Looking Under Stones

by Joe O'Toole

  Tim O’Brien was their neighbour and friend. Of course I was interested. Wouldn’t any sixteen-year-old? But by the time we finally met, under the microscope of Phil and her friends, the embarrassment was total. Oh, she was definitely a looker, but I cannot remember if we even spoke. Whatever was expected of me I didn’t deliver. Not that that stopped Phil with her matchmaking.

  ‘Wouldn’t you ask her for a date?’

  Max, a real softie like my father – they even looked alike – sensed my mortification and would chuckle, ‘Don’t mind her, Joseph. Do things your own way.’ Thanks, Max.

  Max and Tim were members of the Garda Driving Corps and had just been assigned a minister between them. They had the big ministerial car at home every night. What the minister never knew was that on a few occasions Max put it through its paces for me, up around the back of the park near the Ordnance Survey. It was mighty. It could accelerate to sixty miles per hour while still in second gear; you would be jammed into your seat by the G-force. I’ll never forget that car – a big, black Mercedes, registration BZI 306.

  That year, Max’s younger brother, Joe, was home on holidays from England. He had a scooter: a Heinkel, a real Mods job. I couldn’t keep my eyes or my hands off it. Joe was great; he explained all the features of the bike to me.

  ‘Do you want to start it?’

  Did I what!

  It was a great feeling, sitting on that machine and feeling the power quiver through it as I revved the engine. I told Joe of my experience with the Quickly Mopeds in Foxy’s, and maybe I talked it up more than a bit! The parking area in Garda Terrace was confined and safe and at the time it was empty.

  ‘Here,’ said Joe. ‘Drive it across the car park.’

  This was heaven itself. I kicked the bike into gear and released the clutch with my left hand. It jumped, stalled and stopped.

  ‘No, no. Release the clutch slowly and gently.’

  I did and I was travelling. Joe ran along beside me.

  ‘Squeeze in the clutch again and change her into second gear.’

  Never one to leave well enough alone, and with the wide open spaces of the Phoenix Park beckoning, it was only a matter of minutes before Joe suggested I take her on a decent run up the Park. I was doing fine for the first hundred yards, then just at the Depot, I had to make a left turning around by the railings opposite the Zoo. Of course, I leaned over as you would on a bicycle. But scooters are not for banking. The footguard scraped the ground, the scooter spun out of control across the road, and suddenly the side of a truck loomed up in front of me. I was helpless, terror-struck.

  By good fortune, I hit the ground towards the rear of the truck, just avoiding the wheels. I remember the truck driver slamming the vehicle to a halt and jumping out. The poor man was white with shock. Joe, who had witnessed the whole thing from the entrance to Garda Terrace, came running over. I was okay, only a few scratches, but felt really embarrassed at my own stupidity. The driver was so relieved to find I was not injured that he made nothing of my dangerous driving and went off about his business.

  Poor Joe did not escape so lightly. Max, once he had got over the shock of what nearly happened, tore him apart. Told him he was irresponsible and senseless and more. There was I, witnessing all this and knowing that I was completely responsible, but Max wouldn’t even listen to me.

  Yes, they were the best of times, a happy household, full of fun. There was always something to do and I was included in everything. But it was less than a year before Max and Phil experienced the very worst of times. It was something that all parents dread. That they would never forget as long as they lived. Max was leaving for work one June morning. He hopped into the ministerial Merc, started up, checked that the way was clear of children playing outside and then reversed. He had not seen, and couldn’t have seen, their baby daughter, Bernadette, their pride and joy, because she had crawled behind the car. He thought she was inside, but she was just at that age, sixteen months, when babies are impossible to watch. When he felt the car strike something, he knew the worst. It was too late for help. Nothing could bring her back. Little Bernadette was dead.

  My father, Myko, had been transferred to Dublin some months earlier. He was in the Depot a few hundred yards away and he was with Max and Phil within minutes. It was awful. What could you say or do? The wake and funeral were terribly sad. I remember it as my first encounter with tragedy at close family level, and it left an indelible mark.

  Max’s boss was the Minister for Justice. He was an important man, but as soon as he heard of the accident he dropped all other business to come and comfort Max and Phil. He arrived into Garda Terrace. While the rest of us were trying to come to terms with the horror of what had happened, he took personal charge of many of the arrangements. Myko asked Phil to think about the burial plot.

  ‘Leenane and nowhere else,’ Phil said. ‘I want her with the family and where people will know her.’

  There was no phone in the house. It was the minister who made the phone calls; he contacted Leenane and the key people who needed to be notified. He was with them all that night, talking to the family members. Not doing much, but simply being there and sharing their pain. The following day, as Myko was lifting Bernadette in her tiny white coffin into the back of Jim Fitzgerald’s estate car, because nobody wanted a hearse, the Minister was still there, comforting and supporting them. Then he got into his car and followed the saddest cortège to lovely Leenane.

  I had never met that minister before, though I had seen his name prominently in the news. He had a reputation. For the following thirty years he was rarely out of the news or out of trouble. The political icon of his age. Always the subject of extreme views, his political career was a rollercoaster ride of peaks and troughs. Many times in later years I was among his harshest critics, even if I often also appreciated his positive contributions. Like so many political careers, his ended disastrously and he finished in a flood of vilification.

  Through all those years, however, my view has been leavened by and filtered through that first impression of pure humanity that was Charlie Haughey during the tragedy of little Bernadette.

  ANYTHING BUT A SOCIALIST

  My mother always remarked of my father: ‘He was cute enough not to tell me he was Fianna Fáil until we were well married.’

  Election time in our house was tense. Myko was a lifelong, unquestioning Fianna Fáil man. He supported them down the line. It was a recurring source of frustration to Teresa.

  ‘For such a bright man in other ways,’ she would say to her audience, and in his presence, ‘wouldn’t you think he would have seen through them?’ No doubt, much of Myko’s loyalty was rooted in memories of his father, Joe, who had been involved on Dev’s side during the Civil War and had also been on the run from the Black and Tans during the War of Independence.

  The Moriartys, on the other hand, were pro-Treaty to their core, Fine Gael all the way. The family would always be active at election times and some of the Moriartys of my grandfather’s generation were county councillors. When politics and the state of the country were being discussed in our house, every excuse was found to place the blame for any catastrophe at the door of the ‘Long Fellow’, Eamon de Valera. In the Moriarty interpretation of politics, Dev was the source of most that was wrong with Ireland. The only non-Fine Gael beneficiary of a Moriarty vote was Dan Spring. At that time, the Dingle peninsula was part of the North Kerry constituency and Dan was the Labour Party TD. The Moriartys always gave him a scratch at general elections. The ‘scratch’ would have been a third preference, having already voted for the two Fine Gael candidates. My mother would explain the vote for Spring on the basis that he was a decent man. He was that, but I’m certain that the vote was directed more at keeping Fianna Fáil out than with keeping Spring and Labour in!

  When our near neighbour and one of Teresa’s customers, Michael Begley, was elected as a Fine Gael county councillor and later as Dingle’s first Fine Gael TD, there was jubilation. Michael w
as not a man to take prisoners, and he had many a heated argument with Foxy John and Uncle Patty. Nonetheless, they supported him loyally and canvassed for him for years.

  So it was in this maelstrom of blueshirt politics that Myko found himself, and, fair dues, he fought his corner well against all the odds. Though the Moriartys always pushed the Fine Gael case, Myko approached things differently; he never proselytised for Fianna Fáil and never consciously tried to change a person’s mind in that direction, but he left you in no doubt as to his views. He had one minor but continuing victory and that was in the matter of newspapers. The Moriartys read the Irish Independent only; the Irish Press was de Valera’s propaganda machine and had no place in a Fine Gael house. Except that Myko was the one who bought the newspaper every day, and he chose the Press every time.

  ‘You bought that old paper again,’ Teresa would say in disgust. But it didn’t stop him. It provided me with a choice of reading: Rip Kirby and Denis the Menace in the Indo at my grandmother’s, and Captain Mac and The Phantom in the Press at home.

  Despite his own pronounced and unremitting party political bias, Myko’s general position on political activity and the furtherance of democracy was well thought through and admirable. He absolutely refused ever to discuss the pros and cons, or the events of the Civil War, taking the view that it was a black period of our history that was best left alone, not to be examined or discussed until all participants were dead. Even then he felt that it should be left to academic consideration and interpretation by the historians of the day.

  ‘Politics should concentrate on events of today. Leave history to the historians,’ was his credo. It was not bad advice, and Irish politics might have matured much more quickly if prominent politicians had taken a similar view earlier in the history of the State.

  One day, when I was in my very early teens, Myko brought me home a rolled-up piece of newsprint. It was torn at the edges and not very clean; the print was smudged in places and the paper was yellowing and dried out. He handed it to me in the most matter-of-fact way and I took it from him without any show of appreciation for what became, in time, the most invaluable material gift of my childhood and one which I treasure to this day.

  ‘Con Lucey was cleaning out his sister’s house – she died recently in Cork – when he came across this,’ he said. ‘He was going to throw it out because he felt it had no place in a Cumann na nGael house, but he asked me if I had any use for it.’

  I could sense Myko’s excitement as we unrolled the paper. ‘It’s the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic,’ he announced. ‘Probably the most important document of its day, and it’s an original.’

  Big deal, I thought to myself. Maybe the fact that it was on its way to the dump convinced me that it was not worth much.

  ‘Apparently, on the day of the Rising a large number of the Proclamations were sent down to West Cork,’ Myko went on. ‘It has been in the Lucey house ever since. But they took Michael Collins’s side in the Civil War, so they don’t have any value in it now. I don’t know that the Civil War position should make any difference to the Proclamation, but people are people!’

  To my shame, and, I’m sure, to Myko’s disappointment, I was less than impressed with his gift. In my defence it could be stated that it did not look like any copy of the Proclamation I had ever seen, all of which were a half-page in size. I did, however, keep it and took it with me whenever I moved. It was stuck on the wall of my bedroom at home and again in my room at college. I valued it for sentimental reasons, having received it directly from my father. But apart from using it once or twice as a teaching aid in classroom history lessons, and being impressed by the breadth of vision of its creators on matters of equality and social justice, I never paid much heed to it and never thought that much of it or about it.

  Never, that is, until my election to the Senate in 1987. Framed in the main hall of Leinster House I saw something that looked absolutely identical to my own copy of the Proclamation, except that this one had a signed inscription by former President Seán T O’Kelly, confirming that it was an original. For the first time I felt a sense of excitement about the old rolled-up document. Like meeting an old friend in a faraway place.

  I examined in detail the Leinster House copy. The size, paper quality and print smudging looked the same as mine. I made a note of the various little print errors – where a letter was out of line or where there were other print marks – and then compared them with my own one at home. The lettering and text were the same in every way, but the print marks and smudges were different. I was thoroughly disappointed to find that it was not an exact copy. Some months later I mentioned it casually to a printer acquaintance.

  ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘of course yours is not an exact copy. If it were then it wouldn’t be authentic. There were no copying machines in those days. They were printed off like news sheets, each one coming through the machine individually. The marks of the casings around the print lead and the ink smudges could not be the same on every sheet. Even though they would all be very similar, it is unlikely that any two would be exactly identical.’

  After a bit of research, I came across a pamphlet on the Proclamation which gave the story of its printing. The Proclamation was produced by two printers from Capel Street. They used a printing press in the basement of Liberty Hall. The account related how they ran short of some letters and had to make do in some cases with different fonts; how they ran out of the letter ‘e’; how they only had enough type to set half of the Proclamation; how they did that, then turned it top to bottom and, having set the second half, ran it through again. For that reason all original Proclamations have a misalignment between the top and bottom halves. A second run was printed some months later, but these had none of the flaws of the original. I could see immediately that in my Proclamation the top and bottom were slightly out of line. I went through the other checks with the printer and he confirmed its authenticity.

  It was a tremendous discovery and even more so when I established that there are now only a dozen original Proclamations intact. Today that rolled-up piece of paper I received so ungratefully from Myko is one of my most valued possessions. Many in modern Ireland tend to dismiss anything relating to 1916, but the fact is that the Proclamation is a most progressive document in many ways, reflecting the most worthy principles of equality and interculturalism. Though most Irish people have never read the Constitution, many of them, including senior politicians, believe that the imperative about ‘cherishing all of the children of the nation equally’ is in the Constitution. It never was. The only place it has ever been enshrined is in the Proclamation. I still regularly read the fourth paragraph of the Proclamation that guarantees, inter alia, civil and religious rights to all our citizens. A bit like Christianity, it was never given a fair chance by the vested interests.

  Hilda Moriarty was a close friend and cousin of Teresa’s in Dingle. She was a most popular and strikingly attractive woman. Apparently, she broke hearts. But she was forgiven. While studying medicine in Dublin, she had a flat in Raglan Road. A penniless poet who lived in the area befriended her. According to Teresa, Hilda did not have too much time for him. When she was moving to better accommodation down the road, the poor poet helped her move to the new place by carrying her stuff down the road balanced precariously on his bicycle.

  ‘Sure, Hilda used only laugh at him,’ Teresa would say, but from my own experience of Hilda, I could not imagine her ever being anything other than nice to people around her. She was a lovely woman in every way.

  Anyway, the poet’s name was Patrick Kavanagh. He expressed his love for her in the beautiful ballad ‘Raglan Road’, which he wrote about her and as a tribute to her. I studied Kavanagh and even met him once, but unfortunately knew nothing of his association with the family at the time. What a missed opportunity! As if that was not enough claim to fame, Hilda then went on to make a match that caused consternation in the family – she became engaged to a handsome Limerick solicitor named Donog
h O’Malley.

  The problem from the Dingle perspective was that the prospective bridegroom was Fianna Fáil through and through. How would the Moriartys cope with this? Donogh arrived to meet Hilda’s people in Dingle. Her father, Dr Paddy, had died by that time, so it was mainly the extended family. They met him; they poured drink into him; they would be proper but reserved hosts and then bid him goodbye. But they had not reckoned on one factor: Donogh was too damn like them.

  A wild man, with no limits, he loved the drink, the craic, the arguments. They couldn’t resist his personality. In no time at all he was one of them. They avoided, dismissed, or ignored his political atheism to the true Blueshirt God. He was forever welcome. Every summer they came back to Dingle for their holidays. Hilda would come down in July with her two children, Daragh and Deirbhile, her white Morris Minor packed with holiday bits and pieces. Almost every day she would call to our house in the Mall for a chat with Teresa; we thought she was lovely. Though we were slightly older than her children, she would often take a few of us to the beach. She loved Ventry beach, where her father had at one time owned a seaside cottage. It seemed to me that she went there every day.

  Donogh, who was by then an up-and-coming TD, would join her in August. My memory of him is of a friendly, approachable and interesting man who had time for people around him and was full of the joys of life.

  Some years later, in 1967, when I was a member of the student committee of St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra, on the day of the formal opening of the new college buildings, the college authorities invited me to greet the President of Ireland, Eamon de Valera, and the Minister for Education, Donogh O’Malley in the hospitality room after Mass. It was my job to ensure that they were occupied and entertained for some minutes while the college clergy were disrobing after the church ceremonies and the official blessing. Donogh was in great form and had a great welcome for me. As usual, he talked openly and forthrightly about his plans. He was going to merge certain departments of UCD and Trinity colleges; in his opinion there was too much duplication. He was, for instance, going to locate the entire Engineering faculty in UCD. He had a plan that he felt was certain to work.