man had been a friend of his father's.
That was in 1927, the year Dev went back to the Dail. Sean was too young to understand elections, but one memory stayed with him. He had been set upon by a street gang. "Is your Da for Dev or against him?" demanded the leader, twisting Sean's arm. Then another kid shouted, "That's Sean Connors - his Da's for the Treaty." After which they had beaten him up. He limped home to Brigid and asked, "Is it bad to be for the Treaty?"
She washed his face and inspected his cuts. "Sure it's bad to be for it and bad to be against it. Politics is all bad, and don't you forget it."
"Is the Da a bad man, then?"
"Oh, hark at that. Isn't it one question after another with you."
Sean had to wait another four years for an answer. His father had been talking politics to him for months by then, so Sean's education was advancing by leaps and bounds. "Dev shilly-shallied over the Treaty for years," Pat told him, "until another General Election, when Dev formed a new party - Fianna Fail he called it, Warriors of Ireland." Pat smiled at the extravagant title. "Well Dev got himself elected and went to the Dail -"
"What about the oath, Da?" Sean interrupted. "Wouldn't he have to swear the oath?"
"Aye," Pat ruffled the boy's hair, pleased with Sean's knowledge. "Aye, sure he's got to swear the oath an' all. So everyone is on the edge of their seats wondering what will happen. In strides Dev to be met by the clerk of the chamber. 'There's a small formality first,' says the clerk, 'I'll have to be asking you to take the oath.' Dev bridles at that, 'I'll not swear any oath,' says he, and turns on his heel and walks out."
Sean sat with his chin cupped in his hands, his elbows resting on his knees.
"A month passes," Pat wrinkled his brow, "no, maybe more. Anyway, Dev comes back and says to the clerk, 'I am not prepared to swear the oath. I am not going to take the oath. I am prepared to put my name down in this book in order to get permission to go into the Dail, but it has no other significance.' And with that Dev pushes the bible aside and signs the book which all members of the Dail have to sign. 'You must remember,' Dev says loudly so everyone can hear, 'I am taking no oath.' Then he takes his place in the Dail. And don't the rest of his new Fianna Fail party do the very same thing."
Sean stared, not properly understanding. "So the clerk called the guards and had them thrown out."
Pat shook his head, "No, Dev was in. He had signed the book."
"But what about the oath?"
Pat scratched his head. "The Constitution is a bit muddled about that. You see, signing the book and swearing the oath sort of went together. I suppose the truth is nobody knew what to do." Pat chuckled, "I bet Dev banked on that all right. And isn't the auld devil still there today."
"Without swearing the oath?"
"Without swearing the oath," Pat agreed solemnly.
Sean scowled. "So all that fighting, Da. What they did ... your bad leg ... everything was for nothing. Couldn't Dev have done that to begin with and saved all that killing?"
"Maybe - or maybe Dev never thought of it before."
Thus another Saturday afternoon drew to a close. But Pat always ended with a story funny enough to send the boy away laughing and looking forward to his next visit. Not that the exchanges were all one sided. Sean had information of his own to impart. Usually he recounted the events of his week with boisterous excitement, but one day he hesitated. "You won't be telling on me?" he asked anxiously.
Which Pat took to mean he was to learn something not known to Brigid, or at least which Sean thought was not known. In Pat's experience nothing happened in that household without Brigid learning about it, whether she let on or not. He answered carefully, "That's a terrible thing to be asking before I know what it is. Couldn't you at least be giving me some kind of clue?"
At which Sean threw caution to the winds and explained about the donkey. That summer he and his cousin Michael had helped out at a farm near Palmerstown. They had given half of their earnings to Brigid, but used the other half to buy a donkey.
"Aunt Brigid knows," Sean added hurriedly. "She thinks we're keeping it as a pet."
"Aye," Pat nodded. "An' wasn't I told all about it the other Sunday. She knows you've got the animal up at the farm. So what's the big secret?"
"A pet!" Sean's derision was cutting. "Wouldn't you think Aunt Brigid would know we're too old for pets?"
Pat regarded his ten-year-old son in silence, then listened intently as Sean's voice fell to a whisper. The donkey had cost two pounds. The cost of its feed and keep were three shillings a week. But Seamus O'Malley was paying them two shillings a day for the hire of the animal!
"Who's Seamus O'Malley?"
Sean was astonished. "Don't you know old Seamus? Da, everyone knows Seamus."
Old Seamus was a knacker who pushed a cart from door to door collecting rubbish and cast-offs. Or at least he used to - now Sean's donkey pulled the cart. Brigid considered Old Seamus to be no fit company for young boys on account of his habit of falling down drunk most nights of the week. Hence the secrecy. Sean hurried on with his explanation. Six days a week at two shillings a day earned twelve shillings a week, less overheads - which meant the capital cost of Charlie the donkey was recouped in just over a month. After which the new enterprise of Sean Connors and Michael O'Hara could look forward to a clear profit of nine shillings a week!
"Suppose Old Seamus doesn't pay?" Pat queried cautiously.
Sean shook his head. "Don't we make him pay when he brings Charlie back every night? A day in advance, in case he spends it on booze before morning."
"Suppose he runs off with the donkey?"
Sean hooted with laughter. "Old Seamus run? He has trouble walking by eight every night."
"Why wouldn't Old Seamus be buying his own donkey instead of dealing with gombeen men the likes of Michael and you?" asked Pat.
Sean accepted the description without batting an eyelid. Gombeen men were shrewd traders. A gombeen man might own shops and lend money on the side - he might do any manner of things, but they would all earn money.
"Old Seamus never had more than ten shillings in his whole life. He spends it on booze, Da, as fast as he gets it."
Pat cast a guilty glance at the three bottles of Guinness on his shelf, but Sean was too busy explaining to notice. He and Michael were buying another donkey next week. "What do you think of that, Da?"
"Does Old Seamus need another donkey?"
"Not Old Seamus - Paddy Cullen who collects down Baggot Street. He needs a donkey."
"An' will he be paying you two shillings a day too?"
Sean nodded, and hastened on with an explanation which seemed to envisage donkeys forever more. Soon every knacker in Dublin would
have a cart pulled by one of Sean's donkeys. Pat interrupted the outpouring to point out that some traders already had donkeys. Some even had horses.
"But there's still plenty of Old Seamuses, Da. I bet Dublin is full of them if you looked hard enough."
Pat made a final attempt to dampen Sean's ambitions. "Wouldn't you be better off saving some money? Seems to me you're no better than Old Seamus, spending money as fast as you get it, him on booze and you on donkeys."
"Wouldn't that be a dreadful waste, Da, locking money up like that. Nearly as bad as Old Seamus boozing his. Mick heard Mr Caffety say that money should work for you - well, nothing works harder than a donkey."
Sean found his Old Seamuses right enough. Twelve months later he and Michael owned seven donkeys - and a year or so after that the Connors and O'Hara stable boasted thirteen donkeys and one bay gelding. It amazed Pat who could never understand grown men doing business with boys. But Sean looked embarrassed when Pat said as much. "They're not doing business, Da. It's only a few Old Seamuses messing around with a couple of kids." His embarrassment gave way to a proud smile, "And we give Aunt Brigid two pounds a week now."
Pat smiled, remembering when Sean and Michael had delivered their first little bonus. The whole story had come out,- Old Seamus and all. But Brigid had to admit that the old man had not driven the boys to drink, and she was more than pleased with the money. The boys spent every spare minute up at Palmerstown. Brigid never had to ask where they were, it was always the stables - stables mind, not just a paddock or a patch of waste ground. Even Charlie, their very first donkey, had been housed in a stable - a crude affair which Sean had built from old packing cases scrounged in the docks, and which he enlarged whenever Charlie had brothers or sisters. The Connors and O'Hara stable was nothing to look at, even Sean admitted that, but at least it was dry, and Sean made it warm by packing mud and straw into the cracks in the woodwork.
People thought the boys were mad to begin with. Local donkeys were thin scraggy beasts whose coats were rough from sleeping out in all weathers - but a Connors and O'Hara donkey could be spotted a mile off. It would have a healthy coat and be wearing a straw hat which Maureen had made. And whoever was using it would be keeping a watchful eye on his charge, knowing that Sean inspected each beast at the end of the day.
One day Pat was in a pub when a man ran in and shouted, "Eh, Garret, kids out there are tormenting your donkey. It's in a right lather." And a man down the bar slopped Guinness over the counter. "Oh Jaysus," he groaned as he rushed to the door, "that Sean will have my hide if anything happens to that beast of his."
The incident stayed in Pat's mind. He never mentioned it to Sean, nor at the time did he go outside to see what was happening. He was shocked after, telling himself it was a poor father who doesn't protect his son's donkey. Yet there was only one answer. Sean needed neither help nor protection. That man had fairly flown to the door for fear of facing Sean's wrath - that man in his fifties, when Sean was aged twelve at the time.
Years later, when Sean Connors was rich and famous, millions of words were written about his childhood. Rubbish most of them, a mixture of half-truths and lies. Certainly Paul Thompson's The Power in the Back Room got it wrong. All that stuff about starving in a Dublin slum and running bare-arsed through the Liberties - Brigid must have spun in her grave. Of course they were poor - living as they did in the tiny terraced house, with Tomas sleeping with the boys and Brigid with the girls, just one room downstairs and a kitchen - but they were proud poor. Being poor is a million times different from the childhood Sean was supposed to have had. He was strictly brought up. School with the Christian Brothers and scars on his hands to prove it - prayers seven times a day, confession every Saturday and mass on Sundays. Brigid and Tomas loved him as their own, and Pat Connors would have died for him. Most people who researched Sean's early life spent too much time looking in the yellowing pages of old newspapers. Had they known Sean's parents, or Brigid and Tomas and the rest of the family, maybe fewer lies would have been told. For the truth is that despite Pat's political activities, Sean's boyhood was fairly well regulated - or at least until he was thirteen when everything changed. But even Sean's reaction to that was foreshadowed the year before - when Maureen had the trouble with the Protestant boys.
Maureen was Brigid's youngest, two years older than Sean. Brigid had feared losing her once, the way three others had been lost before their first birthday, but Maureen had survived, plagued by a consumptive cough and a weak constitution. She was not a pretty child, but her plainness was compensated for by the sweetness of her disposition. Her first faltering steps had been taken to fetch something for Tomas, and she seemed to have been running errands ever since. She had watched Brigid's early ministrations of Sean with interest, and by the time she was five Maureen was taking a hand herself - bossing him gently with that straight-faced seriousness which little girls usually reserve for a favourite doll. Sean had responded with good humour, and more than once Brigid had come across them talking with the hushed whispers and solemnity of a mother superior conversing with a bishop.
But the relationship changed over the years. Roles reversed. Sean shot up, and his sturdy frame showed signs of equalling Pat's one day. When he was seven he was a good four inches taller than Maureen, and a year later he was head and shoulders above her. By nine he was even bigger than Michael, Brigid's second boy who was eleven and a half by then.
Sean's size was good and bad news. The bad was that it made him an immediate target. At one time his face seemed permanently bruised from encounters with older boys who recognised a comer when they saw one. Some bloody battles ensued. More than once Sean limped back to Brigid's after a beating, creeping up to the bedroom before facing the family. Maureen helped mend his clothes before Brigid saw them, and her neat stitching helped perpetuate that special closeness which had marked their earlier life.
The good news was that Sean's size and spirit marked him out as a natural leader. Small boys set on by bullies saw Sean as their saviour. Sometimes he was, but he often earned another black eye in the process.
The remarkable thing was that none of this coarsened his manner. That he could be as tough as old boots never stopped him being gentle at times, especially with Brigid's girls, and most especially with Maureen who was not allowed to as much as lift a kettle while Sean was in the kitchen. He would take it from her, still talking or doing whatever, so that his actions passed unnoticed by others. But Brigid noticed. Brigid continued to nurture her dreams of the priesthood, right up to the day when Maureen had the trouble with the Protestant boys. Then the dream died, never to be revived again.
It happened on a Saturday, alongside the canal. The pattern of Saturdays had long been fixed. Sean went to Confession in the morning, on his way to the stables at Palmerstown. His afternoon was spent with Pat whom he would leave at about four-thirty to be back at Brigid's for tea - and then he returned to the stables for another hour in the evening. Brigid's day had a different pattern, but was just as rigid. She and Maureen cleaned the house from top to bottom in the morning, after which Maureen left to go to her own Confession at St Matthew's. Usually Brigid accompanied her to the Percy Street bridge - and while Maureen took the short cut down the canal towpath, Brigid would walk along the opposite bank to meet Tomas on his vegetable patch.
And so it was that Saturday afternoon, when Brigid and Tomas were returning from the vegetable patch, walking slowly down the towpath, him with a hatful of potatoes and her carrying two cabbages big enough to last until Monday.
"There's Maureen now," Brigid said, looking across the canal.
Maureen had emerged onto the opposite bank, on her way home from St Matt's. Two small boys accompanied her, one with a missal under his arm, all three engaged in animated conversation. Then the Protestant boys struck, leaping from the bushes with blood-curdling whoops to fall upon the startled Catholic children. Maureen screamed with terror while her companions bolted, wriggling and swerving to escape clutching
hands. The smallest boy dropped his missal and as he retrieved it the Protestant boys were onto him - one pinning his arms while another punched his face. Somehow the boy broke loose and scrambled clear, perilously close to the edge of the canal - while his friend raced off in the opposite direction. But Maureen was trapped, with the five Protestant boys dancing around her like wild Indians round a totem pole.
"Hey!" Tomas shouted from the opposite bank. "Hey there - you leave that girl alone this instant."
But the boys were safe from Tomas. He was a good fifty yards from the Percy Street bridge. They hurled abuse across the muddy water and screamed and jigged around Maureen. She swayed one way, then the other, trying to avoid flailing fists while covering her tear-stained face and screaming in terror. Suddenly she stumbled and lost her balance. She was down - and they were kicking her.
Tomas dropped the potatoes and started for the bridge, while Brigid shrieked across the canal. Then a figure appeared at the end of the towpath. It was Sean, on his way home from Ammet Street. He was twenty yards from the boys, but one glance was enough - Tomas breaking into a run on the far side, Brigid frantically waving, and Maureen being kicked on the ground. Sean charged. One tormentor shouted a warning, two whirled round to meet the challenge. They were as big as Sean and clearly confident of the outcome - but then Sean was amongst them.
Nobody doubted Sean's killer instincts after that day. He took a running jump at the two who swung towards him, cracking his heel into a shin with bone-shattering force, and butting the other boy's face so hard that blood flew everywhere. Then he was at the others, fists lashing, his knee finding a groin, his heel grinding an instep, bobbing and weaving like a prize fighter. Back and forth they fought over Maureen's prone body, until two boys ducked away, clutching bloody faces. A third hopped painfully, rubbing his shin. But the remaining two were made of sterner stuff - one landed a swinging blow that knocked Sean down. He rolled over, escaped a flying boot by a hair's-breadth, and hurled himself head first at his opponent. Down they went, legs and arms everywhere. The fifth boy kicked wildly at Sean, missed, and overbalanced into the canal.
Ian St James Compendium - Volume 1 Page 86