Finucane & Me E-Book

John Clarke

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 278

Beschreibung

Marian Finucane was a trailblazing broadcaster, the first to champion women's issues on air, and respected for her fairness, empathy and doggedness. One of a small group of Irish people known simply by their first name, the nation mourned when she died suddenly, aged 69, in January 2020. But John Clarke, Marian's widower, doesn't use her moniker – instead, he calls her 'Finucane'. It highlights the gap between the woman so many felt they knew and the woman he loved – the real Marian – who was by turns curious, fiery, emotional, stubborn, charming and endlessly excited by life. When John and Marian first got together, they promised each other that they'd never be boring. What ensued was forty years of conversation and thousands of miles travelled. Finucane & Me is an unexpected love story: the story of two people who 'made a pact for madness'; the story of a never-ending search for meaning; the story of two people who lived life to its fullest.

Leseprobe

Finucane& Me

My Life with Marian

John Clarke

Gill Books

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Author’s note

One: The First Journey

Two: A Businessman?

Three: Marian, Meantime

Four: Breaking Up, Moving On

Five: The Reynella Years: Paradise Found

Six: Sinéad: Too Busy to Cry

Seven: After Sinéad – Travels

Eight: Drink

Nine: Africa

Ten: The End of the Ball

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill Books

‘There are two types of people in this world; the Givers and the Takers – make the call…’

Anon

‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’

George Santayana

Dearest Marian,

The world you and I knew before you died has changed immeasurably.

We didn’t know it, of course, but Covid-19 was already creeping through humanity in our last few weeks together.

What followed – the cocooning, the absences, the denial of a hug – seems particularly surreal in light of your timing. All the rituals of death and mourning were scrambled and left many of us even further adrift. It made it harder to grieve, to find distractions, and so was all the more conducive to introspection.

My few broken words about us at your funeral made kind people curious about how I was faring without you.

‘How are you?’

‘I’m grand.’

‘No, really – how are you?’

Our old friends Patrick Farrelly and Kate O’Callaghan talked me into making a documentary on grief and loss, and it seemed appropriate for me to do it for all those faithful companions of yours, your listeners throughout your broadcasting years, rather than leave it to commentators from the sidelines.

My stumbling attempts to define grief seemed to resonate with viewers, although my efforts sounded feeble and futile to me. You of all people knew about a depth of grief so visceral it defies description.

When I agreed to write this book about our time together, I thought I might focus on the joys, the travels, the companionship on the great adventure. I wanted to write about what brought us together, what kept us together, the pact of madness that drove us to explore the world and made it so exciting and interesting for us both.

But how do you write a story about a long life and complex humanity without talking about guilt, loss, challenges, tragedy and human flaws? How do you give it a meaning without some kind of philosophical framework?

I am conscious of the tendency to deify the dead and that includes you, my love. You were as flawed as any other human being, as you would be the first to acknowledge. As readers will discover, you were one of the most tolerant women on earth, but your privacy and certain aspects of our lives were sacrosanct. So while I will try to deal honestly with our lives together, I do that while guarding your and other loved ones’ privacy as carefully as I can.

A major part of my problem in writing this book is that I cannot or do not think sequentially, which compounds the challenge for everyone around me. You would certainly have something tart to say about that.

You and I spent many hours wondering at our purpose on earth, musing on the randomness of life and death and choice. I see no sequence in life, only randomness, which may be partly responsible for what has landed me in trouble from time to time. I seek memories that seem meaningless to others; I look for order in places where there is none. It’s what makes the journey exciting but also, alas, so predictable.

As well as struggling to find order and a timeline of some kind, the process of delving into 86 years of a rackety, restless life and trying to make sense of it involves a reckoning. It’s been a painful process at times. And memory, as I also discovered in this process, is a terribly fickle friend for ageing and other reasons that will emerge.

You and I were a fairly disorganised, haphazard pair. Remembering dates and names has been a challenge, which won’t surprise you at all. Incidents I breezily ascribed to the 1960s turn out to have happened in the 1970s – I think. Important family events I had assigned to the 1980s actually happened in the 1990s. Some highly diverting stories had to be abandoned when, on closer examination, they turned out to lack any internal coherence due to geographical or timeline conflicts – and that’s being kind to myself.

We kept no aides-mémoires in the form of diaries and were careless with documents. The fact that you and I moved house at least half a dozen times meant many of the few documents we kept ended up decaying in a damp garage.

As for photographs … well, people seem very surprised that in 40 years we never took a photograph. In these days of instant multiple pictures it seems like a bizarre anomaly. But why would we take photographs when we were so busy being there? We knew what we saw. That was enough.

The upshot of it all is that, in spite of exhaustive efforts, I remain an unreliable narrator – above all because your remarkable memory, my love, is lost to me.

You would have been the firm corrective on the margins, reminding me of details, taking issue with my interpretations and my philosophy, as I like to call it.

Sometimes I look back at old RTÉ footage and I remember the kitchen conferences before a show, an interview, a discussion. I view clips from an old and modern Ireland that you had a hand in transforming, scenes from Africa where we did a lot of crying – and laughing – with Friends in Ireland stalwarts and did some good along the way.

The answer to the kind people’s questions about my life without you is that the earth continues to spin and so do I. I’ve moved on in the sense that I did not remain stranded in a cloud of mourning. But I never stop talking to you.

For a man of 86 with various ailments and a near lifetime of bad habits, my body has been surprisingly resilient, although I think it’s catching up on me, finally. The COPD is noticeable now; I need more blood transfusions and seem to have more allergies. The cataracts seriously impinge on my reading. Since you left, I’ve had cancer treatment and heart problems.

I get tired more easily and I fight it, of course – you would expect no less.

As someone said, old age is not for wimps.

But I can tell you straight, my love. It was a wonderful, wonderful life.

John

Finucane& Me

ONE

The First Journey

The public saw only a sliver of the Marian iceberg. She was quite deliberate about that. But there are whole parts of her that even I didn’t know. We were as close as any couple can be; we soldiered in all sorts of weird places and did all sorts of daft things.

‘But do we really know each other?’ I asked her one day.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

Have you ever sat there looking at the person you’ve been sharing your life with for 40 years, sharing your grief, laughter, love, hate and everything else, and thought, Who the fuck is this? How did I get here?

*

What did I see first? A tall blonde woman in red trousers. Gabby. Laughing. Surprising. A rare sight coming down the steps of Stephenson Gibney & Associates, the brash young architectural partnership shaking up the capital city, when women made up just a handful of the profession.

She was on a year’s placement from Bolton Street’s School of Architecture. Arthur Gibney was her boss and my closest friend. It was around half past five on a sunny summer’s evening, and he and I had arranged to have a drink in the Crookit Bawbee, where Mr Charlie Haughey featured among Gibney’s regular drinking companions.

We said hello. ‘Are you waiting for the quare fella?’ she asked. I said yes, and we chatted about her views on the demolition of old city buildings, while also noting that she was doing her internship with a company profitably designing their replacements.

‘So you’re joining the enemy?’

‘I want to learn how to be a good architect,’ she said gravely.

Would she like a drink, I asked. We were all heading for the pub, as it happened, so she and I went ahead together and talked about books, which morphed into a heated debate about Hemingway and his book on bullfighting. A discussion ensued about blood sports, which was satisfactory for neither party, until we were joined by Arthur, with a crowd from the firm, and the drinks started.

At around eight o’clock she said she had to go. I offered to walk her to the door, then to the corner of Baggot Street, from where she went on about her business, wherever she was going.

Gibney asked if I liked her.

‘She’s a very interesting woman,’ I said. Anyone who can argue about Hemingway is always interesting.

‘She’s very distant,’ said Gibney. Which was exactly what I found interesting about her. She was reserved. A bit standoffish. Just … different. Her exit from the pub was a pattern I would come to recognise on other occasions. She always seemed to have ‘appointments’. I think she had her escape route built in before she went anywhere.

Gibney, myself and some others had a regular Friday lunch to which some ladies from his office were usually invited. I asked him if he would invite ‘yer wan’. He rolled his eyes.

‘I don’t care if she’s cold,’ I said. ‘I like her anyhow.’

So a couple of days later, Marian duly arrived down with three other women. Lunch started at half past twelve. By the time the food arrived, around two or three, there were half a dozen bottles on the table.

Marian? She laughed and kept laughing till the tears ran down her face. Nobody could figure out why she was laughing. She thought she had arrived at some kind of Mad Hatter’s tea party. She had never seen such quantities of drink being consumed in the middle of the day nor heard anything like the nonsense that was being spouted.

Lunch finished up around five, whereupon Gibney, the master of ceremonies, would decree that it was time for liqueurs – sambuca (we didn’t set fire to them – that was for tourists) or limoncello, perhaps.

This was followed by another decree – ‘a proper drink in a proper pub’ – whereupon we would proceed to a pub and drink two pints. Following those, Gibney would say that they were nice pints, but we must have a man’s drink. This heralded the whiskey course. By now on the Friday routine, it would be around ten o’clock and it always seemed a bit premature to go home. The next stop would be a nightclub, where closing time was in the early hours.

Marian and I sat together at one end of a table at that first Friday lunch. We attempted to elevate the conversation to a slightly higher plane. Completely futile. Naturally we ended up in a nightclub – a terrible kip in Leeson Street.

By then I had learned a few things about her. I knew that she was 20 years old, that she had read every known book on God’s earth and was a keen debater. But she also seemed quite innocent. Sheltered, convent educated, a daily Mass-goer when she lived at home, raised through the sieve of devout Catholicism and respectability by a teacher and a garda with proper social consciences. Good people who lived good lives and earned their pensions, kept their noses clean and worked regular hours in the service of family, church and community.

I was her polar opposite. I had a wife and three young sons at home. And I was 14 years older than her. A hard-living, hard-drinking atheist of 34, wheeling and dealing in property and the rag trade. I’m not too sure what Marian made of me. But there was a torrent of chemistry between us.

After a couple of meetings, I realised she was the only person I ever wanted to see. We shared an insatiable curiosity about the wider world and how it worked. A diligent student debater and activist, she was far too busy studying, saving the planet and marching in protests against apartheid and the ruination of Georgian Dublin. Debating seemed to take up an inordinate amount of her time.

What she heard in me, I think, was an alternative voice. I accepted almost none of the tenets she had been brought up with. She was a voracious reader who routinely parked up her little Fiat Uno opposite Eason’s on O’Connell Street every Saturday, bought a book and spent the afternoon reading it there in the car or on Howth Head. Her knowledge of American and Russian literature suggested it wasn’t the Sacred Heart Messenger she was buying.

In her efforts to navigate a path through a stifling society, she possibly viewed me as her number-one specimen, someone who agreed with absolutely nothing she had heard or seen, someone from another world, a world that worked much more in the grey. That may have been the attraction. I don’t know. We never analysed it because we didn’t have to. Within a few weeks we had fallen in love.

*

It was easy enough to bump into one another discreetly. Gibney, being our social organiser, ordained a fitness regime for the group at one point and this involved tennis in Shankill, where my friend and mentor, Sam Sherling, had a farm. Marian and her friend would come out to join us and Sam would open a bottle of whiskey and we would all sit around discussing philosophy, Plato and the meaning of Zen, or so we liked to think. There was some tennis played, it’s fair to say, and Sam was a very serious man in terms of the human comedy. He was also running a lucrative international scrap-metal business.

Thirty years older than me, he had been my mentor since I was 20. The Sherlings were no ordinary family. Fleeing the pogroms, Sam’s father, a devout Ashkenazi Jew, walked from Russia to Cork and sold needles, thread and scissors door to door before setting up a scrap-metal business in the 1920s. It was a whole other world, one barely visible from Ireland unless you were prepared to look.

What did I learn from Sam Sherling? I’m not sure. Sam was a very negative man in many ways, and I could be negative too about life. But Sam was negative in that way that nothing really matters, everything changes, life is for living now because tomorrow we may all be dead or in a gas chamber or expelled in a pogrom. Finucane felt he was a dangerous mentor because he was an anarchist. It’s true that he was more than a little odd. I seemed to spend a lot of my time with oddities. I liked them.

All this was an eye-opener for her. She was suddenly entangled in these frenetic encounters among people who appeared to be making money in all sorts of bizarre ways, people who were totally cynical about the system and how it operated, with a complete disregard for societal and religious norms.

We had a few things in common, she and I. We had been born in Dublin, our mothers were teachers and we were big readers. Otherwise, we might as well have landed from different galaxies.

*

Like most Dubliners then, we were only a degree or two removed from rural Ireland.

My only sibling, Elizabeth, and I were fashioned from more liberal material. Sheila, our mother, born in 1904, was raised in County Longford by a woman who rolled her own cigarettes – held with a hairpin – and was living a kind of anti-clerical feminism decades before it ever hit the mainstream. Granny Cosgrove reared five daughters and two sons on a farm in Dalystown, a townland a few miles from Granard where I often spent holidays. When Dublin’s North Strand was bombed during the war, Sheila feared another attack, so we moved to Granny’s for several months since Granard was considered to be an unlikely target.

I was only four or five and frightened by the big old creaky farmhouse so was really happy to be allowed to sleep with Granny. This came with conditions. Her alarm went off at six every morning. This was a house where electricity and running water were way in the future and the toilet was a ‘long drop’ in the orchard. So, Granny’s day began by turning on her Tilley lamp, fuelled by methylated spirits, and stoking the ashes to boil water for the tea.

Then she would turn on the crackly radio – the kind run on old batteries that had to be taken the three miles to Granard every Friday to be charged – and tune it to the BBC.

The rule was that I got a cup of tea if I didn’t talk.

It was 1940, the Second World War was raging, and on her bedroom wall was a vast map of Europe, made up of bits of maps of France and Germany and other places all stuck together. Cigarette in one hand and box of coloured pins in the other, she listened to the BBC news, with all the static, crackles and bangs, and moved little red pins on the map indicating new troop movements on the Russian or German battle fronts. I followed the war in silence and learned all sorts of army things while drinking my tea with Granny.

Granny Cosgrove was also a bookworm. All through the war, six books arrived every month from Foyles, the London booksellers. A war of a different kind was in permanent spate between her and the local canon, who strode about in a black cassock terrifying the poor citizens of Granard – every citizen except my granny.

‘I suppose you’re readin’ them books still, Mrs Cosgrove,’ he would thunder. ‘How is your war going?’

‘That’s a halfwit, John,’ she would answer loudly in my direction, gathering me and my sister around her long apron. She reared us to dissent. She and my mother were fiercely anti-clerical while managing to square it with observing the Catholic rituals.

Granny’s husband was a farmer who had a hardware shop and a house in Granard town, and the children’s townie playmates included Kitty Kiernan – much later to be known as Michael Collins’s fiancée – whose family owned the hotel across the street. Grandad had never gone to school but had a keen respect for Granny’s well-stocked mind. When she decreed that all their girls would go to university, he agreed, which was no small concession from a man in the 1920s. Granny kept her promise despite his early death.

Her children were as fearless as she was. By the 1930s, Sheila, my future mother, had a teaching job between three different schools in County Kildare and rode everywhere on her motorbike.

She and my father, Desmond Clarke, met in Spiddal in the Galway Gaeltacht, where they went to learn Irish in 1933 – a romantic national movement in those days, until it became organised and lost its charm for my mother and my father. Sheila continued to do all the driving. I never saw my father behind the wheel of a car.

Desmond was the kindest and gentlest of fathers to Elizabeth and me, which was surprising because he had a very dark childhood with a mother who was an idiot by Sheila’s reckoning.

His mother was Marcella Shaw, born into a well-heeled Kilcullen family and a life of displaying her talents as a singer and a pianist at afternoon teas and soirées before marrying a dashing young barrister called John Clarke, my grandfather, from North Mayo – Parnell’s right-hand fundraiser in America – and giving birth to Desmond and Leonard.

John died young from tuberculosis. His fundraising activities clearly hadn’t enriched him personally, and certainly curtailed his practice, because he died penniless and Marcella was ill-equipped to earn a living. Her answer was to place the boys in the O’Brien Institute, a kind of home for the children of the genteel on the northside of Dublin and, like most of those institutions, a fairly savage and austere place. Then she took off to Belfast and became a nurse to victims of the First World War, while Desmond tried to look after Leonard in the orphanage, probably thinking it a temporary arrangement.

But when Marcella emerged from her war effort, she married a widower and acquired three stepsons, and somehow Desmond and Leonard never got back into the family home. I think my father suffered a lot of hardship and hurt in his early life, although his children would never have known.

Desmond was a prodigy. He left school at 16, wrote his first book at 17 and got a job in a solicitor’s office in Molesworth Street at 18. When an opening came up for an assistant librarian in the Royal Dublin Society in 1925, he grabbed it because it placed him back among books. By the time he retired as chief librarian in 1974, he had played a major role in developing the new RDS library and become a dominant modernising force in the Library Association of Ireland. He had also produced a prodigious number of published short stories, as well as works as diverse as art biographies and a study of 18th-century agriculture, histories, bibliographies and reviews, and became secretary of Irish PEN, among other things.

Desmond adored the west of Ireland, with its little cosmopolitan colonies of artists and writers, and he loved exploring the history and the heritage of the people along the seaboard, writing stories about them long before Connemara was colonised by Dublin 4.

Desmond also became chairman of the Beekeepers’ Association and found time to pester the Irish Times letters editor about matters like the destruction of woods in Mount Merrion.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about him was that, in spite of his own deep childhood scars and poor role models, he adored his two kids, even me. He tried very hard to give us a life and the kind of love that he had never experienced. Although it was an age when children were casually slapped, my father never slapped us, nor did my mother. He thought slapping a child was a terrible thing to do.

He and Sheila had a good marriage. There was a lot of reading and a lot of books in the house. Like her own mother, my mother was anti-clerical while observing the Catholic rituals. My father never indicated much attachment to religion.

The only time I really saw him angry was about the exclusion of Catholics from Trinity, where some extraordinary research was happening in the sciences, a subject that was close to his heart. He felt that Irish people were being excluded from all this by a cleric, specifically John Charles McQuaid.

St Conleth’s on Clyde Road was the chosen school for my secondary education. Though founded as ‘an establishment for the sons of Catholic gentlemen’, it felt like a fairly broad, liberal-minded place that encouraged free and open thinking – another lucky life choice I shared with Marian – even for this young rebel without a cause. But unlike Marian, I was very hard work.

Coming of age in the 1950s, my problem was that there was nothing I liked about Ireland. I didn’t like the Church, I didn’t like the singularity of thought, I didn’t like the social structures. Worse, when I was about 15, I started reading the existentialists and deciding this was the way to go. Life has no meaning, nothing happens, nothing matters, reject bourgeois conventions, whatever I do I will die one day anyway … or at least that’s what this callow 15-year-old made of it.

But it was a handy concept for someone who had no idea who he was or what he was and, to be honest, has never quite worked it out to this day. Back then there was no career guidance and, in truth, when it came to third level, the whole university thing seemed such an elitist activity. University fees limited admission to a tiny minority, and there was nothing about that minority that appealed to me.

Without much actual evidence, it seemed to me that all the students were culchies (yes, me, hardly a generation up from the country). I had no interest in rugby and even less in the GAA. My interests lay in buying and selling horses and hunting several days a week with a mate of mine, Leslie Fitzpatrick, an international showjumper.

My father wanted me to be a scientist. My mother wanted me to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a layabout. I won – or thought I did. If they said black, I said white. If they said it was raining, I said the sun was shining.

My greatest regret about my father is that I was not more interested in the things that fascinated him – which, ironically, were the same things that came to fascinate me as I grew older. I regret that I didn’t know him better and was so arrogant and intolerant. But I didn’t know what understanding was. I have apologised to him many times in my head.

He was passionate about education and felt a duty of care to the sciences. So, naturally, he assumed that his son would make a very good scientist. I believe my mother pleaded with him to let me take a year or two out to work, to knock the corners off me, and then send me off to university. Though her writ usually ran in the house, she lost that cause.

One year on the science degree course in UCD was enough to confirm she was right. I’m sure they both despaired.

There was a consequence for this 19-year-old, both then and far in the future, when I would have reason to do a lot of self-searching. But right then my problem was the lack of good layabout role models in the 1950s for me to ‘aspire’ to. Choices had to be made. You needed money, like everyone else – probably more of it, in view of the evolving lifestyle – but how did one accumulate it?

This was the challenge for a lad with absolutely no purpose in life except to chase women and drink and therefore in need of an income well above his station. I supposed then that I must be a businessman.

*

It was not a scenario that would have sat well in any sense with Marian’s family, now or then. Farmers, shopkeepers, schoolteachers and Roman Catholics to the core of their being, they were rooted in Ballydesmond, an area of west Limerick on the Kerry border.

Her grandfather was the principal of Ballydesmond national school, a tough, hard man and dedicated teacher. Every year the master – as male principals were called then – picked the five brightest boys from poor families and prepared them for the British civil service exam. At 5 p.m. every evening the master returned to give special evening classes for those boys. His purpose was not to provide servants of the empire – that was a side effect – but to give the boys a rare route out of poverty.

Thus prepared, five boys who had never been outside the village were each provided with a suit to wear and dispatched to London via the Ballydesmond network. Somebody from Ballydesmond would be waiting for the train at Westland Row station to escort them to the Liverpool ferry. In Liverpool, they were met by another Ballydesmond native, who would accompany them to the exam venue in London. The same network delivered them safely to each point on the return journey. Back in Ballydesmond, the five suits were returned and carefully stored for the next year’s chosen five.

When the boys landed those permanent, pensionable jobs as civil servants with the British government, as they usually did, they reimbursed the master for the bus, train and boat fares. That was how he funded the programme.

The system did not reward such dedication. When the master, Marian’s maternal grandfather, died suddenly in his forties, the family income died with him. There was no such thing as a widow’s pension, nor was there much sensitivity about it either. ‘It’ll be the poorhouse for you lot,’ someone was heard to say to the widow and mother of four young daughters at the funeral.

It was something else we had in common. Both our grandparents’ generations had experienced the sudden, early death of the breadwinner, which led to a radical redrawing of their children’s lives. But those tragedies were handled in very different ways.

Maura, the master’s eldest child and Marian’s mother in a future time, assumed the duty of rearing her siblings. When she got her teaching degree, every penny she earned went to supporting the family. They all achieved a secondary education before migrating to Dublin and availing of the few choices available to women: nun, teacher or housewife.

By the time Maura married Daniel Finucane and had her own children – Therese, Dorothy, Noel, Tomás and the youngest, Mary Catherine Marian, born in February 1950 – Maura had already raised another family. The funeral whispers of the poorhouse could have destroyed others. For the master’s children, it was what drove them on. In one way or another, they all became educators fuelled by a sense of social justice.

Maura’s sister Nora became a teacher and, more than that, a central figure in the founding of the Irish credit union movement. Teaching at an Irish Sisters of Charity school in Dublin during the 1950s, she was appalled at the effects of poverty, unemployment and the vicious cycle of money-lending on local families.

With an economics student, Thomas Hogan, she set up the Dublin Central Co-Operative Society, a workers’ co-op, and then expanded her vision by travelling to study the Canadian Credit Union National Association model, designed for people too poor to have a bank account. Seán Lemass appointed her to an advisory committee on non-agricultural co-ops, and the first two Irish credit unions were formed in 1958. Her first employee was a young Derry lad called John Hume.

Nora lived like a hermit. She smoked like a train and dined almost exclusively on Vienna rolls, despite the family’s best efforts to vary her diet. She also set up and ran the Irish League of Credit Unions, unpaid, from her Dublin living room, teaching full-time and funding its development with her earnings. Her contribution was recognised when she stood beside President Éamon de Valera as he signed the 1966 Credit Union Act into law.

This was the solid social-justice ethos in which Marian was raised.

She was 12 when her father, Daniel, a garda sergeant, died at only 55. For the last five years of his life, a heart condition meant he could only work in the afternoons, and Marian’s frequent throat infections meant she was at home quite a lot. As a result, they became very close. She loved that time with him, sitting at the end of his bed listening to his stories about history, current affairs and how world events evolve. Like Marian, he read widely and voraciously, and though he wasn’t formally educated, she always said he was one of the most educated men she had ever known.

Marian often referred to the incident when Maura arrived in, appalled, to find him reading the Bible. ‘Great God, Dan, you’ll lose your immortal soul if you read that book.’ In that Ireland, ordinary people could not be trusted to read the Bible without the supervision of an informed person, apparently.

That incident spurred her to get her hands on every book she wasn’t supposed to read. Daniel’s influence on Marian was profound. ‘Straighten your back, walk tall, keep walking tall,’ he used to say to his tall girl.

She always did.

His death was one of those subjects that went into the depths of the iceberg, the first of several catastrophic events in her life that were never up for discussion. It was her way of coping. But they were never forgotten. They went round and round in secret compartments, were taken out, examined, looked at and put back in again. And they were hers – her privacy, her no-go areas.

During all that time, Maura hauled Marian and the others out to seven o’clock Mass, came home, gave them breakfast, raced into Phibsborough school, where she taught at the time, raced home at lunchtime and gave them lunch.

Then she drove Daniel to work. And when he died, Maura was left alone again to carry the responsibility for her family, sustained by her teaching job, her faith and the heavy responsibility of giving her five children the best chance she could in life. She was a remarkable woman who undoubtedly had private questions of her own about her beloved Church.

It was Maura who told the story about a class of children she had prepared for Confirmation and who were all lined up in their pews, dressed in their very best, when Archbishop John Charles McQuaid arrived to confer his blessing. ‘Which is the illegitimate child?’ he asked. He then proceeded to put the routine doctrinal questions to each young Confirmation candidate, except the illegitimate child, whom he pointedly ignored. The incident shocked Maura, a card-carrying Catholic, to her soul. On countless occasions throughout her life, Marian would bring it up and say, ‘How could a human being do that to a child?’

As an institution, the Catholic Church was capable of astonishing cruelty, yet there were always individuals within it working quietly to undo the harm. Marian found some of them in an institution that would prove to be another major influence on her life. Though chosen for its excellent exam results, Scoil Chaitríona, an all-Irish secondary school in Glasnevin run by the Dominican nuns, was well ahead of its time in its promotion of independent-minded women.