Rory & Ita

  * Ita: ‘He had changed jobs again.’

  * Ita: ‘There still isn’t. It hasn’t taken off in this house. Rory is strictly a spud man.’ Rory: ‘That’s an illusion. In my time, I’ve eaten yak, shark, kangaroo and ostrich. I even ate spaghetti once.’

  * Ita: ‘The pumping station has recently been demolished, to our great delight.’

  * Rory: ‘I was enjoying myself.’

  * Rory: ‘We got a letter, that the Customs would have to come and examine it. “Jesus,” said Joe. He’d hidden away his store of duty-free liquor, perfumes, various cigars and cigarettes. Himself and one of the attendants in the embassy had parcelled up all his stuff; they were all attached to the legs of tables or chairs, and the Customs men were going to go through it.’

  † Rory: ‘I had the bright idea of using two small boys; put them in among the gaps, and they came out with a treasure trove. There was Cointreau, bottles of the finest brandy, whiskey, the original Redbreast – the one in the funny bottle.’

  ‡ Rory: ‘He was quite badly crippled. He was also a bit difficult, in that he had a brand-new wheelchair but he wouldn’t go out at all. Any idea of bringing him out into the open air was vetoed.’

  * Orthopaedic hospital, in Finglas, north Dublin.

  † Rory: ‘He was always waiting for the miracle pill.’

  * Rory: ‘He was very cautious, being a diplomat. He was a self-confessed heathen, but he didn’t let that be known to the nuns. And he went to Lourdes.’

  * Rory: ‘A ring came to the door, and I saw this little pixie face, a beautiful face, and a wild crop of red hair and eyes as bright as buttons.’

  † Rory: ‘Now and again, I pick up a book and I ask, “What did I buy that for?” and then I realise it wasn’t bought; it was left behind by Maeve Brennan.’

  * Ita: ‘It’s long gone. It was a very exclusive grocery. There’s a café there now.’

  * Rory: ‘She said to me, “Do you like prawns?” I said, “I do, but seldom see them.” So she went into town and came back with bags full of prawns and a bottle of Chivas Regal whiskey.’

  * Rory: ‘She was very much aware of everybody and the kind of person they were. The kids absolutely loved her telling stories.’

  † Mac was St Clair McKelway (1905–80); his books include Gossip: The Life and Times of Walter Winchell; True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality; The Edinburgh Caper; The Big Little Man from Brooklyn; managing editor at the New Yorker, 1936–9. His New Yorker obituary states: ‘… he was married and divorced five times, and his former wives remained his friends.’

  * Rory: ‘It’s now a car park, off Trinity Street.’

  † Rory: ‘I think she was somewhat nostalgic for old Dublin. She didn’t take kindly to all the changes.’

  * Maeve died in 1993.

  * Rory: ‘Brendan Quinn would come out to visit Joe, and another bottle of Redbreast would bite the dust.’

  † Rory: ‘He wasn’t well at all. I sat beside him and I put my hand on his, and I spoke to him. He had been comatose, and he suddenly came alive. A similar thing had happened with Ita’s Uncle Watt. He was very ill, and we were told that he didn’t even recognise his own children. I went up and, as I came into the room, he looked over and said, “Rory, you came to see me.” Not alone did he talk to me, he got up shortly afterwards and went into Enniscorthy and bought a new coat. Joe came out of the coma, but he didn’t know where he was. He started talking away, like something that had been wound up – and Finnegans Wake poured out of him. It flowed out. I’d read it, and recognised it. He was calling the nun the “White Druidess”.’

  * Rory: ‘He was only a handful when he died.’

  * Ita: ‘I remember when I came home, after the solid sun from morning till night, I was going to work the next morning, and there was fine, light rain falling. I remember walking along to the train with my face up, and I thought it was gorgeous. Mind you, one day was enough of it.’

  † County Kerry.

  * Aunt Katie’s daughter.

  * Rory: ‘I won’t say a word.’

  * Ita: ‘I’ve never been mugged but I was once accosted by the Legion of Mary.’

  Chapter Twenty – Rory

  ‘My sister Nancy and her husband, Brendan, arrived on New Year’s Day:* my father had died. He’d been ill for quite a while, and rather discontented. He had emphysema; he was smoking cigarettes from the age of nine. And, eventually, it got him. He was lying there; it was sad, because he was a country man, essentially. He used to go fishing, and rabbit hunting, but he had to lie in bed and listen to the country sounds that Tallaght still had, even at that time. He died at home. The poor heart eventually gave out. He was only sixty-seven years old.

  ‘I drove to my parents’ home and my mother handed me my father’s War of Independence medal, and said, “Your Dada would want you to have that.”† Then she said, “I’d like him to have a military funeral.” I enquired from the Department of Defence, and was told that that matter was decided by the Old IRA Liaison Officer. I went to his address, in the Tenters, a small area of two-up, two-down houses, near Marrowbone Lane. He was obviously a Mick Collins man; he had a picture of him on the wall, and Robert Emmet as well. He knew immediately who my father was, and his record. He told me he’d make the arrangements, and to call to his house that afternoon and he’d give me the flag, to drape the coffin.

  ‘After the requiem mass, the coffin was borne by hearse up Tallaght Main Street to St Maelruain’s graveyard. We were met by a file of soldiers, who presented arms. When the funeral prayers were said, I lifted the flag from the coffin, which was then lowered into the grave. The soldiers then fired three volleys over the grave, and the trumpeter played the last post, and then the reveille. It was a fitting tribute to a man who did what he considered to be his duty to his country, asked for no reward, and was totally unpretentious. I am absolutely proud to be Tim Doyle’s son.

  ‘My mother died seven years later. In fact, she started dying when my father died. It was just, she wasn’t greatly interested in life after he went. She had a stroke, a massive stroke. I was at home. I got a phone call from my Aunt Lil, to tell me. So I headed for Tallaght right away. She was taken into James’s Street Hospital.

  ‘It was a shock; it wasn’t expected. She was only sixty-seven, and she didn’t act sixty-seven. But she got this massive stroke and I prayed to God to take her. I didn’t want a woman like her to be half-paralysed; she would have been in dreadful agony, in her mind. She died about two days after. After requiem Mass in the Dominican church in Tallaght, we laid her to rest with her beloved Tim, in St Maelruain’s graveyard.’

  ‘The Apprenticeship Board* was set up in 1965, to organise and co-ordinate the training of apprentices in different trades. They designated a post for the printing trade, and advertised. And I got the job, mainly because I knew the printing industry and I was a teacher; I had been involved in apprentice training.

  ‘And so, I was away again. I travelled all around Ireland, visiting every printer who had apprentices, and those who had apprentices and shouldn’t have had them; generally, setting standards, laying down the rules and regulations for apprenticeships. I liked it immediately. I’d been teaching for thirteen years, and I’d reached a stage where the curriculum wasn’t keeping pace with new developments, and I had an uncomfortable feeling that the students were aware of this. It became a dreadful bore, carrying out training which I knew was never going to be implemented. The syllabus was set down to match current practice, but the current practice was disappearing rapidly, with the development of electronics, first the transistors and then the microchip. And therefore I was working with young apprentices who I knew wouldn’t use the older processes at the end of their apprenticeships, or even during it. It irritated me, because I couldn’t jump out of the syllabus – because they had to pass the examination, which was based on the syllabus.

  ‘When I went into the Apprenticeship Board, my first task was to write down all the descriptions a
nd regulations that were unique to the printing trade. Then I set about organising block-release courses. Instead of going to a school or college each day, the apprentices would be released from their jobs for up to ten or twelve weeks. This meant that they had to get digs in Dublin or Cork, so that had to be organised too. But the main part was persuading their employers to release them; that took a job, because they were paying the wages. As far as they were concerned, it was a heavy expense to send the apprentices away and pay them. The thing that particularly annoyed some of them was the idea that, when it came to Holy Days of Obligation, the school closed down and the lads were just hanging around the place. And one of the printers from Sligo was foaming at the mouth. There was a mid-term break, two or three days, so the young fellow went home and the printer was up to his neck in work, and he wanted to know why the young fellow wasn’t up in Dublin. And he said, “Come in and give me a hand,” and the young fellow said, “No, I’m on my mid-term break.” That annoyed the printer; he was in there, working under great pressure, and your man was hanging around outside. But all these little problems were part of the job. The block-release scheme was a very good idea, and it worked, but only after a considerable amount of difficulty and persuasion. There was one particularly difficult case in Donegal, where everybody, including the apprentices, felt that the apprentices shouldn’t have been paid money at all; it was unfair to the employer to have to pay out good money when they were being fed as well – they’d be spending maybe ten shillings a week on the diet. But the apprentices in this case were happy enough, because they saw themselves setting up little businesses of their own when their time came, and they’d do the very same thing. They were quite honest about it; it wasn’t two-faced.

  ‘But it was marvellous. It meant, of course, that I drove around the country. Mind you, it was a different Ireland; all these little grey towns, dreadful hotels. And the advent of the nylon sheet – I can tell you, there’s nothing worse than getting into a bed with nylon sheets in the wintertime. I met some tough characters. One of these was Pat Dunne, the boss of the Leitrim Observer, a very old man. He told me he was opposed to civil servants telling him how to run his business. Then he produced the biggest Webley revolver I had ever seen. He placed it on his desk, the muzzle pointing in my direction. He said he reserved it for Black and Tans and civil servants. I told him I was a printer, and he said, “OK. Talk,” and put the Webley away.

  ‘We were based in Merrion Square, and then the headquarters was moved to Ballsbridge. The technical people, like me, had initial difficulties with the civil servants from the Department of Industry and Commerce, then Labour, who were assigned to the Board; they resented our status in the pecking order. It was an ingrained thing. Some of these civil servants had spent a lot of their time in the lower grades, and they looked upon the men in the higher grades as gods and super-gods. Then, with the surge in industrial activity, they were promoted and they wanted the same treatment themselves, and they couldn’t understand why we, the technical staff, weren’t prepared to accord them that privilege. I was called a Senior Training Advisor; I was at a grade comparable to a Higher Executive Officer in the Civil Service. I was entitled to a mat under my feet, and a large table. I was also supplied with a pencil parer, which I immediately recognised as a knife, or scalpel, for cutting quill pens.* An even higher-grade officer was also entitled to a desk with drawers, a square of carpet and a coat-and-hat stand.

  ‘Eventually, Anco managed to reduce the medieval seven-year apprenticeship. It was now four years, and that was more than adequate. The overall effect of the training scheme was to provide the country’s printers and newspapers with young people who were au fait with the new technologies, and most were not now turned out after completing their apprenticeships. I felt pleased to be involved in such an improving and radical scheme.’

  ‘Things changed. First, the road outside the house. Suddenly, we had a road, and it also became a tennis court, in a sense – because of the lack of traffic. Then there were more houses built. Jim Kenny built more bungalows, and then other builders arrived. All this was happening when Jack Flood’s fields were bought and, gradually, a ribbon of houses grew up along Kilbarrack Road.* The changes were radical but, at the time, it was just happening – almost unnoticed by us, the area changed.

  ‘It’s hard to explain: a new major sewage system was put in, for all of North Dublin, and it came down the middle of Kilbarrack Road – a major inconvenience. But one of the results of that construction was that, years later, we ended up with a very attractive walking and cycling path, covering up the major sewage pipe which was laid along the seafront. We lost and gained. There was a most unsightly pumping station, built at the end of Kilbarrack Road – and people now had a place for swimming, which was very welcome. We didn’t appreciate it at the time, the sheer vulgarity of the building. But we learned: it was blocking the wonderful view of Dublin Bay.

  ‘It wasn’t a rural place any more and the people who were here first, who were native, were more or less swamped, between ourselves and then the other developments and the Corporation houses that were being built all across North Dublin. All of North Dublin filled in. That was development, and I never wanted to stop it. “Don’t put that there; it’s my patch.” I never saw it that way. Everybody was getting a chance to have improvements in their lives, and these were now being provided. As well as that, although I didn’t think it at the time: the more people arrived, the more services were set up. We got supermarkets, churches, and a chipper.†

  ‘My cousin Vi* lived in St Lawrence Road, in Clontarf. Her son had gone off to England and married there, and he was thinking of buying a house. He suggested that she might like to live there. So she sold the house and went to England.† But it wasn’t working out, so she came back to Ireland, and she stayed with a cousin, another cousin of mine, in Ballymun. But she was the type of person who was best living by herself and, after a while, it began to weigh on her mind and, in desperation, she was wondering what she could do. And she came up with the idea, and asked might she build a small chalet at the end of our garden. Maybe I was used to the idea of having buildings in the back garden, from my living in Tallaght. But I agreed and so did Ita. The chalet went up, and that was it. It was, in fact, a debt paid, because her mother, Mrs Pim, my Aunt Lizzie, had been very, very good to our family – my father was her brother. In fact, because of her husband, who was an engineer with the company, my father and his brothers and brothers-in-law got jobs on the railway, the Dublin to Blessington tram. It had made a big difference, and I felt a kind of obligation to repay. When Vi arrived, she was inclined to give directions – she was inclined to dictate – about what she would or wouldn’t expect, but, after the first few weeks, she fitted in to our way of life.’‡

  ‘When Jack Lynch became the leader of Fianna Fáil,§ there was a general uplift of interest in politics. There seemed to be a move towards modernism. Myself and my neighbour, Seán Cleary, went off and joined the Baldoyle Fianna Fáil cumann. We were both former members who’d left their native areas and had drifted out of active politics. We liked Jack Lynch’s steadfastness, his straightforward approach, and his lack of what you’d call side.

  ‘I remained with the Baldoyle cumann until we organised our own local cumann, in our new parish of Kilbarrack.* That was about the time Michael Woods came on the scene. He lived in Kilbarrack; he got involved in the local affairs of people. The new housing estates were going up. Some of the people who had taken out mortgages from Dublin Corporation were suddenly faced with an increase in interest rates; it had been generally accepted that these particular mortgages would not have a variable interest rate. The Corporation broke its word, and many of these people faced great financial hardship, might even have lost their homes. Michael Woods took on the case of the people in this mortgage battle, and he successfully got them a very good deal. We more or less decided that we had a man who could well represent the party, whom we could support, and who could go to a higher
level of politics. He was also ambitious, which helped. But how to get him there – that was the problem.

  ‘The constituency stretched from the North Inner City to Howth. There were five seats in the constituency, and Fianna Fáil held three of them, with Charles Haughey, George Colley and Eugene Timmons – all party heavyweights. But we now had, as a cumann, three delegates to the constituency organisation and to any convention to select election candidates. Michael Woods was our Secretary and, automatically, one of our three constituency delegates.

  ‘He didn’t waste his time and, with his access to the higher echelons of the party, he came under the watchful eye of Jack Lynch, who was always on the lookout for young talent. And then came the General Election of 1973, and off we went to the convention for the selection of candidates. We felt like the Three Musketeers and, at the end of that convention, Michael Woods got exactly three votes. Fianna Fáil lost that election, and we were left kicking our heels.

  ‘And then the new Government threw us a lifeline. In a review of constituencies, usually caused by population changes, our constituency was broken into three new constituencies.* Eventually, George Colley and Charlie Haughey went their separate ways; Dublin North East was now a four-seater, and opportunity beckoned for local talent. We succeeded in having Michael selected as a candidate for the 1977 General Election. And he was elected. He took the last seat from Conor Cruise O’Brien, in a nailbiting final count.

  ‘Conor Cruise O’Brien was our bête noire. He was, with Justin Keating and David Thornley, one of three brilliant intellectuals who flashed across the political scene. He became a Government minister. To my mind, these people opportunistically decided to use the Labour Party for political advancement. They had a brief success. I disliked Cruise O’Brien’s outlook on national politics, essentially because it differed from mine. I admired his work for the United Nations in the Congo, and he was a very distinguished writer and journalist.* Strangely, he was supported by the Kilbarrack branch of the Labour Party, and I never, ever met any other member of that branch. I’m sure he was a charming man to meet, but I never did meet him, and we took his seat. He is now the Cassandra of Irish politics – we are all ruined and doomed.