'A reminder of how far Ireland has come'

Popular Times diarist publishes memoir

GROWING up in Carrickmacross Frank McNally didn’t harbour ‘notions’ of becoming a famous writer.

“I was no good at exams” the son of a dairy farmer says today.

That fate came to pass, however, following a brief career with the civil service in Dublin after stints as a labourer in London and then Australia in the 1980s.

He returned to Ireland just as the Berlin Wall was coming down in the autumn of 1989 to what we now know was the beginnings of the Celtic Tiger era.

Buoyed by a palpable sense of hope and renewal in the Dublin air, a young Frank McNally made the decision to “wean myself off the permanent pensionable job and try my hand at journalism”.

Come next year, he will have been writing ‘An Irish Diary’ for The Irish Times newspaper for 20 years – a regular column as much-loved for Frank’s witty observations on Irish life as it is for his easy style and cultivated language.

In 2008, miffed that singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen was returning to Ireland for a third time to gig in Lissadell House therefore de-rarifying the ‘last-in-a-lifetime’ Cohen concert he had attended in Kilmainham Jail two years earlier, Frank McNally wrote:

“In a Yeatsian twist this Lissadell House appearance will be the third in two years and it threatens to seriously up the ante on Kilmainham. Given the poet’s acknowledged influence on the singer, a 180-year-old big house in Yeats Country definitely trumps a 320-year-old military hospital as a Cohen concert venue” and “if Countess Markiewicz and Eva Gore Booth are not on actual backing vocals, they’ll be present in spirit too.”

Memories

Frank McNally has also just published his memoir ‘Not Making Hay: The Life and Deadlines of a ‘Diary’ Farmer’, recounting days on his family’s farm, the death of a schoolfriend during the Troubles, his time in the ‘Decisions’ department of the civil service, and working for an editor who “brought down two governments” and everything in between.

“As they say in Hollywood, it’s a story arc of my life,” Frank told the Celt.

The title’s ‘Not Making Hay’ is of course a Patrick Kavanagh line from ‘On Raglan Road’, and as for the ‘Diary Farmer’ reference, “If you google it, you’ll see that the ‘diary’ industry gets blamed for many things including global warming. It’s a very common typo,” Frank observes.

“Diary farmers like me have to ‘milk’ ideas, I have to research,” he added with tongue firmly in cheek.

Frank doesn’t come from a line of writers, but rather politicians.

He explains how his namesake grandfather rose to become Sheriff of Montana during a period of mass emigration from Cavan and Monaghan to that US state because of the success of Marcus Daly from Ballyjamesduff, aka, the ‘Copper King’.

From researching old editions of The Anglo-Celt and the Northern Standard Frank learned more about his grandfather’s time as a Sinn Féin county councillor after the party’s landslide victory of 1918 and how he lost his seat in 1925.

Frank’s father, Patrick, was also a Monaghan County Councillor for many years.

Growing up on the family farm on the Ballybay Road, Carrickmacross, as the middle child of five sisters and one brother, Frank McNally’s otherwise idyllic childhood was framed by a “semi-funny, semi-agrarian war” with a bachelor farmer neighbour who would “burn hedgerows and steal gates” in a dispute over access along a lane.

Carrickmacross was a frontier town at a time when gardaí and customs men were posted along the border but otherwise, it was “a quiet place, which, didn’t feel like a border town during the Troubles” except for two incidents in four years, which, reminded the young Frank, there was a conflict going on.

The murder of Lord Mountbatten was followed four years later by the shooting of Gary Sheehan during the botched IRA kidnapping of British businessman, Don Tidey.

Gary Sheehan from Carrickmacross was the 23-year-old garda recruit who was shot without warning when he and a colleague came across the hideout in a Leitrim wood where Don Tidey had been held hostage by the IRA for 23 days in 1983.

“Gary was what you’d call an all-rounder,” Frank recalls today. “He was a prefect, he was the goal-scorer in a minor championship final, he was a ladies’ man, what you’d call a quiet operator.

“We had been in the same year in school after I repeated the leaving cert, and I met him when we both applied to join the guards during the medical exam. At the time I thought to myself ‘I’ll see him at Templemore,’” Frank says of his “sliding doors moment”.

A couple of English teachers at the Brothers detected McNally’s gift for the written word.

“Mr O’Brien was a great fan of mine, but he used to point out with a pained expression how my essays were well-written but too short. I’d write two foolscap pages when five was the aim,” Frank remembers, “I didn’t have anything more to say but, it didn’t matter, I wouldn’t get the marks.

“Journalism is the very opposite where the ideas cram in and you don’t want to get rid of any of them.”

Career

The life of a hack would have to wait though, as Frank McNally started his working life by joining the civil service.

Despite his “terrible” Irish, Frank earned internal promotion from the Office of the Collector General to the head office at the Department of Social Welfare in the mid-1980s at a time when there was “huge unemployment”.

The precise name for his department was the Unemployment Assistance Unemployment Benefit Decisions office and as “one of nature’s confirmed procrastinators” it never sat well with Frank the way he and his colleagues answered the office phone with a simplified “Decisions!”

One of the things the “Decisions” department dealt with a lot was women complaining that their husband had taken the family’s social welfare payment and spent it on drink.

“Before there was an EU directive on it, the men of the family would get all the welfare benefits paid directly to them,” Frank explained, “When they went to their local exchange these women were told to ring a man in Dublin, who was me.

“We would tell them to get a letter form a respectable third party i.e. a priest and we would give her half the payment,” Frank recalls. “I’m not sure if that was founded in law but it was founded in natural justice,” he says with pride.

One of the department’s customers was Martin ‘The General’ Cahill “or The Man Who Denies He’s the General as he was known at the time,” Frank said with a tone equivalent to an eye roll. “RTÉ did an exposé about how the biggest criminal in Ireland was stealing artwork and robbing banks while also claiming the dole.

“There was a political scandal then somebody in the Department of Decisions had to rubber stamp Martin Cahill’s rejected dole application form,” Frank McNally said before adding: “That colleague was then kidnapped at his home, taken in the boot of his own car to Sandymount where Martin Cahill himself shot him in both legs.”

Changed Times

Anyone can point to several pivotal moments in recent Irish history which changed us as a nation forever. Annie Lovett, Italia ’90, Riverdance, divorce and abortion laws all led to an Ireland throwing off its shackles but, these “just crystalised what was happening anyway,” Frank McNally says.

“In the early ‘90s we had the Downing Street Accord which paved the way for peace, then we had the talks about talks and then the peace process.”

It was around this time that Frank was scratching out a living as a journalist. He was accepted onto a journalism course, he thinks, as the “token mature student” and during a placement in The Irish Times where he spent “three very soul-destroying days in the newsroom being ignored” he got his break when a new editor asked: “Are you doing anything?” and sent him to do a colour piece on an archaeology dig in Temple Bar.

The editor described the finished article as “beautifully-written” and Frank Nally, the journalist was off. As colour pieces were his speciality, Frank was dispatched to write behind-the-scenes impressionistic articles on everything from the Dáil, court cases, funerals and back-to-back tribunals.

In the same year that we learned from the Moriarty Tribunal that Ben Dunne gave €1m to Charlie Haughey and Bertie became Taoiseach, Frank McNally won the colour writer of the year award.

“After the award, The Irish Times gave me a job, but it had taken me 10 years to get to where other journalists straight out of college arrive,” he said.

His colour writing eventually landed him the Irishman’s Diary column after its author for 25 years, Kevin Meyers, left the Times. Meyers had turned the diary slot into a polemic and when asked if he felt daunted writing the diary for the first time, Frank McNally told the Celt: “I’m one of the majority who muddles through and says well, I can see both sides of the argument.

“I can’t do what Kevin did but, I can bring other things that Kevin and others didn’t: I grew up in rural Ireland for a start.”

So, unconcerned, for his first An Irishman’s Diary entry Frank McNally wrote about how his god-daughter’s confirmation clashed with a Monaghan Gaelic football match.

“It was the perfect juxtaposition of religion and GAA,” he says mischievously. “Apart from that, it was a good way to tell readers the column is under new management and from now on you’re going to read a lot more about Ulster football!”

When Frank McNally is asked who would be interested in reading his memoir, the 63-year-old said: “A nurse I know in Dublin bought it for her mother who is from Bailieborough and she said it was the story of her life.

“People of a certain age would find a lot of familiarity in it. I hope people of a younger age will find some eye-opening things about what this country was like not that long ago.

“It was a reminder even to me of how far Ireland has come in the past 30 to 40 years.”