Clodagh Finn: A tale of two extraordinary ‘ordinary' grandmothers

Irish Examiner

15 hours ago

What comes to mind when you hear the word 'grandmother'?
It is hardly an image of a 14-year-old girl throwing boiling water at the 'crowbar men' trying to evict her from her home at Bodyke, Co Clare, during one of the most infamous evictions of the land war of the 1880s.
Yet that is what Jim Driscoll's grandmother, Bridget McNamara, did in June 1887 while an astonishing crowd of 8,000 people bayed and bellowed their support as they watched tenants being forcibly removed by landowner Colonel John O'Callaghan for not paying their rent.
The evictions, over a two-week stretch in early June, generated international headlines, and widespread sympathy for the tenants. Two things were noted — the brutality of the eviction party and the spirited resistance of the tenants, in particular the women. This newspaper noted the 'pluck and daring' of the women who fought back with boiling pots of stirabout, poles, cow dung and, in one case, a hive of bees.
The arrest figures bear out that surprising fact — some 22 of the 26 people charged with assault in court hearings afterwards were women.
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Then again, it is not that surprising because, as Jim Driscoll says, we don't pay enough attention to the role our grandmothers, the so-called ordinary women of Ireland, played in shaping Ireland.
Take Bridget McNamara, for instance. She and her siblings Annie and Francis barricaded themselves into their home on their tenant farm in a form of action that would challenge and eventually change rack rents in Ireland.
The two sisters were later charged with assault and sentenced to one month's hard labour in Limerick prison. Their brother Francis was jailed for three months and while the sisters didn't serve their terms, Jim Driscoll, a former prison officer from Co Wicklow, says he can't imagine the fear they must have experienced in the prison system more than 100 years ago.
The siblings are mentioned in Bodyke: A Chapter in the History of Irish Landlordism, a vivid account of the evictions by English journalist Henry Norman. It describes 'the cottages ruined by the crowbar, the furniture smashed to bits by the sledge-hammer, the goats and chickens and pigs driven off the land,' and, most powerfully of all, the 'determined courage' of the mothers, daughters and sisters trying to hold on to their homes.
The Bodyke evictions of June 1887 are remembered in Bodyke, Co Clare, today.
The famous O'Halloran sisters, Annie, Honoria, and Sarah (who, Norman very poetically tells us, had 'a laugh like concentrated sunshine'), are mentioned in detail. Pass through Bodyke today and you will see an extraordinary photo of them with their mother Harriet in the impressive commemorative monument at the crossroads.
Spare a thought for the McNamaras and all the other families too. That is all that Jim Driscoll asks. He never met Bridget O'Driscoll, who died in 1936, but when he discovered her role in Bodyke, he was determined to write her back into the narrative of the event.
He was happy to discover that her resistance was acknowledged in her lifetime at least. While the magistrate condemned the 'unwomanly behaviour' of the female tenants, they were celebrated by land reformer Michael Davitt who presented them with a silver chain and £5.
There is a gap of 15 years before Bridget appears in the historical record again. In 1902, she married farmer James O'Driscoll (sometimes listed with an 'O, sometimes without). The couple lived in Drimeen in Broadford and went on to have eight children.
Jim Driscoll later found a death notice for one of the couple's sons, Patrick who died, aged 17, of scarlatina. The cert notes there was 'no medical attendant' at the time of his death. The poignancy of that still resonates.
While he doesn't know much more about Bridget, he has a photo of her and her husband. He also knows that his grand-aunt Annie married a man called Fahey and they later ran the Savoy Café in Scariff, Co Clare. Francis married too and, in a satisfying twist of irony, the man who fought RIC officers in the 1880s went on to rear five sons who joined the gardaí in the Free State.
'I just want them to be remembered,' Jim says. 'The history of Ireland is the history of these women. They are the foundation of the country, and without them there would be no building, so to speak.'
Foundations by their very nature are invisible, of course, but Jim Driscoll hopes to change that. He wants to inscribe the lives of these women back into the weave of history or, more prosaically, into the algorithms of the internet. 'If you Google their names, I want their stories to pop up,' he says.
He has already succeeded in doing that for his maternal grandmother. While his knowledge of Bridget, his father Gerry's mother, is a little sketchy, he knows a lot about his mother, Kathleen Lynch's mother. Margaret 'Maggie' Lynch, the celebrated 'Queen of Clydagh' in Co Kerry, was a schoolteacher who taught all of her 17 children.
Margaret (Maggie) Lynch and her husband William with 16 of their children in 1933. Picture: courtesy of Jim Driscoll
She was, in her grandson's word, 'a mother, a wife, a career woman and community leader'. And that doesn't begin to capture the essence of a woman he says he had the pleasure of knowing.
With the help of his cousin, Peggy Curtis from Macroom in Cork, he has been able to chart the life of an exceptional woman. And thanks to his efforts, the life and times of Maggie Lynch now pops up on Google if you enter her name. There she is, claiming her rightful place in the digital annals of our time.
To quote from a lovely tribute written by Stephen Fernane in the Kerryman last September: 'To say she belongs in the category of 'unique women' is an understatement considering the decades spanning her life were anything but favourable to ambitious women. Maggie's outlook was always a formidable one.'
It must have been when you think that this woman from Glenflesk in Co Kerry had 17 children with her husband William, a school attendance officer, yet still managed to work as a national school teacher for 45 years, from 1911 to 1956.
She taught all of them from babies up to second class at Knocknabro National School and, at one point, six of her own children were in her class.
Her grandson shakes his head in disbelief, and admiration. There was a lot of loss too, he adds. She suffered a number of miscarriages and, like his other grandmother, knew the pain of losing a child. Maggie Lynch also lost a son called Patrick wo died of an illness, aged 16, in 1936. Two others, Donal, aged 27 and Michael, 28, were killed in separate accidents in the same year, 1948.
Jim Driscoll: 'I just want my grandmothers to be remembered. The history of Ireland is the history of these women.'
Jim has the newspaper cutting describing the inquest after the cycling accident that claimed Donal's life. It's in a thick folder that contains the compass points of his relative's lives.
The details, though, are at his fingertips. Six of Maggie's children joined religious orders and the story of the Lynch family is, like so many others, the story of emigration to countries all over the world, from Africa and Australia to Europe and Canada. Two children, Mary and Jimmy, went to the States — in 1926 and 1928 respectively — and their mother never saw them again.
When Maggie Lynch died in 1973, local tributes acknowledged how much she had done to educate her own children and so many others. As one poem put it: 'How many of her pupils migrated/To how many countries they've sailed/ But they ne'er will forget their first lessons/'Tis where the foundations were laid.'
And there we are back to the foundations, and the importance of remembering the women who laid them.