Blood-Dark Track: A Family History. Joseph O’Neill

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      ‘That was my political education,’ my grandmother said. ‘My family and the Black and Tans.’

      It wasn’t difficult to guess what education my grandmother received from her family. Her uncles Dan and Bob Lynch were interned in the North in 1921 during the Anglo-Irish War, and three of her brothers, Jack, Tadhg and Paddy, came to be interned during the Second World War. The only non-republican Lynch was Ellen Lynch, my great-grandmother. She was born a Kingston and there was Protestant blood in her; but even she had Fenian cousins, the two Quill brothers, who abandoned their nail factory in Dunmanway and disappeared – to America, in the family’s best guess.

      More than one of my grandmother’s children observed that she rarely spoke about her husband, Jim O’Neill. For example, Grandma had no ready tale about her courting days with Jim, which is perhaps why, when I broached the subject, she spontaneously said, ‘What did I know about him? I knew that he was beautiful.’

      She must have known that he was a republican, too, because she’d see him at the Gaelic League Hall, where you spoke Irish and danced Irish dances, and at Tomás Ashe Hall, the republican club in Father Matthew Quay, named after the Easter Rising veteran who died from forcible feeding during a hunger strike.

      Eileen Lynch was eighteen when she met Jim O’Neill. She had just moved with her family from Dunmanway to Cork city, where she worked in a shop. She wasn’t entirely without metropolitan sophistication: Grandma said that the Black and Tans’ womenfolk had introduced West Cork to rouge, powder, lipstick and bobbed hair. (‘Don’t go looking like a Black and Tan’s wife!’ the nuns would say to schoolgirls who wore make-up.) But Eileen and Jim didn’t go with each other immediately; there were other liaisons first. It wasn’t until she was twenty-one and he twenty-three that romance, as they say, blossomed. On 8 July 1934, at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in the Lough, Eileen Lynch married her beautiful republican.

      My grandmother quickly took to her parents-in-laws, Peter and Annie O’Neill, who lived up at Ardkitt. ‘Annie was a very kind woman who would bake cakes for the tinkers and happily put them up in the hay-shed,’ Grandma said. (‘In those days,’ she said, ‘itinerants were not like they are today: they’d come and be friendly with you and mend your pots and pans; tell you your fortune if they were women.’) But Grandma’s real admiration was reserved for Peter O’Neill. ‘What a man he was. What a man. He was a rebel; a lovely rebel. And he had the brains of – how many? – five professors.’ This was the Peter O’Neill story: that, in essence, my great grandfather was a scientist rather than a farmer. It had even filtered through to me growing up in The Hague: how he harnessed the stream that ran through Ardkitt and generated hydroelectricity for the farm; how he grew tobacco – tobacco, in West Cork! – and turned an enormous £300 profit for his first crop; how he cultivated tomatoes and mushrooms and kept honey-bees; how he was the only farmer for miles around who didn’t have a bush in the gap; and, most famously, how he invented and crafted a mahogany-framed egg incubator that hatched a hundred chicks and won first prize at the 1932 Cork science fair but, unhappily, could not be patented for want of money. ‘He was altogether unlucky with money,’ Grandma said.

      But then I heard from my uncles that Peter O’Neill was an alcoholic who drank every penny he made. Every first Thursday of the month was creamery day and Peter would go off early in the morning to collect his money. The next time he’d be seen was in the evening, asleep between the milk churns as the unpiloted pony pulled the cart home.

      My grandmother kept a framed photograph of Peter and Annie O’Neill and some of their ten children. Peter O’Neill, a ringer for my father, sits with patriarchal pride at the centre of a cluster of youngsters (Peig, Kitty, Nora, Paddy, Peter) and other relations. In the background, the ivy-clad frontage of Ardkitt farmhouse looms like an old college wall. There is no sign of young Jim, my grandfather, or his sister Mollie. By the time the photograph was taken, these two were living in Kilbrittain with their uncle and aunt, William and Mary-Ann O’Driscoll. My grandfather was farmed out when he was seven. Grandma explained, ‘There was such a lot of children at Ardkitt and his uncle in Kilbrittain had no children. So he was adopted – well, not adopted exactly, but he went to live at the Kilbrittain farm.’

      A little surprisingly, nobody suggested to me that Jim’s early separation from his parents adversely affected him. The redistribution of offspring from overpopulated to underpopulated homes was not an unusual occurrence in the country in those days and it made economic sense for young Jim to be reared by his uncle and aunt, who were short of manpower and had nurturing energies to spare. Also, the arrangement gave young Jim the chance to acquire an interest in the Kilbrittain farm, eighty odd acres of dairy land known as Graunriagh: the O’Driscolls were childless and in need of an heir.

      But Jim never did inherit Graunriagh. When he was twelve, his uncle William O’Driscoll died from peritonitis: it was the time of the Tan War, and the cratered state of the roads meant that William could not be transported to the hospital in Cork on time. The farm had to be sold. Mary-Ann O’Driscoll did not neglect her youngsters: provision was generously made that Mollie and Jim would each receive £500 at the age of twenty-one. The children never benefited from their inheritances. Mollie died, aged nineteen, of tuberculosis; and though Jim collected his bequest in Skibbereen, he immediately went to the office of a solicitor called Neville, in Cork, and transmitted the entire sum to his father, Peter, who needed to pay off farming debts and to stock Ardkitt with seven calves. The payment to Peter was made not as a gift but as a loan, and a promissory note in favour of Jim was executed by Paddy O’Neill, Jim’s eldest brother and, as the heir to Ardkitt, the ultimate beneficiary of the loan. The promissory note was entrusted to the custody of Neville. It was agreed that repayment would fall due when Paddy got married and came into a dowry. (In those days, many marriages amongst the farming class – which saw itself as a class apart – were fixed up by matchmakers, with the size of the dowry depending on the size of the bridegroom’s farm.)

      However – there’s always a however in these stories – triple adversity struck. In October 1944, Peter O’Neill died intestate, with no provision made in respect of his debt to Jim. Second, in the late ’forties Paddy married Ellen Hennigan, universally known as Baybelle. Baybelle started trouble in the home from day one, according to Grandma, and Paddy, who had hitherto been a wonderfully friendly uncle to Jim and Eileen’s children and had invited them round to Ardkitt every summer, refused to pay back the loan, even though Baybelle’s dowry was £500, exactly the amount required. Third, Paddy was able to get away with non-payment because the office of Neville, the solicitor, had burned to the ground together with all documents stored there; and Neville himself was in a mental hospital and couldn’t remember a thing about any promissory note. The dispute came before the High Court in about 1949, but my grandfather’s claim was dismissed.

      There was a further dispute with Paddy over property. Another uncle, Jim O’Driscoll, left my grandfather the deeds to a house in Bandon. However, the keys to the property were held by none other than the bugbear, Paddy. Even though he had neither the deeds nor good title, Paddy sold the house and pocketed the proceeds.

      But it didn’t end there. The most bitter feud of all arose from Paddy’s treatment of his and Jim’s mother, Annie (who, incidentally, had brought a £500 dowry to her marriage with Peter O’Neill and was grandly wed by fifteen priests). The root of the problem lay in the ill-feeling between the mother-in-law and the new bride. Annie found a bottle of hair-dye under the staircase and immediately she guessed that Baybelle was not as young as she claimed to be: a serious matter in West Cork, where in the view of some it was a mortal sin for a wife to be older than her husband. Bad blood was also caused by Annie’s intrusions into the housekeeping. When Annie commented to Baybelle that she shouldn’t put red clothes into the pot with white ones, Baybelle told Annie to mind her own business.

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