Looking Under Stones

by Joe O'Toole

  Fair Day on Main Street, Dingle.

  DEDICATION

  To Joan, a wonderful partner.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I have many people to thank:

  Teresa for her motherly, non-judgemental eye over five decades.

  Max & Phil Webster for their supportive encouragement.

  Four tremendous sisters, Mary Sabrina, Anita, Phyllis and Grace, for not panicking about this. Phyl Moriarty for her help, stories and photographs; Ita Moriarty for her openness and courage.

  Patty Atty Moriarty for uninhibited information on the early Moriartys; John Moriarty and John Benny Moriarty; Hanora Moriarty. Mollie, Fergus and Karl O’Flaherty for their accuracy; Mazzarella and Norella for their story.

  Peadar and Murielle O’Toole, Lettermore; Lena O’Toole, truly a fount of knowledge. Oliver and Annie O’Toole; Clare and Geraldine O’Toole.

  Tomás, Síle and the Tourmakeady O’Tooles for completing the family tree.

  Micheál Ó Móráin for his stories.

  Fr Kieran O’Shea.

  Pat Neligan, Donal Ó Loingsigh, Thomas Lyne for remembering.

  Austin Corcoran for his research.

  Micheál Ó Cuaig, Cill Chiaráin, don taighde áitiúil.

  Ciarán Cleary, graduate of Barry’s forge, for describing another Dingle.

  Mary Webb for her effective editing, positive advice and sheer professionalism.

  FOREWORD

  This is a story. It is neither a social history, a local history nor a family history.

  Mentally revisiting, questioning, querying and trying to understand anew things which were the norm growing up has been a real challenge. The research, the talking and the writing were thrilling for me. I have learned more and come to understand more about myself and my background during the writing of this book than at any other time in my life. The uniqueness of a Dingle childhood and the constant provocation and catalyst of interesting relations, friends and neighbours re-emerged.

  I have also been awestruck in admiration of the zest for life among my O’Toole and Moriarty ancestors, how they dealt with hardship, tragedy, success and change, and most of all how they could still laugh at themselves and live life to the fullest. The more I got to know of them, the more interesting I found them.

  Surprisingly, I have found that all those things that I enjoy in my own life, including teaching, politics, writing, boating, haggling and a love of islands, are all there within the clan experience. I have also grown to a fuller appreciation of how those life experiences moulded me.

  No one contributed more to the way I turned out than my father, Myko, whose influence and open, tolerant philosophy continues to give me a sense of direction. I hope that this book is a testament to his tutelage more than any other. It may be a strange thing to say about one’s father, but it was a great privilege to have known him and shared in his constant optimism and ever-ready good humour. His great lesson was that every day is worth living, and life, with all its challenges, is also an entertainment.

  For me this has been an exhilarating and fascinating voyage through my gene pool. My hope is that the reader, as a fellow traveller, will share some sadness, joy and discovery with me and that my account might also induce the odd smile.

  Joe O’Toole, September 2003.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Cast of Characters

  1. Daddy Tom

  2. Seán the Grove

  3. Connemara Roots

  4. The Emigrants’ Return

  5. Granny and Her Sisters

  6. A Kerry–Galway Match

  7. A Kickstart from the Pope

  8. ‘Unwillingly to School’

  9. Foxy John

  10. Summers in Galway

  11. Upstairs in the Monastery

  12. Fair Day in Dingle

  13. Buried Talents

  14. Behind the Counter

  15. Three Cheers for Our Lady of Fatima

  16. Jimmy Terry’s Stallion

  17. A Tailor on Every Street

  18. Bonfire Nights and Wran Days

  19. Light my Fire

  20. The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

  21. Anything But A Socialist

  22. Goodbye Dingle, Hello Dublin

  Plates

  Copyright

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  The Moriartys

  Daddy Tom: Great-great-grandfather

  Old Johnny: Great-grandfather

  Seán the Grove: Grandfather

  Born 1885. Married Bridgy Fitzgerald, 1913.

  Children: Patrick (Patty Atty), Mollie (married Paguine), John (Foxy John), Thomas, Teresa (my mother), Jonathan (Jonty), Phyl, Ita, Benny, and Jimmy

  The O’Tooles

  John O’Toole: Great-great-great-grandfather

  John O’Toole: Great-great-grandfather

  Pat (Kruger) O’Toole: Great-grandfather

  Joe O’Toole: Grandfather (also his brother Henry, my granduncle)

  Born 1884. Married Margaret O’Boyle, 1905.

  Children: Patrick, Mary Clare, Twins Michael (Myko – my father) and Jack, and Plunkett

  The joining of the clans:

  Teresa Moriarty married Myko O’Toole in 1946

  Children: Joseph (b.1947), Mary Sabrina, Anita, Phyllis and Grace

  DADDY TOM

  There have been Moriartys in Kerry for as long as history records, but the first one of whom I heard stories was Daddy Tom, my great-great-grandfather. And by all accounts he was not the kind of behavioural role model we would be inclined to hold up to our children. He had a reputation as a bit of a rake; the kind of man a father would be reluctant to leave alone with his daughter.

  Daddy Tom married another Moriarty, a distant cousin, thereby reuniting two sides of the family. His wife, Síle Óg, was from below the hill in Mullach Mhial, a beautiful and remote place tucked in under the Conor Pass, on the Cloghane side. The Mullach Mhial people had a centuries-old track worn into Dingle, across the hill, through Camaois and down by the Glens. Daddy Tom called into Mullach Mhial regularly enough. It was always expected that he would marry Mary, the eldest girl; they were promised to each other. But Tom’s eyes wandered. He was distracted by the younger Síle, and soon it was himself and Síle Óg who were becoming great with each other.

  It wasn’t a situation approved of by Síle’s father, who did not trust Tom for either of his daughters: ‘By God but weren’t we privileged to have had his company again today! He is too fond of the drink and mad for the other thing, that fella. I’m telling you, you’d be better off keeping far away from him. Young O’Donnell is far steadier. Tom Moriarty might be clan but he has a dangerous, wild streak in him.’

  Síle was well aware that James O’Donnell was steadier. Wasn’t he a neighbour and didn’t she know him all her life. When he called to the house you wouldn’t notice the difference; he was just like the rest of her family. And he would marry her in the morning. Everyone expected it. James was safe, secure … and dull.

  Tom Moriarty was a rogue. He plámásed her mother, drank with her brothers, challenged her father, laughed at the world and worried little. He was exciting. Never a pátrún day or fair did he miss and he would never leave a ball before morning. And she had heard about him and the women. But she wanted him around and wanted to be with him.

  One fine summer’s day, when it was time for Tom to leave, Síle walked with him up the path to the top of the hill where, no doubt, the stunning views of the north and south sides of the Peninsula were the last things on the minds of two healthy, handsome youngsters. As Breandy Begley put it, ‘They went at it so hard that Tom left the print of S�
�le’s arse on the side of the track!’

  Nature took its course, and with a baby on the way the couple did what they were expected to do and got married. And as for a honeymoon, a learned local historian told me once, ‘What honeymoon are you talking about? In those days the honeymoon after the wedding was a day in town and a night in bed.’ While the young lovers settled in to the married state, it is said that Daddy Tom did not let marriage completely change his rakish ways. ‘Seven or eight at home and a few more around the parish,’ was his answer to an enquiry as to the size of his family. Tom took to heart the great biblical imperative ‘Go forth and multiply’ and made it a personal mission.

  The story of Daddy Tom and Síle was an entertainment, and the generational distance in time made it safe to tell. But these two people represent the beginnings of the family tree and, as such, they evoked a great curiosity. As it happens, the old track from Glens through Camaois into Mullach Mhial is extant. Little or nothing has changed and, apart from the presence of a power line with its string of poles, the view today is the same as it would have been for Tom and Síle.

  Two centuries later I retraced their journey over the hill track down into Mullach Mhial. I started off lightheartedly enough, driving the Glens road out of Dingle and turning right at the Droichead Bán. Leaving the car behind when the road ran out, I crossed a gate and headed up into Camaois. As children growing up in Dingle, Camaois was the back end of nowhere. It was the place of threatened banishment if we were bold. How age matures, I thought, as I soaked in the sheer beauty of the place. How could I have missed this loveliness on my boyhood visits? It reminded me now of the Scottish legend of Brigadoon, which emerged magically out of a drab valley once in every century. Had I stumbled on Brigadoon? Or maybe the real truth of Brigadoon is not that it reappears every hundred years, but that it is only visible to the enlightened and the ready?

  Striding up the gentle incline I kept a sharp lookout for the imprint of the posterior of my libertine great-great-grandmother, Síle. I have to report that, sadly, I did not find it. But following in the footsteps of the young lovers, I could almost picture them skipping up the hillside on that warm August day. Now that I was surrounded by the almost spiritual beauty of the place, their story took on a new meaning. The crude, simple telling seemed inappropriate. No sense now of a bawdy, superior enjoyment at their expense. This was a place meant to inspire romanticism and love.

  And when you think about it, where could young couples go to be alone in those times? There were no secluded corners in nightclubs, no ‘Come up to my apartment’. It was only to be expected that in their desire for each other they would have been loathe to part when it was time for Tom to go. Wasn’t it the most natural thing in the world that Síle would walk aways with him? And when they reached the summit they would see the glory of West Kerry spread out in front of them, with the point of Cruach Marthain puncturing the sky and dividing the panorama between the distant Blaskets to the west and Skellig Mhicíl to the east. Breathless after the climb, and cocooned in the dry heather, they would rest before saying their goodbyes, delaying the inevitable parting by surrendering to passion in the most natural and, as it turned out, fruitful coupling.

  So there it was, the place of conception and the source of my maternal gene stream. From this pair, through four generations to me, and it continues.

  As for Síle Óg and Tom, it could be that as the years passed their love faded and their passion for each other cooled, but it would appear that the older Tom became, the more of a ‘stail’ he became. Many years after Síle’s death and with his family well reared, Tom was living with a son and daughter-in-law. His son’s wife was a decent, caring woman, who put up with the antics of her father-in-law. One night as she was sitting at home, there came a loud and demanding knock at the door. It would be rare enough for anyone to knock; neighbours just lifted the latch and came in with a ‘God save all here’ greeting. It was rarer still for someone to come to the front door, which had very little practical function in those times, apart from the welcoming of a new bride or the taking out of a coffin.

  By the time she had sconced a candle and got to the front door there was no sign of anyone in the dark outside. Thinking that the visitor had gone round the back, she was about to shut the door when she saw a basket on the ground. Wrapped in it was a tiny, newborn baby. Practical woman that she was, she knew it was ‘returned goods’ to her father-in-law. And soft woman that she was, her heart went out to the little mite. She took herself and the child to bed and the word was put out that she was having trouble with a premature birth. A day or two later she produced the child. She called him Tom and he was reared in the house as their own.

  As a young man, Tom felt the call to the priesthood and he was duly accepted as a seminarian in Maynooth College. At the time there was an arrangement that seminarians could be ordained after five years rather than the usual six if they agreed to serve a ten-year stint in Australia. Tom chose that route, and records show that he graduated from Maynooth with high honours in 1903. He loved his time in Australia, where he was held in great esteem by his community. When the ten years were up he was so comfortable with his parish that he opted to stay there, despite the offer of returning to a parish in his native Kerry. The people of his Australian parish were so delighted that they presented him with a sidecar and a pair of white horses. A month later he was driving in the sidecar to one of the outlying parishes when a woman by the roadside raised a large umbrella. The horses took fright, reared up and took off at a gallop. Father Tom could not get them under control. The whole contraption turned over on him and the poor man was killed. All that happened near Melbourne, in the diocese of Ararat, where he had served as priest in some beautiful-sounding places, such as Warnambool, Koroit and Casterton.

  By all accounts Father Tom was a kind and generous man who always took an interest in the family back home. But if he had had his way, this book would never have been written and the union of the O’Tooles and the Moriartys, still a long way off, would never have happened.

  When my grandfather, Seán the Grove, and Bridgy Fitz got married, Father Tom strongly advised them to come to Australia where he guaranteed them a good start. Interestingly, it was a route that my other ancestors, the O’Tooles, were to take a generation later – one of the many coincidences I was to discover in the story of the two families. Anyway, back to the Moriartys – the young couple decided to take him up on the offer and he sent over the price of the tickets and money for the journey. All was organised, and after the farewells were done, the pair headed for the ship in Queenstown, now Cobh harbour, outside Cork City. As Seán the Grove told it, ‘We had everything packed and ready to go, but when Bridgy saw the ship she bolted and refused to go another inch. We turned on our heels home again for Dingle.’ Though he relished the telling of the story and laying the blame on Bridgy, it always seemed to me that he was not unhappy with the outcome. He was a reluctant would-be emigrant at best.

  Bridgy never changed her mind about emigration and as she would say herself, signs on, only one of her own family later emigrated. After one row too many, her son Jimmy, the black sheep of the family but her pride and joy, decided that Dingle was too small for her and him. When his mother heard that he was about to board a US-bound plane in Rineanna, as Shannon Airport was then called, her comment was, ‘The green distant grass makes an ass of the ass.’

  From what I heard, Father Tom did not hold it against them that they changed their minds about Australia. Indeed, every story I was ever told about him suggests that there was a man of goodness if ever there was one, and there is no doubt that as a priest he was loved and respected for his caring and commitment. The irony is that if Holy Mother Church had even suspected that Tom was illegitimate he would never have been accepted as a seminarian. The rules of the Catholic Church at the time were unwavering on this matter: ‘Bastards can’t be priests.’

  Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

  It is almost certain tha
t Tom himself lived and died in ignorance of his true parentage. It raises a very fundamental question: should he have been told? Certainly he had a right to know, and nowadays we would be in no doubt that he should have been made aware of his biological parents, for all kinds of reasons, including family medical history. But that was the way it was then, and many a child grew up not knowing that the woman they called ‘Mammy’ was in fact their grandmother or some other caring relative. But it is interesting to speculate as to what direction young Tom’s life would have taken if Daddy Tom had been made to face up to his responsibilities.

  Great-great-grandfather Daddy Tom was described to me by one seanfhear as ‘Fear mór leathair, feoil agus ceoil’ – a great man for sex, meat and music. ‘Leathar’ was commonly used in Corca Dhuibhne to describe matters sexual: ‘Bhíomar ag stracadh leathair’, literally meaning we were tearing leather, or indeed the more graphic ‘Bhíomar ag bualadh bolg’ – we were banging bellies. Nothing left to the imagination there. The colloquial Gaeilge for sex was direct, expressive and rich in imagery and the euphemism is often starker and more vivid than the real thing. An enquiry into how far things had gone went straight to the point: ‘Ach ar fhágais ann í?’ – but did you leave it in her?

  It could be that English was the language of Puritans.

  The fact that drink wasn’t listed in the description of Daddy Tom’s attributes should not be taken to mean that he was a teetotaller, far from it. Drink was such a given that it wasn’t necessary to mention it. Indeed, there was a kind of a view in those times that whiskey was a great pickling agent that prevented the breakdown of organs. And in Daddy Tom’s case, it seemed to have worked; he lived hard and died at the ripe old age of 105 years.