An Irishman's Diary

I’M GLAD my father is dead. And my grandfather. Both my grandfathers! I am happy too that many of my aunts and uncles are also dead. But none of them is resting.

You may have heard that whirring noise coming from the West over recent weeks. It’s my dear departed spinning in their graves.

They have been spinning at such a rate it could power Roscommon for a year were the energy tapped. But no one in the beloved county dares suggest such a thing. It sounds too much like Green Party thinking.

“Green”, the very word is like a bell which, despite recent dissonance, brings back . . . greener days when all was well and Dev was in the Park.

Unlike some, my Fianna Fáil pedigree is flawless on both sides. My granduncle Jim Rogers fought in the War of Independence. He was captured, tortured and jailed, and was then on the losing side in the Civil War.

In 1923 he emigrated to the US, returning just once in the remaining 70-plus years of his long life so his new wife could meet the family. That was in the 1930s.

My grandfather Patsy McGarry was a founder member of the Fianna Fáil cumann in Mullen, near Frenchpark, where we lived for generations. And my father, Tom, was a Fianna Fáil county councillor.

In our house there was one god and three gospels. The god was Dev, against whom no other prevailed, and the gospels were the Irish Press, the Sunday Pressand the Evening Press.

In general, Fine Gaelers were regarded with treasured contempt. They had sold out the country in 1922 to hold onto their big farms, their big shops, and to get all the new State jobs. They were people of weaker moral fibre. “Suff on them.” By contrast, individually, my father liked most Fine Gael people. A favourite was our publican neighbour Peggy Mannion who would sit at one side of the range in our kitchen, with him at the other, as they exchanged insults. The intensity of these encounters could be measured by the number of cigarette butts Peggy left behind – the more, the merrier their war.

And always, before she left, both would join in the even more thrilling task of filleting reputations, when party affiliation was no protection.

Just the way to end the day.

Of course, during elections, there were always Fine Gael posters on the pole outside our house, facing our house.

Yet, we were not without honour in that context. When Tom O'Higgins lost (just) the presidential election in 1966 I put a "death notice", in black crepe and a white card, on Mannion's pub door. The card read, "These premises will be closed today as a mark of respect for Tom O'Higgins who yesterday lostthe presidential election to Dev". Despite this, I was already a disappointment to my father. Possibly influenced by excitement over Vatican II at school, I had taken to a unique sort of ecumenism.

Reaching out to Protestants was no problem in our house. There was one Protestant family in Ballaghaderreen then and their son sat beside me in school, a lovely lad with two terrible afflictions.

He wore braces on his teeth. I would rather have died. And his surname was Fitzgerald, the same as a then rising star in Fine Gael who would later be Taoiseach.

My father reckoned nothing good came of anyone with a “Fitz” in the name. “They came over with Strongbow and cannot be trusted,” he would say. It did not help that the boy’s father played golf. My father hated golfers.

But he liked Protestants. “Where would this country be without Douglas Hyde (buried just out the road), Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, not to talk about Parnell, Butt, Mitchel, Davis, Emmet, McCracken, Wolfe Tone!” he would say. One of my brothers is named Douglas.

Were it the case that my family said the rosary, I know which names would have been in a litany at the end. It would have been probably the most unusual litany in the world. All Protestants and not a saint in sight. Pray for us!

My father had little time for professional Catholics (clergy) or their craw-thumping allies, though he was very fond of those priests who shared his passion for the Irish language.

It would be years before I understood his dark mutterings about “....the Bishops and the Party”, whenever he heard Fine Gael’s Oliver Flanagan stand up in the Dáil for some rigid Catholic Church position.

It was, however, when I extended the range of my ecumenism to include Fine Gaelers that my father first realised he had a heretic on his hands.

My thinking was clear. I realised that even if Protestants never got to heaven they could still have a good life this side of the grave. But Fine Gaelers seemed condemned forever to the hell of Opposition in this life too. I could imagine no worse fate.

It was a remarkable insight for one so young. I became consciously kind to Fine Gaelers and began to think seriously about their policies.

It got worse when I went to university in Galway and started spouting all those left-wing ideas. “It’s that Michael D fella,” my father would spit in strained anger, his tone blunted by knowledge that Michael D Higgins’s father was also Fianna Fáil, had also fought in the War of Independence and died poor.

Later, it would help when I discovered that my father’s favourite local politicians were the late Fine Gael TD Liam Naughten as well as Fine Gael councillors Paddy Concannon and Tom Callaghan.

He did not trust party colleagues much and once referred to Sean Doherty and Terry Leyden in the council chamber as "two half wits who wouldn't make a decent wit between them". Yet another great story for the Roscommon Herald.

Then, he could be hard on his own. Arguing against the introduction of dog licences in the council he said he had “five sons and a sheep dog and the sheepdog is worth the five sons put together”. The Herald loved it. The dog got it.

He, my grandfathers, all my dead, are now seemingly distraught at what Fianna Fáil has done to Ireland. But it wasn’t their Fianna Fáil which did this to Ireland.

It was a later Fianna Fáil that abandoned Kathleen, the daughter of Houlihan, to cavort with floosies in the Galway tent.

My dear departed should rest in peace. Settle down, for God’s sake. For Dev’s sake, so? The people of Roscommon need a night’s uninterrupted sleep.