Life with father

It was a relationship brimming with contradictions: the war hero-turned-fanatical democrat who seethed with nationalist fervour but was too prepossessed by Victorian prurience to hug his own children; and his brilliant physician son, zealously challenging medical orthodoxies while struggling to reconcile himself to a rigid Catholic upbringing.

Prof Risteard Mulcachy was the maverick heart surgeon responsible for the first public health campaign in the Republic to highlight the dangers of smoking. When he set about distilling into a coherent narrative the vast archive of papers left behind by his father Richard - veteran of 1916, centrifugal figure in the subsequent military struggle for independence and a leading influence in the nascent Free State government - he had no intention of delving into his own childhood in the family home, Lissenfield, in Rathmines, Dublin.

So nobody was more surprised than Risteard himself when the fruit of his labours, Richard Mulcahy - A Family Memoir, recently published, was as notable for its depiction of the author's youth in 1930s Dublin as for its recounting of his father's career.

Without meaning to do so, he had composed an understated, curiously affecting, portrayal of life in post-Emergency Ireland, when physical expressions of affection verged on the taboo and sex was a mysterious undercurrent scarcely acknowledged.

Richard Mulcahy was Michael Collins's right-hand man and a central figure in the GHQ intelligence unit which masterminded the War of Independence. He became Army Chief of Staff and Minister for Defence during the State's troubled early years.

Chiefly motivated by a gnawing anxiety that his father's pivotal role in the genesis of the State was in danger of being forgotten by his own descendants, Risteard - now aged 77 - envisaged a straightforward summary of his father's career, appended to a study of his thoughts on Collins and other contemporaries, and a brief family history.

But a strange thing happened as he began to write. Memories started to unspool and the work took on a life of its own, transmuting into an engrossing contemplation of Ireland after the Civil War and an intimate account of life with a soldier who came home from war to enter politics.

At the time of his death in 1971, Richard Mulcahy's contribution to the fight for independence had already been overshadowed by denigrated reduced to that of a bit player; he became just another faceless extra in what was now essentially a two-man drama. After a 40-year career as TD he was, outside his family and a coterie of historians, virtually forgotten. Had his son not encouraged him to record his thoughts on the era during the decade between his retirement and his death, they might have been lost forever.

But it was never Risteard's intention in compiling his father's memoirs to reclaim for him a place in the annals. That function, he says, was adequately fulfilled by the Maryann Valiulis 1992 biography, Portrait of a Revolutionary - General Richard Mulcahy and the Founding of the Irish Free State. His work was intensely personal, conceived as a keepsake for his own children. "It was a very organic process. I found the book growing and growing. I found myself returning very vividly to the past. There was a large degree of thought association - I would recall one event or occurrence from my childhood which would inevitably lead to another."

He remembers Richard Mulcahy as an "impersonal" though dutiful father, a religious man who attended Mass at 7 a.m. every day but whose faith was as much a matter of habit as spirituality. There were few outward displays of affection among the family. Risteard attributes this reluctance to express emotions to "the omission of sex and sexuality in the background of our lives". It was this unspoken aversion to intimacy which infuses the book's later chapters with a gentle poignancy.

"I wanted to make the point that though things were very different - and in a way more straightforward - than at present, we are not any more or less happy. But I was careful not to make any claims that things were any better than they are nowadays. I merely felt compelled to point out that they were different."

The project was a painstaking task, requiring the author to sift through the more than 100 hours of recordings and the voluminous archive of papers which his father left behind before he could even begin to write. The book is, he willingly confesses, a "haphazard sprawl" which he composed over three years.

Mulcahy plumped for self-publication when preliminary talks with a publisher faltered on the issue of editorial veto. He would write it his way or not at all.

"There is such a yawning gap between generations nowadays - it seemed important to me that my own children were aware of what their grandfather achieved. To do that I required complete editorial control. My account may be a little rambling in places - but I was afraid that if I handed it over to an editor they would overly concentrate on his achievements in the early 1920s and gloss over his later life."

Although expressly packaged as a family account, a literary heirloom, the book appears to have struck a chord with a wider readership. The initial print run of 200 quickly sold out - though Mulcahy admits this may have had something to do with him personally giving away "between 120 and 150" copies to friends, academics and a smattering of libraries. The positive reaction encouraged him to order a second printing and make the book more widely available. He has agreed to supply Easons and the Dubray bookstores. But he insists that critical or commercial success is of little consequence.

"I didn't do this because I wanted a lot of people to read about my father. I wanted my own family to have something to remember him by. I didn't want his legacy to fade into dust."