Just Mary: A Political Memoir From Mary O'Rourke

By Mary O'Rourke

In this memoir Mary O' Rourke writes, with remarkable candidness and humour, of personal and political events; of the many senior political figures with whom she worked, including Charles Haughey and Bertie Ahern; of her life with her beloved husband Enda; of her two dear Brians, both of whom died before their time; of her successes and disappointments.
She does all this with honesty, energy and an absence of self-pity or self-justification. The book is like the woman herself: open, warm and frank.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gill Books
• Release date: Oct 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9780717154104

Mary O'Rourke

Mary O’Rourke is a former Deputy Leader of her party, who has held a number of senior Cabinet positions. She has also been Leader of the Seanad and is a frequent guest on radio and television.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Saturday, 26 February 2011

It’s a dry, warm day, after a couple of weeks of really uncertain weather. I have joined many others in St Dominic’s Community Centre in Kenagh, Co. Longford, where the combined count for Longford and Westmeath is being held. It is about four o’clock in the afternoon and it’s clear by now that I have lost my seat as one of the Fianna Fáil representatives for the constituency. My active political career is ending here, in this spacious community hall.

So, who is with me? I have driven here with my older son, Feargal, who intended to travel down from Dublin for the count anyway, but who came early when he got the news that all was not going well. Here with me also is my lovely niece, Gráinne Lenihan, daughter of my late brother, Paddy Lenihan, who died just four short months earlier. Gráinne and I are soul sisters on many issues and, like my two stalwart sons, she worked hard for me in that General Election. My younger son, Aengus, is here too and has been in the count since 8.30 a.m., along with Mícheál Ó’Faoláin, a dear friend who was in charge of so much in my election campaigns and who had ordered all the people keeping the tallies to arrive as early as possible that morning.

Was I on the floor with despair? No! As I said to everyone in the centre, I was disappointed but not devastated, and that is the most accurate way of describing how I felt. I decided to adopt Avril Doyle’s mantra, which always made such an impression on me. She had been defeated in one of her election campaigns in Wexford and she said, ‘Hold on, what’s all the crying for? No one died!’ Deep within me, that is really the way I felt. I had lost my husband, Enda. I had lost my two brothers, Brian and then Paddy. These deaths, as well as the very poor prognosis for my dear nephew Brian Lenihan in his battle with pancreatic cancer, weighed heavily on me (Brian would pass away less than six months later, of course), and I had an immeasurable amount of grief within me. Losing a parliamentary seat, whilst catastrophic in career terms, is clearly not in any way comparable with the loss of such dear loved ones from one’s life.

When I had arrived at St Dominic’s in Kenagh, I met all the team who had worked so hard for me, along with Mícheál and my great friend and valiant Director of Elections, P.J. Coghill. As the outcome became ever clearer, I found that my job would be to console them, rather than theirs to console me. I think that is what keeps one strong on such an occasion: it certainly kept me strong. I went through the motions. I did the national television and radio; I did all the local TV and radio stations too. I stayed up on the balcony, looking down, keeping up a positive front. But the numbers were already written up for me — literally — and I was about to be eliminated.

Now, I had form in this. Back in 2002, I had lost my seat after 20 continuous years in the Dáil. I had subsequently gone into Seanad Éireann, appointed by the then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and had indeed enjoyed a highly productive five years as Leader of that house. But on this occasion, the defeat was somewhat final. I knew that the end of my active political life had arrived — but I did not intend it to be the end of my active, living life. In the cards and the letters and the phone calls that followed, so many said to me, ‘Enjoy your retirement’. I didn’t intend to retire, however. I didn’t feel like retiring. I wanted to do things; I wanted to be involved; I wanted to continue to have a voice.

That night, we all went back to my home in Athlone. Throughout the evening, many other people called in, those who had been less directly involved in my political campaign but who were all dear friends who had contributed in other ways. Among these of course were Mícheál Ó’Faoláin’s lovely wife Maura, and my close friends, Hugh and Celine Campbell, and Niall and Angela McCormack. We had a few glasses of wine or a few gins and again, my job was to talk things through with everyone, to reassure them and allow them to reassure me. Eventually they all left and it was just my son Feargal and I. He wanted to stay with me, but I insisted, ‘No Feargal, I like my own company. I’m happy to be on my own.’ So, finally alone, I sat down in my familiar easy chair in my familiar living room with all my familiar things around me. And I found myself thinking back to when the long odyssey of my political life had first begun. I went back, back, back . . .

I went back to 1944. I was a young child, seven years old, and living in the town of Athlone with my mother and father, my sister Anne, who was four years older than me, my brother Paddy, who was six years older and my brother Brian, who was seven years my senior. It was a night of great excitement in our home town, because the chief of the Fianna Fáil Party, Éamon de Valera, was there to give impetus to a General Election campaign which had lacked lustre until that point. That evening we had all been brought by our parents to the town centre of Athlone, where de Valera spoke from a platform outside the church in what was then called the Market Square (now more often called St Peter’s Square). Huge crowds, huge excitement, huge commotion and, to my childish eyes, the huge, imposing figure of the man in the long black coat, there in the Square. He was talking and talking — in a funny voice. A high-pitched voice, I remember thinking at the time, and with an odd emphasis on certain words.

After that, it was everyone back to our house in Gentex (the Athlone General Textiles factory complex) and a whole crowding in of all of the Fianna Fáil faithful to meet at first-hand ‘the Chief’, there, in our home. My sister Anne and I were told to go to bed, but our brothers, being older, and politics being then as now very much a male world, jostled in to the dining room-cum-living room with the others. And then the door was firmly closed. The drinking began and the serving of tea and sandwiches; and the tumult of the talking and the shouting rose and fell and ebbed and flowed throughout the night.

In our shared bedroom, my sister quickly fell asleep, but for me the excitement of it all was far too great for such a thing as sleep. I soon crept out of bed and up the long, dark corridor to the noisy living room and the vibrancy and clamour which, even at my very young age of seven years, drew me irresistibly towards it. I lay down on the ground at that door, knowing that there was no need for anyone to use it as a passage to the bathroom, as there was a bathroom on the other side of the living room, which I had heard people going into. As I lay in that dark corridor, pressing my ear to the door, it seemed to me that I was living in the middle of huge excitement, and that I was part of it all, even though I was outside of it.

Voices rose and fell. Laughter boomed out. Arguments broke out and animated discussions waxed and waned. There was the clinking of glasses, the acrid smell of cigarette smoke (at that time, smoking was allowed always and anywhere). It seemed to my childish senses and my very young mind that this was real life. This was the tumult and the talk that I wished to be part of. And there and then, I determined that I would be part of it, of that excitement which was unfolding in our house. Not only that, however: I knew that I wanted to be involved in this sort of life in the years ahead. I wanted to be someone who knew about politics, who was part of the political world and to whom politics meant as much as it did to those gathered in our house that night.

Finally, tiredness overcame me and I crept back to bed and pulled up the covers around me. But my mind jumped and sprang for a good while after that, and I was still awake to hear people departing loudly with ‘Goodbye’ and ‘Slán Leat’ and ‘Slán Abhaile’. And then, a single sound remained — the odd intonation and timbre again of what I knew was the voice of Éamon de Valera.

Back to the present, and me sitting alone in my home in Arcadia in Athlone on that night of February 2011, contemplating the end of my professional life in politics. Was I very sad? No, I wasn’t. I knew I had worked at politics all my life, had given it my very best shot and now I was back in the house where my very happy domestic life had played out, where I had lived from the very beginning of my marriage with Enda, the only man I ever loved and who had brought such happiness to me and to our family. Wrapped in the warm mantle of happy memories, I felt somehow safe and secure. As far as my life in politics went, of course some of the memories were good and some were bad, but undoubtedly my journey began on that very far off day in 1944, as the seven-year-old with the lively mind who wanted to know all that was going on. And I find myself in 2012 at age 75, still wanting to know all that is happening in political life and in life in general too.

After that day of the count in Kenagh, I decided that I was going to write a book about my life. Not a high and mighty book — how could it be? — but an ordinary book, detailing my life in and out of politics over the years: one which would aim to shed some light on the key events of a long career in public life. I hope that those reading this narrative will find that I have been able to go some way to achieving that aim.

Chapter 1

My father was a County Clare man, P.J. Lenihan, from Lickeen, Kilfenora. My mother was from Drumcliff in County Sligo. They met as students at University College, Galway, where my mother was doing a BA and my father was doing Arts and then later a Law degree. Both bright, full of life and highly intelligent, they quickly fell in love with one another.

My father was the son of Patrick Joseph Lenihan Senior of Kilfenora, Co. Clare. My paternal grandmother Hannah, née McInerney, had died when the children were all very young: they were four boys and one girl. My father, the eldest, was barely ten years old at the time. After a suitable interval of time, my grandfather married the assistant teacher who had come to work with him in his two-teacher school. She was Sarah. Obviously I never met my grandmother Hannah, as she was long, long dead, but my step-grandmother, Sarah Lenihan, was a formidable woman who often visited us in Athlone and put the fear of God into my young heart and, I feel sure, into those of my siblings too.

The mortuary card of my paternal grandfather, P.J. Lenihan Senior, shows a stern man with an unwavering gaze. Records from the time show that he was a leading figure in the fledgling Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) trade union in County Clare and one of the greatest adherents to their cause. From what my father used to tell us — and this was confirmed by my aunt Maura, the only girl in the family — he was a strict father. All the children were expected not just to do their lessons but to excel at them, as well as doing whatever work was needed around the house, yard and so on — no one was to be spared. I often thought about how my father must have felt, losing his mother at such a young age and how this must have affected him throughout his life, despite the calm sense of order which his stepmother Sarah imposed in their home.

My mother, Annie Scanlan, on the other hand, grew up in a household without a father. My maternal grandmother was left a widow when she was a young woman in her mid-twenties with several youngsters clutching to her skirts and a child in her womb. Her husband, my grandfather, Bernard ‘Brian’ Scanlan, had been stretchered home to her, fatally wounded, on a door from a pub in Sligo town, where he had got involved in a row over Charles Stewart Parnell. He was a member of the UIL (United Irish League), a group of small farmers. Remember that this was a time when Lloyd George’s enlightened social welfare reforms were not yet fully in place in Ireland. There were very scant pickings for a widow with six young children and another baby on the way, and twelve acres of rough land at the foot of Ben Bulben.

My grandmother was lucky in one respect, however, in that she had a cousin who was head of the Ursuline Convent in Sligo. So she was able to send each one of her five daughters — May, Tattie, Chrissie, Annie and Bridie — there for their secondary level education. Of all of them, according to written and spoken evidence of the time, my mother was the star pupil. A small incident will tell its own tale. She did a very fine Leaving Certificate, achieving first place in French in Ireland, and secured a scholarship to UCG. However, she had not studied Latin and at that time there was, over and above having the Leaving Cert, a matriculation examination which one had to sit to get into university, and this examination had a compulsory Latin component to it. Undaunted, however, my mother elected to do her matriculation in September. And so between the months of June and September, she studied Latin with private tuition and managed to pass all elements of the September exam. Throughout my life, I have often thought what a remarkable feat it was, for a young country girl from County Sligo, to set such a goal for herself and to manage to win through at it. She surely showed great resolve and great determination.

My mother’s family were strongly republican and all of them, young and old, took the anti-Treaty side during the debate in the early 1920s and in the Civil War. In fact my uncle Roger, then a young man of just 15 years of age, was actively involved as a runner for the republican side, and had to be smuggled out of Ireland and sent to Australia to be resettled there, because the Treaty side were after him. My father’s family on the other hand, and my paternal grandfather in particular, would have been strongly in support of Michael Collins and of the Treaty. Indeed, when he was a student in UCG, my father and a group of other devil-may-care students rode out to Athenry on their bicycles to assist the men at the Barracks there in fending off an imminent raid by anti-Treaty forces.

This aspect of our history was to come back to haunt me a few times during my early political life, when small-minded people would toss back at me my father’s family’s allegiance to the Michael Collins tradition, regardless of the fact that by then my father had fully embraced Fianna Fáil. On these occasions, I was always able to counter such innuendo by reminding them about my mother’s family in County Sligo, about the bravery of my young uncle Roger and his commitment to the anti-Treaty movement, and about my Aunt Chrissie, who became the life-long President of Fianna Fáil in Sligo and was revered at her funeral as such. That usually silenced my detractors — although then again, the same facts were also used to taunt me in other situations!

My father and mother married young, starting their new life together in Dundalk, Co. Louth. My father entered the civil service at Higher Executive level and began in Revenue. Both my brothers — Brian and then Paddy — were born in Dundalk, and then, following a promotion for my father, the family moved to Tralee where my sister Anne was born. My father was promoted once again and posted to Revenue in Dublin Castle. My mother often spoke to me about what these moves involved for the family and how disruptive they were — but that was the life they led. My father was lucky to have what would have been regarded as a good middle-class job, and in some senses this is why my mother didn’t get the opportunity to use her qualifications, except for early on when she taught for a few years in Loreto in Bray (and had vowed that if she ever had daughters, they would be sent there to school).

The final move for our family came whilst we were living in Sutton, Co. Dublin. One day my father came back from work and announced to my mother, ‘We are on the move again, Annie. We are going to Athlone.’ An exciting opportunity had arisen. My father was nothing if not full of adventure and he had decided at once that we would meet this one head on.

This change in professional direction for my father came about because Seán Lemass, who was then Minister for Industry and Commerce in a Fianna Fáil government, had met him while he was working in Revenue in Dublin Castle and had liked the cut of his jib. Accordingly, when a government initiative involving the setting up of factories all around the country was being put in place, Lemass suddenly thought of P.J. Lenihan, the civil servant he had met during the course of his work and whom he thought was a go-ahead young man. He contacted my father, proposing that he take leave of absence to go to Athlone and start up a plant specialising in textiles, to be called General Textiles Limited. My father jumped at the chance.

And so, with three young children and a fourth — myself — on the way, my parents arrived at the old Ranelagh Protestant School opposite the railway station in Athlone. That was in 1936, and my father would work day and night to get the fledgling factory off the ground, while we were reared on the site of what was to become a thriving plant employing a thousand people. He quickly established himself and started to recruit staff, while life assumed a pattern too for my mother, with now four young children to mind. She was very ill after my birth, but was lucky to have the devoted services of a young girl, Bridget Sharkey from County Louth, who came to live with us and in many respects became a surrogate mother to us all.

My father was busy and outgoing, with an attractive personality which drew people to him, and so it was a natural evolution that he became involved, and quickly assumed a permanent role, in civic affairs in Athlone. He was persuaded to run for the town council, initially as a Chamber of Commerce representative and Independent. Later he decided to take on the mantle of Fianna Fáil, not for any ideological reason, but out of loyalty to Seán Lemass, I imagine.

At this time Athlone was part of the constituency of Athlone–Longford, which was represented by the TDS Erskine (Hamilton) Childers, Thomas Carter and Seán Mac Eoin. It was Childers who ‘serviced’ Athlone and so about once a month he would visit the area, arriving by train with his bicycle. I would be sent, as a very young girl — just six or seven years old — over to the railway station to meet him and would accompany him as he wheeled his bike up the road to our house in the Ranelagh. There my father, who had detailed in his notebook for the TD all the queries which had come in from constituents over the previous weeks, would go through these with Childers, who would in turn note them in his own book. Then up Childers would get and on his bike and away around the town, calling at all of the addresses faithfully compiled and given to him by my father. Much later, he would come back to our house, fortified by the many stories he had heard and the many cups of tea he had been given. Then it was time for me to do my job again, accompanying him back over to the railway station until he got on the train, put his bike in the luggage carriage and away he went. It all sounds so old-fashioned now, but it wasn’t really. There was a great deal of dignity in the exchanges between my father and Erskine Childers, and in turn between the TD and his electorate, those who had solicited his presence. There was a strong sense of the unspoken contract which existed between them all. Around that time, 1943 to 1944, there were two elections within eleven months, and Erskine Childers, who was returned for both of them, continued to put in his regular appearances in Athlone.

In the years which followed, life carried on seamlessly in our busy household. My father was clearly devoted to his work and no matter what the vagaries of the night before, would get up at 6 a.m. without fail, wash and shave himself and walk down into the bowels of Gentex, as the factory was called, to meet the workers coming in for the first shift of the day. The number of employees — many of them female — increased exponentially and for many years, Gentex was the economic mainstay of the town of Athlone and the rural hinterland around it. The factory complex was continually being added to with, for example, huge sheds being erected — the bleaching, dying, finishing and spinning sheds — but for my father, with his advanced ideas on social practice among workers, the facilities on offer for employees were an equal priority. There was a resident, full-time nurse on the premises and a doctor visited at regular intervals. Right throughout the 1940s and beyond, there were workers’ councils and recognised trade unions in place in Gentex — at a time when such structures were only beginning to be introduced in other workplaces throughout Ireland. I know now that my father was very much influenced by socialist thinking, and he never failed to put such principles into practice in so far as he could.

Looking back now from a world in which women are expected to use their education and to enter the workforce, many may wonder how my mother managed to contain herself, with her brood of young children in the town of Athlone? It seems that she took up the card game of bridge, which at the time was starting to be a craze throughout Europe. She joined clubs and found friends to play with. And she mastered the game. So much did she master it in fact, that later, in the 1950s and 60s, she would represent Ireland at bridge conventions in Europe and beyond, travelling to such far, far places (to our young minds) as Lake Como, Vienna and London to fly the flag. In Seamus Dowling’s The History of Bridge in Ireland, Mrs Anne Lenihan is cited as being a winner of the Lambert Cup, with her name ‘frequently appear[ing] high on the leaderboard of major competitions’. Meanwhile, my father continued to be ever more involved in local politics, going from town council to county council, and becoming on many consecutive occasions Chairperson (there were no mayors then), both on the county council in Mullingar and on the Athlone Urban District Council.

My childhood was easy-going and because I was the youngest by so many years, I assumed a kind of ‘busybody’ role. When people came to the house to see my father about problems they had, I would always be the one to answer the door, bring them in and sit them down. I would say that my father would be with them in a moment and then dutifully go off and get him. I am certain that it was then that the belief was instilled in me that you were there to serve the people and that they should be treated properly and politely — and in my public life, I never forgot those early lessons. My father often explained how, for those people who came to him with a difficulty, their problem was the most important thing in their lives at that moment. I would notice that people generally seemed happier going away than when they had first arrived to see my father, as if the sharing of their troubles had helped them, and so this was something I strove for also in my work throughout my life.

Brian and Paddy were sent to the local Marist Boys’ Primary School and from there to the Marist Secondary College, also in Athlone. Brian completed his schooling there, but Paddy was sent at a certain point to Garbally College in Ballinasloe as a boarder, as he was proving a handful at home. It was felt that he would benefit from the discipline and the control of Garbally, but he was to prove a handful there too, and he was threatened with expulsion on two occasions. On one occasion, the threat was actually carried out, but he was taken back again — a rare event, I would think! Paddy smoked from a relatively young age and perhaps took a beer or two as well, all of which at that time was regarded as wild behaviour. I remember hearing this and it passing over my head. But both of my brothers persevered to the end and came out with their Leaving Certs.

My mother was true to the promise she made herself in her first teaching job in Loreto Bray, and she sent my sister Anne there as a boarder at the age of 13. It sounds odd now but it was the norm then that, if you could afford it, after national school was over, you sent your children — both boys and girls — to boarding schools. And so in due course, I too arrived at the Loreto Convent in Bray as a twelve-year-old, when Anne was in her final year there.

I hated boarding school with a passion. Just as my mother had vowed to send her daughters to Loreto, I vowed that as regards any children I might have in future, I would never send them away. I missed my home; I missed my father and all the family; I missed my friends. I hated the cold; I hated the food; I suffered with the loneliness of it all. Yes, I made friends but somehow I never got over my wish to be at home rather than where I was. I became a prickly teenager, noted for being vaguely subversive and not at all like my ‘good’ sister, with whom I was constantly compared. But there was one sterling aspect about life in Loreto, and that was the way we were taught and with this came the realisation that learning could be exotic and interesting, and that there were worlds outside ours to be explored through books and through conversations and in classes. I loved the wonderful library there, where I could continue to enjoy the adventure and excitement of reading, which had begun in my home in my very early years. I developed a schoolgirl crush — we all had them — on a Mother Benedicta, who taught us Latin. Looking back now, I realise that she was a brilliant woman who instilled and fostered in me a love of the Latin language, of the Odes of Horace and so many other classical works. I enjoyed sports too, and in my last year was appointed captain of all the Dublin Loreto schools at netball. All of this side of school life was exciting and it made up in important ways