What Timmy O’Donoghue Knew About Troubled Times

Céad Míle Fáilte, and welcome to this week’s Letter from Ireland. We are at the end of a grand warm spell here in County Cork, the kind of week you’d nearly forget Ireland was meant to be a wet country. The windows are thrown wide and the blackbirds and starlings are full of chatter morning and evening. I’m sitting here with a cup of Barry’s tea, and I hope you’ll join me with a cup of whatever you fancy yourself as we start into today’s letter.

A Drop of Whiskey with Timmy O’Donoghue

If I’m honest with you, like many others, I’ve been feeling the weight of the world a bit this past while. The news has a way of arriving in the kitchen these days whether invited or not, and there are mornings I’d rather not open a newspaper at all.

I’ve been thinking about how to write about this without making it any heavier than it already is, and the answer came to me, as these things often do, in a sideways fashion. You see, a while back I asked our Green Room community a simple question. Who is the oldest Irish ancestor in your family tree?

The answers that came back have been a great pleasure to read. When I considered my own answer to the question, I gave it a fair bit of thought. Plenty of names came to mind, but the one who kept coming back to me was Carina’s grandfather, Timmy O’Donoghue.

Timmy was born in 1902 on a farm near the village of Banteer in north County Cork. He was the youngest of seven, and like so many Irish families of that time, saw the house slowly empty around him as brothers and sisters went to England and to America.

But Timmy stayed and worked that same land the whole of his life, marrying Julia and raising seven children of his own. He never learned to drive, preferring to ride a horse. He was never comfortable being away from his farm for any length of time, and saw no particular reason why he should be. He was hale and hearty to the end, and that end didn’t come until 2003 when he was a hundred and one.

Think for a moment about what passed over that one life. He was a boy during the First World War, fourteen at the time of the Easter Rising. He was a young man during the War of Independence, and in those years he carried messages for the local IRA, a runner along roads he knew even in the dark. He saw the Irish Civil War come the following year, setting neighbour against neighbour. He saw the making of the Irish Free State, and then the Republic. He saw a second world war from a neutral country, listening hard for news beside the kitchen wireless.

He saw more upheaval in his first fifty years than most of us will read about in a lifetime. And he lived to a hundred and one with, by my memory and every account in the family, a twinkle in his eye and the ability not to impose his troubles upon others.

So this week I did a thing we can only ever do in our imagination. I pulled a chair up to Timmy’s kitchen table, and imagined a conversation in which I asked him what he made of the state of the world.

Come Into Timmy’s Kitchen

Let’s go into Timmy’s kitchen. The fire’s down low, with him in the chair nearest it, and me told to sit where I’d be warm.

“You’ll have a drop,” he’d say. Not a question, a visitor being a grand excuse to bring out the bottle of whiskey. He poured a hefty measure and added some water. Then, once we were settled, I leaned in a bit, on account of his hearing not being what it was.

“Timmy, I came to talk to you because I’m in a small bit of a knot about the state of things. You saw the whole century turn over. Wars, and a country torn in two, and remade again. Were you not afraid the whole time of where it was all going?”

He took a while. Not because he didn’t know, but because he wasn’t a man to rush at an answer.

“I was mostly afraid of being late for the milking, that I remember well. The night I was sent over the road with a message for the men, I was more in dread of my mother finding my bed empty than of anything that might be on the road. Isn’t that a strange thing to carry sixty years?”

“But the bigger things, Timmy. The War of Independence and the Civil War after it. Were they not always with you?”

He went quiet at that, and I knew not to push.

“We didn’t talk about it much, after. There were men I knew on the two sides of it, and then it was over and we still had to live up the road from one another. So we let it lie. We were the better for letting it lie, I’d say.”

“And nothing of it stayed with you?”

“Plenty stayed, but it stayed in its own corner. I’d the animals to be tended and a wife above and seven children running in and out, and a man only has so much room in him. If I’d let it all in, there’d have been no room left for them.”

“It’s the news that has me, Timmy. There’s so much of it, all at once, from everywhere.”

“What’s the news?”

“The wars. The politics. The state of the climate. I’d hardly know where to begin.”

“Sure the world was always ending. There was always a man outside the church on a Sunday who’d tell you so. But trouble never comes in the door all in the one go, the way it does off that television.

“In my time, it came in a room at a time, if it came at all, and you dealt with the room you were standing in. The animals in the fields below never read the paper. They wanted the same things off me in 1921 as they did in 1971. There was a power of comfort in that, though I’d not have called it comfort at the time. I’d have called it work.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“I do not, boy. I’d say it was the work of a lifetime to keep the bigger things out long enough to be of use to the smaller ones. You’d not always manage it, but you’d try again the next day.”

“What kept you at the trying?”

“What was in front of me. The cows. Julia. The seven little ones. The hedge that needed trimming. If you tend to what’s in front of you long enough and well enough, you don’t have much spare for the rest of it. I’d not call that philosophy. I’d call it Tuesday.”

I laughed at that, and he let me.

“And if I’m honest with you, Timmy, the worry isn’t really for me. It’s for the young ones. The grandchildren.”

He nodded for a long time. The fire crackled.

“That’s a different thing. That one doesn’t go away on you, and I’d not insult you by saying it would. But here’s what I’d say to it. The young ones don’t need you to have the world figured out. They need you not to hand them the whole knot. They learn faster by looking at you than anything you’d ever tell them.”

“So I’m to put the knot down.”

“You’re to put it down for the bit you can. And then pick it up again later if you must, but somewhere they won’t have to carry it. That’s all anyone ever did. We were no braver than ye. We just let fewer troubles into the kitchen.”

He looked toward the window, the light was going.

“Drink that so I can pour you another one. You’re nursing it like a cup of tea.”

I have thought about this imagined hour a great deal this past week, and what strikes me is what Timmy would not have said. He would not have told me it was all going to be grand. He lived through too much to insult another with that. He would not have told me the world was safe, because he knew well it was not.

What he had instead was something more useful. He had the room he was in. He had the animals and fields that asked the same of him every year, regardless of whose flag was flying over the courthouse. His attention reached about as far as he could walk before his dinner, and it went down deep rather than wide. The enormous things passed over him in the way the weather passes over a hill, leaving the hill still there after.

So, here’s my question for this week:

When you feel challenged, when the news is too loud or the year has been too long, which of your Irish ancestors would you most like to sit with for perspective?

Not the most famous one. Not the one with the best documents. The one who, if you could pull a chair up to their fire, might steady you.

Do leave your reply in the comments section below.

That’s it for this week.

Tóg go bog é. Go gentle on yourself, and on the news. The hill is still there.

Slán for now,

Mike.