Maeve Binchy (37 page)

Maeve (top stair) became convinced that she was fat, ‘awful, because when you’re young and sensitive, you think the world is over because you’re fat’.

The ruined castle on the cliff top at Ballybunion, which gave Castlebay its name for Maeve’s second novel,
Echoes
.

Maeve, fourth from the right. She was not ‘very obvious at school … not a very confident person when young’.

Would you get a fellow? Brigid’s Cave, the echo cave where sometimes you got an answer if you asked.

Ballybunion in the 1950s was a joyous place, full of friends that would meet up every year. Here at last girls could run free without their mothers worrying.

For the dance ‘it was summer frocks, somewhere down to between the knee and the ankle and maybe a couple of layers of petticoats’.

Maurice Mulcahy was the resident orchestra. Mulcahy himself used to gee up his audience with clichéd innuendo that would set the dance floor alight in a riot of laughter and whistling.

Matt ‘featured for many years and it was always Maeve’s hope that he would fall in love with her’.

‘There was a rush in the morning to see who you were photographed with last night.’

Daniel A. Binchy (left), appointed Irish Minister to Germany in 1929, did not like Hitler and the Germans.

Soon after Daniel went up to University College Dublin, the British executed 19-year-old fellow undergraduates and IRA members Kevin Barry (above right) and Frank Flood, outraging public opinion.

Graduation Day was a huge disappointment for Maeve as she’d fluffed her degree. But it marked a turning point just as big, for university had awoken her to her true potential.

Cumann Merriman plugged Maeve into the true spirit of Ireland. She loved how connected the festival-goers were, the friendliness of the Failtiú (the Welcome), and the unaffected fun of the craic.