Carroll, Aideen

Aideen Carroll is Seán Moylan's eldest grandchild. She grew up in a family whose lives were touched by the War of Independence and the events that shaped the foundation of the Irish State. She has a BA in History from UCD and a Purser Griffith Diploma in the History of European Painting. She works for an American multinational and lives in Dublin.

Some thoughts from Aideen. July 2010.

In October 2009, several notebooks and many reams of photocopying paper later, a book emerged or what I thought was the final version of a biography on my grandfather. Little did I know this was only the beginning! It would take several months of editing and careful rewrites before ‘Seán Moylan-Rebel Leader’ was launched on the reading public.

I am now reclaiming the space around my laptop and under the table. A full box of A4 paper, printed on one side, awaits a decision. Should I shred it, green bin it or do my bit for the environment and write on the unprinted side. For the moment I'm leaving it. I can't bear to part with the scribbled notebooks either. Flicking through I find a sketch drawing of a Fianna Fail 1948 election poster showing a picture of a boat with FF written on the sails and storm clouds declaring Economic War and World War. The caption reads: Skipper for this Storm Too - Éamon de Valera. With a little editing the current wearers of the toga could recycle it. The umpteen files of photocopied documents would also benefit from careful indexing but that's a nightmare I can't face. At least I know where most things are. My research activities at the National Library were largely conducted on a Saturday morning with the occasional mid week foray after work. Luckily I still have reasons to go there so I don't have to wean myself off that particular pursuit. As I walk up Molesworth Street past Buswells Hotel I say good morning to a homeless man who sleeps on the steps of a Georgian house.

At first I was slightly afraid of him, but now, if he's not snuggled under his duvet, we bid each other good morning. I'm not noted for sartorial elegance or wide-awake bonhomie in the early part of the day but on Saturdays I happily join the ranks of other like-minded historians researching hot topics from a bygone era. What do you do in the library my husband asks in an accusing tone as I dodge the grocery shopping yet again. At this stage I think I could recite the Cork Examiner from January to June 1921! Sometimes I get sidetracked by unrelated snippets like the advertisement for the Clarence Hotel, on Wellington Quay, which reads: Seventy Bedrooms, Splendid Cooking, Electric Light Throughout! I wonder would Bono be interested? I have a soft spot for the Clarence because I know that a number of Volunteers from north Cork stayed there when they came to Dublin to sit for the artist Seán Keating's iconic works Men of the South and 1921 An IRA Column. I wonder where my grandmother and her sister Mary stayed when they came to Dublin for the Treaty vote. I tried to locate the Clarence’s register but sadly it couldn't be found. On recent library visits, some tetchy people have tried to oust me from the microfilm printer suggesting I'm hogging a valuable machine. Listen I say in my own mind, if you want to use it get up early! And then the tourists arrive 'to do' the National Library of Ireland. They gaze at the ornate ceilings and bookcases and cast a sweeping glance at the native population huddled behind desks before retiring to an establishment nearby for an Irish coffee! Thank God for the tourist industry in these straightened times.

Since the book was launched, a number of surprising connections have been made. Taidhg O’Muineacháin who is now in his 90s was at Riordan’s farm the morning my grandfather was captured on May 16 1921. The poverty of the time can best be described in Tadhg’s story. He was a small child wearing no more than a shift. Did he have shoes I wonder? Some time after Seán Moylan was released from Spike Island prison he sent this child a brown parcel. Inside the parcel was a coat. It was miles too big for him but he grew into it and to this day his eyes light up with the memory. I discovered in a copy of the Evening Echo that Minister Micheál Martin’s grandmother Margaret Ahern from Lisgoold, as she was then, walked my grandfather to freedom in 1919. This was the year Seán Moylan was given a twelve months sentence for seditious speech. He immediately went on hunger strike and pretended to be insane until the Prison Governor had to take notice! Two weeks later Moylan was transferred to the Cork Asylum, now Our Lady’s Hospital. He was rescued by Thomás McCurtain who enlisted the help of Margaret Ahern. Dressed in her nurse's uniform she told the soldiers on duty that the patient was being taken for a walk. In the blink of an eye Seán Moylan cleared the asylum wall and took off!

After the book went to press and I had the leisure of a little free time, my good friend and cousin Fr. John J. O’Riordáin organised a safari to visit the ambush sites, which had become part of the Moylan legend. Standing at Clanbanin with a captured plan from the Kew National Archives, I could sense the action that took place on March 5 1921 with bullets flying and cattle shivering by the hedgerows. The distances the Volunteers marched during those years should not be underestimated. Forty miles was nothing as they tramped through the night to an ambush site. Sometimes they would wait all day in wet clothes and damp boots hoping for their intended target, small wonder these men fell into bad health. In Moylan’s case, on Christmas Eve 1919, already in a bad way he walked from Millstreet train station to his mother’s house in Newmarket, a distance of 23 km. Falling in the door in a state of collapse, he was confined to bed for months.

Writing this biography has been like a revival of memory. Growing up in the 1950s my Moylan grand aunts were a major part of my young life. Seán Moylan died when I was almost 11 but he lived on in the voices and memories of his brother Joe, his sisters Mamie and Gret, my grandmother Nora and my great grand aunt Annri. My summer holidays in north Cork with Mamie and her husband Joe Carroll are laced with memories of ice creams, Nash's red lemonade and endless freedom. Great grandaunt Annri and her sisters Maud and Kate lived next door and shared the same back yard with Mamie and Joe. Dry rot, old books and ancient carpets gave their house a pervading whiff of mustiness but it was the familiar and comfortable smell of my childhood holidays. Annri was a woman of many talents who in other days had turned a shilling by making dresses for the living and shrouds for the dead. She was also a dab hand at cooking Drisheen but when I saw how it was made and watched her pour the ingredients into a sheep’s intestine I couldn't be persuaded to eat it. These elderly ladies spent their time perched in front of an open range cutting lace and ribbon from one garment to make over another. Rows of old fashioned small jugs lined their kitchen shelves, relics of a far off time when the Misses Moylan’s Refreshment Rooms offered a hospitable venue for convivial card playing and gossip. My first history lesson was absorbed in their house when I heard about the Black and Tans and the wrecking that went on during the house raids of 1920 and 1921. The significance of this was lost on me as a child but the chance remarks of these serene old ladies about their nephew Seán standing behind the door of his mother’s shop with his gun cocked and aimed while his courageous sister Mamie and her friend Baby O’Mahony heaped flattery on the Military to deflect a search, remained in the corridors of my childhood memory. When writing about this incident last year I knew exactly where Seán had stood at the back of the shop. In the 1950’s Uncle Joe kept his fishing tackle in the same spot.

Some aspects of writing about a family member tread a fine line. The bias is an affectionate one but the difficult questions cannot be ignored. In the aftermath of the Ryan Report on Child Abuse I struggled on how to present the Dáil debate on the teenager who suffered a broken arm in an incident at Artane Industrial School. Moylan was Minister for Education at the time and the question was raised in the Dáil by the independent T.D. Peadar Cowan. After compiling a thick file of newspaper cuttings, I eventually came to the view that the past was a different country and we could not impose present day attitudes on those who lived 55 years ago. There was a culture of not giving scandal and the clergy were seen by the population at large as beyond reproach. The newspapers of the day were also instructive. The Budget was debated in the Dáil on Friday morning 23 April 1954 and Saturday’s newspapers carried front page coverage on Budget related matters. The Irish Times printed the text of the Artane incident on page seven without editorial comment and the Irish Press made no mention. Nor were there any letters to the papers in the following weeks. The approach I took for the book was to quote the Dáil debate in full and give it a context for balance. Ireland at the time was Catholic, conservative and dominated by a Church, which invaded every aspect of peoples’ lives. I read an article on dancing in The True Witness & Catholic Chronicle (later the Montreal Tribune) of 1895 which says this: ‘Vast numbers imagine that because Lent is a season of fast, the succeeding period should be one of riotous living and uninterrupted carnival. This is a very mistaken idea; neither during Lent nor during any other time of the year are dangerous pleasures allowed or even tolerated by the Church. Dances, in which both sexes take part, and in which prolonged and rapid evolutions of couples are practised, are prohibited.’ Sixty years later, not much had changed. The entertainment industry in Ireland shut down during Lent because dancing was considered an occasion of sin and dancehalls were regarded by many as the vestibule of the devil incarnate. No wonder the ‘Bishop and the nightie’ affair following Gay Byrne's Late Late Show broadcast in 1966 caused such clerical convulsions.

In the interests of research, I went to see the documentary play by Mary Raftery, No Escape, commissioned by the Abbey Theatre. Compiled directly from the Ryan Report, the opening minutes played a recording of the Artane Boys Band and I fully expected to be confronted with the broken arm incident. No, it just set the scene for a play that was beyond compelling. It is one thing to read the report with as much detachment as you can muster but in the confined space of the Peacock theatre the audience were obliged to connect with the actors in a visual and emotional way and became part of the play itself like spectators at a Tribunal.

Seán Moylan went to school in Dromanarigle a few miles outside Newmarket town. He was in the same class as Alice Taylors’ father. She told me he made their kitchen table and a fine big solid one it was on which her mother fed all and sundry and on which the pig was salted every year. This erudite and well-read man had no pretensions to grandeur and couldn’t bear humbug. He was very proud of his carpentry skills and insisted that Seán Moylan, Carpenter and Minister of State be printed on his election ballot papers. Occasionally when electioneering, a heckler would challenge him: ‘What would you know you’re only a bloody carpenter’! ‘St. Joseph’ shouted Moylan ‘was a carpenter too and if I had his job Mary would be going to Egypt in a pony and trap and not on the back of a donkey’!

He was often quoted in Alice Taylor’s house as having said ""all being equal why not our own” In today’s world that philosophy might be much criticised but when you came from a small rural town in Ireland and a neighbours' child wanted a job and was as good as the next, why not she said! Alice has a friend who is in the horse business and when a horse wins a race he says, ""we shouldn't go to bed at all tonight"". He wants the day to last forever. That’s how I felt when Seán Moylan-Rebel Leader was launched in Kilmallock Co. Limerick, the town of my grandfather's birth. The turnout was enormous and the goodwill towards a man who fought for Ireland and played his part over 25 years in politics in moving this country towards peace and prosperity made all the effort worthwhile. Now that the book is no longer a struggle between me and my laptop it’s almost like being out of a job. Was it was worth all the blood, sweat and tears? Definitely!