Just Mary (31 page)

As Brian continued his treatment and kept working so hard at his job, we began to feel that perhaps, just perhaps he might be one of the very few who would not be beaten by this cancer. Of
course hope always springs eternal in the human heart and I, like many, many others, hoped that somehow Brian would surmount his illness. He was undoubtedly a fighter and I felt that such a strong
spirit as his might be able to stave off any further inroads by the cancer. All the while, I could only imagine how Brian’s wonderful wife, Patricia, was able, despite her own demanding job,
to keep up her children’s spirits at home as they continued their studies. At the time, Tom was doing his Leaving Cert and Clare was shaping up for her Junior Cert. As an aside, I remember
well how, as part of his Honours History course for Leaving Cert, young Tom decided to do a project on his great grandfather and my father, P.J. Lenihan. To that end, he came down to Athlone to
meet with George Eaton, who had been Company Secretary of Gentex — the two of them had a very useful and interesting conversation with one another. As part of the project, Tom also
interviewed me at a later point. I never saw the end result of the project, but I’m sure it worked out really well because he was fascinated by his subject, as well he might be.

It was to be an enormously difficult year for the Lenihan family in 2010. As well as Brian’s continuing struggle with pancreatic cancer and its bleak prognosis, we would lose my brother,
Paddy, that autumn, in the month of October. Paddy had been battling illness for some time. Years before, he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s but, with the help of a very effective regime
of medication, he had been able to withstand this difficult disease very well. However, in the twelve months preceding the summer of 2010, his health had taken a distinct turn for the worst. He had
developed various problems with the veins in his legs and other chronic health difficulties. Taken in isolation, none of these conditions was serious, but together and in conjunction with his
Parkinson’s, it all added up to a poor state of health. At one point, Paddy went to Roscommon Hospital for about four weeks and we all visited him a lot during that time.

The whole Lenihan family had a great affection for Paddy. As I have mentioned in the opening chapter of this book, he was the younger of my two brothers, at 15 months younger than Brian Snr.
Paddy was always regarded as, not so much the wild one, but the different one — and I think it was perhaps because Brian was so serious and so much the older brother when they were growing
up. I remember Paddy in those early years so well, because I was always really fond of him and he of me. After completing his schooling, Paddy had enrolled at
UCD
to study
Agriculture. I can still recall clearly being brought as a schoolgirl to see him at one stage in the Portobello Private Nursing Home in Dublin, where he had to stay for about four or five weeks,
having had a very bad flu which had turned into pleurisy. Following this bout of ill health, Paddy had seemingly decided in his own mind that he had had enough of academic life and of what he saw
as the strictures of life in Ireland — and so off he went of his own accord to work in England, without telling anyone that he was so doing.

One day, Paddy had telephoned my father out of the blue from England, to say where he was and what he was doing. As you can imagine, my mother and father had been in a fierce state of worry
about him since his disappearance. Anyway, he explained to my father that he was living in a town called Worksop in the North of England, and that he was working down the mines earning his living
and was quite happy. He said he was in decent digs and gave my father the name of his landlady, who, he said, was very good to him. I remember vividly how concerned my mother was on hearing that
Paddy was working in the mines, as, with his record of ill-health and pleurisy, she was sure that he would be very prone to any of the miners’ diseases which were so prevalent in the
UK
of the early 1950s.

My father would often have been in England on business for Gentex at this stage, and so he decided to go up to Worksop one evening to meet Paddy. My mother was very relieved to hear after this
visit that Paddy was enjoying himself, and that he liked the work and had made some good friends. The experience had also clarified in Paddy’s mind the realisation that he wasn’t cut
out for academic life and that he wanted to continue with the path he was now on.

I took it upon myself then to start to write to Paddy. In turn he would reply to my letters — although usually after a long interval! — telling me among other things that since he
had been away, he had learned some wonderful poems by the folk poet, Robert W. Service, and in particular, ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’. I wrote to ask him if he could send me the words
of this poem, as I wanted to learn it off by heart as a future party piece. Paddy duly obliged and by return of post, I received the words of what I referred to as ‘Dangerous Dan
McGrew’. Once I had learned these and had all the words and various intonations off just so, I sprang a surprise rendition upon my family. They were completely amazed, particularly when I
told them that Paddy had sent me the poem. It was a funny little interlude, but a measure, I think, of the friendship and rapport we shared.

After he had been in England for a few years, Paddy started to come home for summer holidays. He was always tall, but now he had broadened out and was a fine, strong young man — the hard
work in the mines had seen to that. He certainly seemed to have toned down his wilder inclinations: again, perhaps that too was down to all the hard work. I guess that even then, when there would
have been a shortage of workers in the mines, you had to be on top of your game to keep your job. On one trip home, during the time we were all still living at the Hodson Bay Hotel, Paddy met Brid
O’Flaherty, a fine young Connemara woman who had trained in Cathal Brugha Street in Dublin as a chef and was now head cook in the Hodson Bay Hotel. She and Paddy hit it off well, but he went
back to his work in the mines in Worksop and she stayed in her job directing the kitchens in the Hodson Bay. Soon, however, Paddy started to come home more regularly and we all knew that the reason
was his attraction to Brid O’Flaherty. And so it was no surprise when he eventually came home for good, married Brid and set up in business with the Athlone Transport Company, which I helped
him to run. Paddy drove the haulage lorries, while I kept the books.

When he came back to his home town, Paddy got involved in Fianna Fáil and went on to become a member of the Fianna Fáil National Executive. He famously fell out with Charlie
Haughey over Neil Blaney and the republican movement. Of a strongly republican bent himself, Paddy had taken the part of Neil Blaney at a National Executive meeting. After this incident, he decided
to leave the Fianna Fáil organisation and continued on his political path as an Independent Fianna Fáil Councillor on Roscommon County Council. Was this a cause for any embarrassment
to my father or Brian Snr, who were both then advanced in their political careers? No, not a bit of it!

I always loved Paddy dearly, and all in all, he was a really good brother to me. He and Brid went on to have a lovely family: Pádraig, Gráinne, Caoimhín and Finbarr. Young
Caoimhín was autistic, at a time before the causes or effects of autism were known about as fully as they are now, and Brid and Paddy and all of the family would have immense challenges to
face in this regard. A lovely young man, tragically Caoimhín died very young in a swimming pool incident. Pádraig, who is my godchild, joined the Irish Army and then went on to become
a lecturer in history in both
NUI
Galway and the University of Limerick. Gráinne (my dear friend, whom I mentioned at the very opening of this book) became a
secondary school teacher after a few years of adventuring in Algeria and various other exotic locations. Finbarr qualified in medicine and now practises in Edinburgh.

Anyway, back to the late summer of 2010, and before Paddy’s deteriorating health necessitated his admittance to Roscommon Hospital, there had been an earlier happy interlude for the whole
family. It was during one of the holiday weekends in August, and Paddy was still at home, king of his own domain, at ease and happy to see the family, and Brian Jnr in particular, who had come down
to Athlone with Patricia, Tom and Clare for a few days. The occasion was the relaunch of my father’s sailing boat, the ‘67’, at the Lough Ree Yacht Club, and I had asked Brian to
do the honours at the event.

Just to explain, my father had had a very fine sailing boat which he left to the Lough Ree Yacht Club for the use of young people who might not have the means to go sailing: he had asked that
the club would provide sailing lessons in his boat for what we would now call disadvantaged young people. The club had duly carried out his wishes for some years and it had all worked out very
successfully. Following a conversation between myself and Alan Algeo, Commodore of the yacht club, we had decided to have the boat refurbished, and this was the rationale behind the re-launch.

Brian duly performed the honours at the Lough Ree Yacht Club. Before he did so, Harman Murtagh, on behalf of the club, bade him welcome, in a most wonderful and moving address. Harman is a
renowned historian and art collector and his father and mine had been friends long ago, not from political circles, but through sailing and the common bond of living in Athlone.

After the ceremony, we all went on to a lovely dinner in the Wineport Lodge. The memory of that dinner and of the happiness we shared on that August weekend will forever be in my mind, bright
and strong. Brian was in great form and at the dinner he particularly enjoyed talking to our close friends, Hugh and Celine Campbell. Hugh has an encyclopaedic knowledge of European and Irish
history, but needless to say, Brian was able to match Hugh memory for memory and word for word! Patricia was in great form, as were Tom and Clare, and the family had booked themselves into the
Hodson Bay Hotel. In a way, I now realise that it was Brian’s farewell to Athlone, although he would be there on two occasions yet to come, which I will tell of in due course.

On the Saturday morning after the launch of the ‘67’, Brian walked from the Hodson Bay Hotel up the road to see Paddy, who lived in the first house on the avenue near the Hodson Bay
Road. Paddy and Brian sat together for a good hour and a half, talking and talking — of history, of the world, of the family and surely many other things. Paddy, like Brian, had words at
will, and that morning must have marked for them both a special watershed in their lives.

Later that Saturday afternoon, we all visited my son Aengus in his home at Barrybeg on the Roscommon Road. Brian was delighted to see Aengus and his wife Lisa and their lovely children. When
Brian and his family left the following day for the next part of their trip — a week in London — he rang me to say how much they had all enjoyed themselves. It is so poignant to think
now that this was to be one of their last holidays together as a family.

That weekend in August 2010 had a dreamlike quality for all of us, and particularly, I imagine, for Brian. The lovely trip on the lake; the launch of the ‘67’; the coming together of
old friends; the rare let-up in public pressure; the delicious meal in relaxed company in the Wineport Lodge, and so on. For the rest of us, it was easy to forget that weekend that Brian was as ill
as he was. I remember how I talked about it after he had gone back, with Aengus and Feargal and his wife Maeve, who had also come down for the weekend. We buoyed each other up, I suppose, saying
that maybe Brian would be one of the very few lucky ones who managed to escape the coils of pancreatic cancer. But deep within me, I knew it would not be so, and that we were of course just fooling
ourselves. As for Brian himself, there was something in his face at that time, always, which seemed to betray that he knew the end was coming and that he was now resigned to it.

Brian’s next visit to Athlone would be for the sad occasion of my brother Paddy’s funeral, in the second week of October 2010. As I have said, the family had known for some time that
the end was near for Paddy, but we were all choked up with grief when he finally left us. Before he died, I had been to see him several times in Roscommon and also in Portiuncula Hospital in
Ballinasloe. No matter how ill he was, there was always the lovely light in his eyes when he would see me coming into his room. That was my beloved brother, Paddy.

I feel it reflects so well on Brian Lenihan that, even at the height of his own very severe illness and indeed when he was nearing the end himself, he honoured his family commitments and came to
pay the fullest of tributes to his uncle — by his presence in Flynn’s Removal Home, by his presence at the Mass, at the graveyard and at the lunch afterwards. I will always remember the
honour he paid Paddy.

Chapter
20

I
f that idyllic weekend of the Lough Ree Yacht Club event in August 2010 had been a magical one for us as a family, another occasion of great
national significance was soon on the horizon. This was the commemoration of the death of Michael Collins at Béal na mBláth, on 22 August. Brian Lenihan would play a central part in
these proceedings too.