Just Mary (2 page)

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.