One night in December 1950, our house in Blackrock was invaded by relations and friends from Baltinglass. They were on their way to the Dáil, where a row was about to erupt over the appointment of a new sub-postmaster in that small town in Co Wicklow. The famous "Battle of Baltinglass" which was to help bring down the country's first coalition government, was under way.
The Dáil duly erupted, and unparliamentary language was hurled - such as the Minister for Post and Telegraphs, James Everett, being called a "dirty, low-down rat" by a former Fianna Fáil minister, Paddy Smith. He was ejected, as was one of the Baltinglass crowd shouting abuse at Everett from the public gallery.
In the days that followed, Baltinglass made headlines, abroad as well as at home, as 50 gardaí were brought in lorries to hold back protesters. These included a British army general who had fought at El Alamein under Montgomery and a female relative of the then Queen. The town clergy were also deeply involved. A local historian, Paul Gorry, has described the events of those weeks as "a study of mass hysteria in microcosm". His own father's chemist's shop was boycotted because he refused to close it during one of the protest marches.
At the centre of the storm was Helen Cooke, a relative of my family whom we all called "Nellie". She had been running the post office for the past 14 years for her aunt Katie, who was the official postmistress but was too ill to do the job herself. The post office had been in the Cooke family since the previous century.
Helen was not all that popular. She had a cool, dismissive manner at times.
She had been brought up in Scotland, had been a nun in the Poor Clares for four years and an activist on the Republican side in the Civil War after she left the convent.
She had been expected to succeed her aunt when the latter resigned because of ill-health but Everett, a National Labour minister and the uncle of Liam Kavanagh, who was later to become a Labour minister, had other ideas. The minister advertised the post - and although Nellie applied, he appointed Michael Farrell, whose father was a party activist who had worked for Everett's election as a TD for Wicklow. When this news broke, there was strong reaction against what was seen as political jobbery. The Farrells owned a public house and grocery, butcher's and drapery shops, while Helen Cooke was the sole provider for her aged aunt on the small sub-post office stipend.
Another publican, Bernie Sheridan, threw himself into the campaign to reverse the minister's decision. Local priests were also drawn into the affair, which quickly escalated. Major-General Meade Dennis, retired from the British army, was landlord to much of the property in the town and farmed at the ancestral home nearby. He was persuaded to chair the first protest meeting. He tried to get his wartime colleague, the aerial photographer Norman Ashe, to drop leaflets on Leinster House. This was illegal, so instead Ashe flew over Dublin shouting pro-Cooke slogans through a loudspeaker.
When post office linesmen tried to transfer the telephone cables from the Cooke office to the new Farrell office, the locals took turns standing on the concrete slab covering the cable junction. Among the protesters was Daphne Lalor, wife of a local farmer but also a cousin of Queen Elizabeth, wife of King George VI. Sheridan, who proved to be a public relations master, passed on the news to the Irish Press and soon "the Queen's cousin" was an important media item. Sheridan also rigged up a siren over his pub to alert the protesters when the next effort to transfer the cables would take place.
But, backed by the 50 gardaí, the linesmen succeeded in the transfer and Michael Farrell took over as the new postmaster. The anti-Farrell campaign was only starting, however, and soon his post office was picketed and boycotted by the townspeople, who set up a system to bypass it and use the office in Naas for their mail.
Young women with black flags of mourning paraded through the town. Farrell supporters mounted a counter-demonstration in the form of a torchlight procession and a meeting at the town hall. Local businesses which did not close and pull blinds as ordered by the pro-Cooke campaign were then boycotted.
Nine days after the transfer, the Farrell family could take no more and Michael wrote his letter of resignation. Nellie was duly appointed after the post was re-advertised. The shaky coalition Government was wounded and finally fell 11 weeks later after the Mother and Child controversy.
Paul Gorry, who recalls the whole story in his excellent Baltinglass Chronicles 1851-2001, was not born at the time - I myself was in my mid-teens - but resents how his father's medical hall was ostracised because he tried to stay neutral. Gorry believes the Farrell family were unfairly demonised and their readiness to give credit to hard-pressed customers was not recognised. The family left a few years later and settled in Rosslare.
Naturally, as Cooke supporters, we rejoiced at the outcome. Nellie retired in 1963 and went to live in Australia with her two sisters. She died in March 1972. She was survived by a daughter, Maureen, who had been adopted by one of Nellie's sisters but did not know until years later that in fact her real mother was Nellie. She had even spent holidays with her in the famous post office. But that's another story.