Sometimes it appears that political convictions may be genetically transmitted characteristics, like a certain crookedness of the nose or the ability to swing a stick at a ball. My grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather, the story went, was each imprisoned in the cause of Irish freedom. There was a nuance: although his father Peter was a rebel, Jim O’Neill’s republicanism mainly descended from the family of his mother, Annie O’Driscoll. Her father, William O’Driscoll, was a famous Land Leaguer, and on his release from Cork Gaol a crowd carried him shoulder-high into Kilbrittain and named him William the Conqueror.
I discovered that stories circulated plentifully among the O’Neills. My grandmother was their collector and teller-in-chief. It was she who told them earliest and shaped them longest, and she who was invested with the authority of having been there. Born on 19 May 1912, she was, in a manner of speaking, there in 1916 for the Easter Rising; there when the Irish Republican Army came into being, there during the Anglo-Irish War – in which Tomás MacCurtain Senior was shot dead in front of his family, and Terence MacSwiney, MacCurtain’s successor as Lord Mayor of Cork, died on hunger-strike – and during the Civil War. My grandmother was party to these mythic episodes and they were part of her. She said – and she wasn’t joking – that her terror of thunderstorms and loud noises in the night stemmed from the times when she cowered indoors while the British forces ran wild in the deserted streets of Dunmanway, hammering down doors and drunkenly shooting and murdering and causing mayhem.
Grandmother’s view of the world was profoundly political, if not downright Manichaean. Everywhere she saw the forces of justice and good locked into an unending, many-faceted conflict with the forces of injustice and evil. Approaching her ninetieth birthday, she continued to follow current affairs, taking sides on a wide range of issues: Balkan warfare, Central American flood relief, local industrial disputes, the persecution of gay broadcasters, the treatment of Rumanian immigrants. She made a point of buying The Big Issue, the magazine for the homeless, and knew all about the life of her regular vendor, Christy. When she visited me in London at the age of eighty-three, she instinctively befriended the two tramps – immense, bearded, raucous drunks – who slept at the corner of the street I lived in, and for years asked how ‘those two lads’ were getting on. Her consumption patterns were shaped by a variety of boycotts (against governments and corporations) and sympathies (for Irish-made products), and the time I flew over to Cork on RyanAir she did not hesitate to criticize me for using an airline that was bad to its workers. The war between right and wrong was without limitation, and whenever I visited my grandmother I was treated to up-to-the-minute despatches from the front. Very often the bulletin concerned some showdown, skirmish or exchange of words in which Grandma had been personally involved: an encounter with Conor Cruise O’Brien, the Catholic arch-unionist ideologue who denounces Irish nationalism as ‘Catholic imperialism’, whom she once upbraided in the streets of Dublin; or some occurrence whose very banality revealed the boundlessness of her ethical concerns. For example: in 1996, when she was eighty-four, my grandmother went to the Aran Islands on her annual jaunt with ‘the girls’ (her sisters Nance and Enda). Whereas some might return from the Aran Islands with stories of their haunting beauty, what Grandma spoke of was, first, the rejection of a ham sandwich at the hotel (‘Ham? Ham my eye, it was all gristle’) and a further rejection of what purported to be a ‘salad’ sandwich; and, second, of some argy-bargy that took place on the ferry to the mainland. The boat was crowded and Grandma approached a German couple who were occupying a three-person seat for themselves. ‘ “Excuse me,” says I, “could you and your wife move along so that I can sit down too?” “No,” the man said. I laughed, because I thought he was joking. Then I realized he wasn’t. “How dare you,” says I. “You’re on an Irish boat, sailing on Irish waters, and you’re on holiday – yet you won’t make room for me?” “No,” the man said, “you will not sit there.” “You are an arrogant German bastard. As long as you’re alive Hitler isn’t dead.” That did it. They moved along then.’
My grandmother also talked about the deep past. She told a story that, like a horror movie, started with a prelapsarian scene of innocence and domestic tranquillity: her father reading to her in bed at the family home in Dunmanway, West Cork. This was a rare treat. Although Timothy Lynch, a quiet man, doted on his children, he worked a six-day week as a foreman for a bread company in Bandon, coming home at around five on a Saturday and going out again Sunday evening. Every weekend he had to cycle twenty-one miles each way, rain or shine. (He was something of an athlete: he played on the Cork football team in 1911. My grandmother played camogie, the women’s version of hurling, with less success: a goalie, she once conceded fourteen goals to Macroom.)
As Timothy was reading his children a bed-time story, there was a hammering at the door. It was them – the Black and Tans. They were dragooning men to fill in the craters in the road. Timothy was pulled away and herded with others in the main square of the town. It was like Hitler, my grandmother said, all the able-bodied men were rounded up and forced to work for days at a time, and their terrified families might have no idea of their fate or whereabouts. As Timothy was led away, some of the children – there were eleven of them, seven girls and four boys – began to cry. This infuriated one of the Tans. ‘Shut up!’ he shouted. But the crying continued. The Tan became enraged. He drew out his pistol and shot the cat in the head.
My grandmother had another childhood recollection of the Black and Tans. One freezing December day, a local Catholic cleric, Canon Magner, took his dog out for its daily stroll. Some time later, the dog returned home without its master, whining and whining. The housekeeper sensed something was wrong and a search party went out. They found blood on the road. Then they found the canon’s body in a ditch; he had ice on his face. He’d been stopped on the road by an open lorry of British soldiers, questioned, and shot. A lad called Tadhg Crowley was also at the scene. The search party found his body, too.
‘That was my political education,’ my grandmother said. ‘My family and the Black and Tans.’
It wasn’t difficult to guess what education my grandmother received from her family. Her uncles Dan and Bob Lynch were interned in the North in 1921 during the Anglo-Irish War, and three of her brothers, Jack, Tadhg and Paddy, came to be interned during the Second World War. The only non-republican Lynch was Ellen Lynch, my great-grandmother. She was born a Kingston and there was Protestant blood in her; but even she had Fenian cousins, the two Quill brothers, who abandoned their nail factory in Dunmanway and disappeared – to America, in the family’s best guess.
More than one of my grandmother’s children observed that she rarely spoke about her husband, Jim O’Neill. For example, Grandma had no ready tale about her courting days with Jim, which is perhaps why, when I broached the subject, she spontaneously said, ‘What did I know about him? I knew that he was beautiful.’
She must have known that he was a republican, too, because she’d see him at the Gaelic League Hall, where you spoke Irish and danced Irish dances, and at Tomás Ashe Hall, the republican club in Father Matthew Quay, named after the Easter Rising veteran who died from forcible feeding during a hunger strike.
Eileen Lynch was eighteen when she met Jim O’Neill. She had just moved with her family from Dunmanway to Cork city, where she worked in a shop. She wasn’t entirely without metropolitan sophistication: Grandma said that the Black and Tans’ womenfolk had introduced West Cork to rouge, powder, lipstick and bobbed hair. (‘Don’t go looking like a Black and Tan’s wife!’ the nuns would say to schoolgirls who wore make-up.) But Eileen and Jim didn’t go with each other immediately; there were other liaisons first. It wasn’t until she was twenty-one and he twenty-three that romance, as they say, blossomed. On 8 July 1934, at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in the Lough, Eileen Lynch married her beautiful republican.
My grandmother quickly took to her parents-in-laws, Peter and Annie
O’Neill, who lived up at Ardkitt. ‘Annie was a very kind woman who would bake cakes for the tinkers and happily put them up in the hay-shed,’ Grandma said. (‘In those days,’ she said, ‘itinerants were not like they are today: they’d come and be friendly with you and mend your pots and pans; tell you your fortune if they were women.’) But Grandma’s real admiration was reserved for Peter O’Neill. ‘What a man he was. What a man. He was a rebel; a lovely rebel. And he had the brains of – how many? – five professors.’ This was the Peter O’Neill story: that, in essence, my great grandfather was a scientist rather than a farmer. It had even filtered through to me growing up in The Hague: how he harnessed the stream that ran through Ardkitt and generated hydroelectricity for the farm; how he grew tobacco – tobacco, in West Cork! – and turned an enormous £300 profit for his first crop; how he cultivated tomatoes and mushrooms and kept honey-bees; how he was the only farmer for miles around who didn’t have a bush in the gap; and, most famously, how he invented and crafted a mahogany-framed egg incubator that hatched a hundred chicks and won first prize at the 1932 Cork science fair but, unhappily, could not be patented for want of money. ‘He was altogether unlucky with money,’ Grandma said.
But then I heard from my uncles that Peter O’Neill was an alcoholic who drank every penny he made. Every first Thursday of the month was creamery day and Peter would go off early in the morning to collect his money. The next time he’d be seen was in the evening, asleep between the milk churns as the unpiloted pony pulled the cart home.
My grandmother kept a framed photograph of Peter and Annie O’Neill and some of their ten children. Peter O’Neill, a ringer for my father, sits with patriarchal pride at the centre of a cluster of youngsters (Peig, Kitty, Nora, Paddy, Peter) and other relations. In the background, the ivy-clad frontage of Ardkitt farmhouse looms like an old college wall. There is no sign of young Jim, my grandfather, or his sister Mollie. By the time the photograph was taken, these two were living in Kilbrittain with their uncle and aunt, William and Mary-Ann O’Driscoll. My grandfather was farmed out when he was seven. Grandma explained, ‘There was such a lot of children at Ardkitt and his uncle in Kilbrittain had no children. So he was adopted – well, not adopted exactly, but he went to live at the Kilbrittain farm.’
A little surprisingly, nobody suggested to me that Jim’s early separation from his parents adversely affected him. The redistribution of offspring from overpopulated to underpopulated homes was not an unusual occurrence in the country in those days and it made economic sense for young Jim to be reared by his uncle and aunt, who were short of manpower and had nurturing energies to spare. Also, the arrangement gave young Jim the chance to acquire an interest in the Kilbrittain farm, eighty odd acres of dairy land known as Graunriagh: the O’Driscolls were childless and in need of an heir.
But Jim never did inherit Graunriagh. When he was twelve, his uncle William O’Driscoll died from peritonitis: it was the time of the Tan War, and the cratered state of the roads meant that William could not be transported to the hospital in Cork on time. The farm had to be sold. Mary-Ann O’Driscoll did not neglect her youngsters: provision was generously made that Mollie and Jim would each receive £500 at the age of twenty-one. The children never benefited from their inheritances. Mollie died, aged nineteen, of tuberculosis; and though Jim collected his bequest in Skibbereen, he immediately went to the office of a solicitor called Neville, in Cork, and transmitted the entire sum to his father, Peter, who needed to pay off farming debts and to stock Ardkitt with seven calves. The payment to Peter was made not as a gift but as a loan, and a promissory note in favour of Jim was executed by Paddy O’Neill, Jim’s eldest brother and, as the heir to Ardkitt, the ultimate beneficiary of the loan. The promissory note was entrusted to the custody of Neville. It was agreed that repayment would fall due when Paddy got married and came into a dowry. (In those days, many marriages amongst the farming class – which saw itself as a class apart – were fixed up by matchmakers, with the size of the dowry depending on the size of the bridegroom’s farm.)
However – there’s always a however in these stories – triple adversity struck. In October 1944, Peter O’Neill died intestate, with no provision made in respect of his debt to Jim. Second, in the late ’forties Paddy married Ellen Hennigan, universally known as Baybelle. Baybelle started trouble in the home from day one, according to Grandma, and Paddy, who had hitherto been a wonderfully friendly uncle to Jim and Eileen’s children and had invited them round to Ardkitt every summer, refused to pay back the loan, even though Baybelle’s dowry was £500, exactly the amount required. Third, Paddy was able to get away with non-payment because the office of Neville, the solicitor, had burned to the ground together with all documents stored there; and Neville himself was in a mental hospital and couldn’t remember a thing about any promissory note. The dispute came before the High Court in about 1949, but my grandfather’s claim was dismissed.
There was a further dispute with Paddy over property. Another uncle, Jim O’Driscoll, left my grandfather the deeds to a house in Bandon. However, the keys to the property were held by none other than the bugbear, Paddy. Even though he had neither the deeds nor good title, Paddy sold the house and pocketed the proceeds.
But it didn’t end there. The most bitter feud of all arose from Paddy’s treatment of his and Jim’s mother, Annie (who, incidentally, had brought a £500 dowry to her marriage with Peter O’Neill and was grandly wed by fifteen priests). The root of the problem lay in the ill-feeling between the mother-in-law and the new bride. Annie found a bottle of hair-dye under the staircase and immediately she guessed that Baybelle was not as young as she claimed to be: a serious matter in West Cork, where in the view of some it was a mortal sin for a wife to be older than her husband. Bad blood was also caused by Annie’s intrusions into the housekeeping. When Annie commented to Baybelle that she shouldn’t put red clothes into the pot with white ones, Baybelle told Annie to mind her own business.
It was around this time, my grandmother said, that ‘Baybelle hunted the itinerants from Ardkitt. The woman itinerant said, “All right so, we won’t come back – but there’ll be grass growing at your door and nobody’ll enter it.” And that came about.’
Then, in the ’fifties, came the egg money dispute. When Peter O’Neill died, it was understood by all that his widow Annie was to remain at Ardkitt and, in accordance with another country tradition, that the egg money was hers to keep; that is, the small proceeds derived from the farm’s sprinkling of chickens and turkeys. But Paddy (Grandma: ‘a skinny, nondescript person, God rest his soul, I couldn’t describe him’) demanded the egg money for himself. Annie tried furtively selling eggs on her own account, but when she returned from the market and lied about how many she’d sold, Paddy (who had counted the eggs) hit her.
Eventually, Annie fell ill. My grandfather cycled out to Ardkitt to see his mother, whom he loved dearly and would often bring a small bottle of whiskey as a gift. He stayed the night. In the morning he went out to the yard to chuck his shaving water; turning back, he found that the only door into the house had been locked by Baybelle. So he smashed the door down. Three days later, he received a letter from Bandon solicitors threatening him with an injunction if he set foot in Ardkitt again. Then, after a couple of months had passed, my grandparents received a telegram from Jim’s sister Peig, who lived near Ardkitt: Annie was very ill and my grandparents should travel out immediately. So the following morning they took the train on the West Cork railway to Desertserges Station. Peig told Jim that she was horrified by what she’d seen at Ardkitt: their sick mother locked away in her room like a prisoner and neglected by all except Paddy’s kids.
Ardkitt, when my grandparents arrived, was empty except for Annie in her bed, Baybelle having fled to a nearby cottage when she saw her in-laws approaching. ‘I decided to make a cup of tea,’ Grandma recounted. ‘As I waited for the kettle to boil, Paddy came in. “Who gave you the authority to make a cup of tea?” says he. “I’m making it fo
r your mother,” says I. “You’re making it for that old bitch upstairs?” “Sit down, Paddy,” I said, “and we’ll have a chat. Your mother idolizes you.” But Paddy ranted and raved, roaring and screeching that she was an interfering old bitch who should be long dead. Jim came down the stairs and heard him. Paddy ran off, but Jim ran around the table and caught him, and gave him a few wallops. “Don’t, Jimmy, don’t, don’t,” Paddy whined. I shouted, “Kill him, Jim, he doesn’t deserve to live!” ’ My grandmother laughed at herself.
A short while afterwards, Jim received a summons to appear in court on a charge of assault. After hearing the evidence, said Grandma, District Justice Crotty put his spectacles on his nose and turned to Paddy. ‘Do you mean to tell me that you came here and stood in that witness-box and all the while your mother suffered? How dare you come here. You should hang your head in shame. You must treat your mother in a humane way, and let her son visit her. A son has that right. But you’re not to assault your brother,’ he said, turning to Jim. ‘There’s no justification for that.’ Jim was acquitted, Grandma said, and it was Paddy, the complainant, who was bound over to hold the peace.
Uncle Brendan gave a slightly different version. ‘Of course he wasn’t acquitted,’ he said. ‘How could he have been, when he beat his brother unconscious? He would have received a suspended prison sentence.’ Brendan – a socialist with, I guessed, a political antipathy for the rural fetish of private property – also took a hard-nosed view of Ardkitt. In his view, there was a suspicion of grabbing about the way the O’Neills acquired an interest in Ardkitt in the first place. The original tenants of the farm, the Slyne family, were facing eviction, and Peter O’Neill’s father, seeing an opportunity, married the widow Slyne and moved in. In later years she, the widow Slyne, lived with a great-aunt of Brendan’s and was kept well away from the family.
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