Jean's Journal: Remembering our mother on her 100th birthday
by Jean Farrell
I’ll begin today with my annual rant!
The exams were on recently. Parents were being bombarded with advice about how they could help their teenagers.
Every year I smile to myself as I read about making sure the whole household is calm and serene so as not to upset the student. I read about providing a balanced diet, making sure that they get enough sleep, plus much more.
How did we survive and succeed, in the past? In 1966, when I was doing my Inter Cert and my sister was doing her Leaving Cert, our mother had just given birth to her tenth child! What time had she to be looking after our needs? We took responsibility for ourselves, as mature teenagers should.
I heard Oliver Callan, on the radio, asking listeners what songs were popular when they were doing their Leaving Cert. I also hear folk, younger than us, asking each other who was their ‘boy-band’ when they were teenagers.
Well, for those of us who were teenagers in the 1960s, we had the very best boy-band ever. We had The Beatles.
In June, 1969, as I sat my Leaving Cert, Get Back was in the Top Ten and so was another classic, I See The Bad Moon Rising. This was sung by Creedence Clearwater Revival and I LOVE it.
Aren’t old songs so evocative? Whenever I hear this song on the radio I close my eyes and am 18 again, back in The Rugby Club!
In 1969, Google tells me that 14,481 students sat their Leaving Cert. This year, 71,698 are sitting the exam.
David McWilliams wrote a very interesting article about the fact that Ireland has the most educated population in the European Union. However, he pointed out that there are no jobs for many of them, in their area of expertise.
He wrote, “If young people cannot secure jobs commensurate with their level of education, on top of the fact that they are probably still living at home, their ambitions will be dashed, creating resentment and frustration. 13,500 of these emigrated in 2025.” This appears to be a sad fact.
Our mother told us often that she began her own Leaving Cert on D-day, June 6th 1944. Only 2,703 students sat the exam, that year.
Her mother (our granny) ran a busy shop on the main street in Carrick-on-Suir. She definitely wouldn’t have had time to check that her third daughter had slept well and had eaten a good breakfast.
We celebrated Mammy’s 100th birthday recently. Born on May 31, 1926, our mother died in 2015. She would have been 100 on the Sunday of the recent June Bank holiday weekend.
Her eight adult children, fifteen grandchildren and sixteen great grandchildren, plus partners, all had lunch together in The Shamrock Lodge Hotel, on that day.
Paddy McCaul and his staff looked after us very well. Paddy was in school, in The Batteries, with some of my brothers. His hotel, on our side of town, is homely and spacious.
The 40 of us had a lovely day there. Some second cousins met each other for the first time. Ages ranged from 76 to 1! We had husbands from Australia and America present. How Mammy would have loved to be with us!
I thought of the line from a poem Seamus Heaney wrote about his mother. “The space we stood around has been emptied into us to keep…” Her genes live on in us all, as does her positivity and self-confidence.
On the subject of self-confidence I’ll tell you a true story. My 13-year-old Dublin granddaughter is going to the Gaeltacht, in Connemara, next week. As I wished her well, I remembered the following.
As a teacher, years ago, I was attending a course on how to promote self-confidence in our pupils. (Always remember that the best way for teachers, parents and grandparents to pass on self-confidence is to have it yourself.) Afterwards we had lunch. I noticed an old woman sitting on her own and I joined her. This was her sad tale.
She was an only child. Both her parents were the teachers in the two-teacher school she attended. She wasn’t bright and knew her parents were very very disappointed in her. She told me that her self-esteem was always very low.
As a teenager she went to the Gaeltacht. She wrote home and her letters were returned to her - corrected in red biro. After two weeks there she made a friend and, delighted about this, she wrote home telling her parents the good news. The letter came back with a misspelling of the word ‘friend’ crossed out, heavily, in red biro. Written across it was, “How many times have we told you that i comes before e except after c?” The woman actually cried telling me this.
She said they didn’t care about her making a friend, all that mattered to them was the mistake in her letter. How terribly sad! She told me that she did succeed in becoming a teacher but never had an ounce of self-confidence all her life. Her whole demeanour showed this clearly.
My granddaughter probably won’t be writing letters home from The Gaeltacht at all. Will they be allowed use their phones, I wonder. Can you text in Irish, I wonder also! She did remind me, smiling, (as we all left The Shamrock Lodge last Sunday) that she has a Revolut account!
Different times indeed!
jeanfarrell@live.ie