Her father, Sean McEntee, one of the ablest members of the first Fianna Fail Government, emerges as a man whose principles led him strongly to oppose the pro-Nazi tendencies that were prevalent in Republican circles during the Second World War. In my view, he is unfairly overshadowed in histories of the period by Sean Lemass.
Sean McEntee’s father, on the other hand, was a rake – a gambler, of whom his wife feared that, if he was killed during the Troubles, he might meet his Maker with the smell of drink on his breath!
The most vivid description of all is of Maire’s maternal uncle, Fr. Paddy Browne. A Irish language revivalist, who became her second father, and with whom she stayed in the Dunquin Gaeltacht for long periods, spending much of the school year there. She relives his participation in cultural controversies of the 1940’s and recreates the harsh life of the west Kerry Gaeltacht of the time. There is a contrast between the convivial story-telling around her uncle’s fireside and a society where an unwed girl who got pregnant could disappear overnight without trace, and where a woman returned from America to a made-match, whose first baby, said to be black, was never seen again after the night of its birth.
Her mother, Margaret Browne, was one of the key figures in Michael Collins’ support network for the “Twelve Apostles”, the gunmen who carried out Collins’ execution orders. But she differed so radically with Collins that, even before the Treaty was debated in the Dail, she cut him dead in the street.
The most warmhearted character to emerge in the whole book is her uncle Maurice, the Parish Priest of Baltinglass, who wrote “The Big Sycamore”, a fictionalized account of the Browne family.
Maire Cruise O’Brien is painfully honest about her own emotional life. She describes her love affairs and infatuations with great candour. She also gives an account of a nervous breakdown she suffered in her twenties, triggered by an unjust questioning of her thoroughness as an academic.
She evokes the atmosphere of pre-war Nazi Germany, which she visited as a schoolgirl on holiday. She also brings to life the hunger and excitement of post-War Paris, where she was a student.
Later, as a junior Irish diplomat in Franco’s Spain, she had the experience of being physically assaulted by a senior Spanish official because of the strength of her protests about the treatment of Irish potato exports to Spain.
Her love for her husband, Conor, is eloquently expressed throughout this book. She defends his decision to declare himself to be a Unionist as a “signal service to both communities on this island”. He showed himself to be, not so much a friend of the Union, as a friend of the Unionist people of Northern Ireland. Out of a sense of justice, he took the path that may prove to be the only one that will actually be to unity on this island, if that is what people really want.
The most moving passages in this book are, interestingly, descriptions of the deaths of people she loved. She sat through his last night on earth with her Uncle Paddy despite being told by the nurse that “you don’t want to hear the dreadful things these old priests say when they are dying”. The deaths of her mother and father are described equally movingly and she takes mischievous delight in the discomfiture of Charlie Haughey when he discovered that Jack Lynch, then in Fianna Fail disgrace, emerged unexpectedly to deliver Sean McEntee’s funeral oration.
This is a warm-hearted story, that carries the reader along with all the emotional pull of a good novel!