Family Fortunes: My garda father was an entrepreneur before the word was common

I now realise that my late father, Tom Ryan, a proud north Cork man, was an entrepreneur. This was in the rather depressed Ireland of the 1950s and early 1960s, when the word had not entered the vernacular.

In truth, my father would not have thought of himself as anything other than a man trying to provide a decent life for his family in those straitened times. His official job was as a garda, but in those days, although it was a very prestigious occupation, it was poorly paid with no overtime. And so he was involved in numerous enterprises designed to supplement the family income.

From an early age, I recall the timber business he had set up in sheds in our back garden in Drumcondra, Dublin, complete with a monstrous electric bench-saw, where we all happily toiled after school, chopping and bundling wood for sale to the local shops.

Then he decided to open a shop himself. It was built attached to the house – pre-1963 planning days – and never really became a success because the intended shopkeeper, my mother, became pregnant and had to retire from the job. Then there was the market garden in Donabate, where again we were recruited to pick and package tomatoes for transport to the fruit and vegetable market.

There were other sidelines, but perhaps the most glamorous, to us anyway, was his dancehall career: he ran dances in Barry’s Hotel and the Ierne Ballroom with some of his colleagues. Again, this did not prove to be very profitable but it did give us a tremendous insight into what was a major industry at that time.

My father died at the relatively early age of 62 while still a serving garda, perhaps worn out by his many enterprises. He never became rich but he certainly had a full life.

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