To be perfectly Frank: Examiner Profile Frank McDermott

It was a baptism of fire that marked the start of the political career of the longest serving member of Westmeath County Council.The then 23 year old Frank McDermott’s first ever council meeting was consumed by a pitched battle between Fianna Fail’s Paddy Lenihan and his opposite number in Fine Gael, Gerry L’Estrange.“Paddy Lenihan was leader of Fianna Fail and was sat in beside Gerry L’Estrange. They all congratulated each other on their election success. When they had finished offering each other congratulations, the two men got straight into the fiercest argument I have ever witnessed. I was enthralled listening to them.“They were vicious and unforgiving in their exchange.“Then it was finished and Paddy Lenihan was on his feet and coming towards me for a personal introduction.“He shook my hand, wished me well and told me ‘pass no remarks on that cannibal beside you’. Then he took from his inside pocket the Evening Press and asked Gerry for suggestions for the races in Roscommon! I was just astounded,” says Frank.Fore native Frank was first elected to Westmeath County Council in 1967. In ‘74 he lost narrowly to his colleague Edward Fagan but he returned in 1979 and has since enjoyed an uninterrupted career as an elected councillor with Westmeath County Council for the Coole Area.He and party colleague Joe Flanagan have now the impressive achievement of 31 years of uninterrupted public service apiece with Westmeath County Council.Party politicsWhen Frank was first elected, he recalls now, he didn’t have a car. To get in to Mullingar for the monthly meetings, he had to rely on the kindness of his former schoolmaster, Sean Floyd for a lift.The only problem was, that Master Floyd was Fianna Fáil, and he and the young McDermott were political rivals and couldn’t have been seen sharing a car on their way in to the meetings, so it was all done by stealth, Frank recalls. He would cycle to the school in Fore, carry his bike up into the field behind and hide it, then he would wait, crouched behind a wall, waiting for the master to finish work for the day.“I would hear his footsteps coming down the steps, then the engine turning. I would leap the wall and the master would have the door open for me. I would jump in the car and we would travel together into the council meetings and home again. It was a delicate time then and no-one could see us sharing the lift,” remembers Frank.Frank also earned a new name for himself in the sixties. McDermott would have been placed further down the electoral list than rivals, so his name appeared as Dermody: “Having your name high up on the ballot paper was the same as knocking on a hundred doors Gerry L’Estrange decided and so I became known in the locality as ‘the young Dermody’.”Growing upFrank had an unusual path into politics, born from a request to thank a man who had brought financial security to Frank’s widowed mother Nancy and her young family. Frank, who was the eldest of nine, was just twenty when his father Jimmy died, at the young age of 48, leaving Nancy to run the farm, and continue raising the family - Frank’s siblings Rose, John, Tess, Mick, Margaret, Maire, Seamus and Conor.“When Dad died, there were nine of us and we had a horse, a dog, four cows and two sows,” recalls Frank.“I don’t know how my mother managed it. She was a magnificent woman but it must have been a struggle.”A neighbour of the McDermott family, Joe Lynch, who was a right hand man of TD Gerry L’Estrange’s, called to Frank’s mother to make sure she was managing and asked “Did you get the pension?”, to which his mother replied she had not.“There and then, Joe yoked the filly and dray and headed straight in to Gerry L’Estrange who in turn made a representation and the pension arrived.“That was a serious plus to our family. It was guaranteed money every single week for the rest of my mother’s life. It was a serious boost,” explains Frank.Deputy L’Estrange even wrote to Nancy enquiring if the pension had arrived.In early 1967 Nancy heard that the Deputy was in the village of Castlepollard that night. Frank was duly despatched to ‘Pollard to thank Deputy L’Estrange on behalf of his mother and his family for his help getting the pension put into place.What the young Frank didn’t know was that the deputy was in town for a convention for a forthcoming Westmeath County Council elections and when Frank returned home to his mother that night, it was as a 23 year old candidate, who became, at the next election, an elected county councillor.“From that moment I wanted to make a difference. It became my ambition to be in a position of influence to make real change. I dreamt of being the Minister for Agriculture and doing great work for the farming community that would have allowed them to make a decent secure living and bring them away from the hardship associated with the land,” said Frank.While the council may have been a path he stumbled onto, Frank was already vocal about the issues facing agricultural communities through his active involvement in Macra na Feirme and his natural gift for public speaking. This awareness grew and grew and propelled Frank into the Farmer’s Rights March in October 1966, where he carried a banner from his local Macra from Fairgreen in Mullingar all the way to the Department of Agriculture, Merrion Street and the Dáil.“I was very angry and I was well aware of what it was like to struggle for a living in agriculture.“Mr Haughey was the Minister for Agriculture at the time and his policies were not seen as an assistance to the farming community. They evoked serious passion and lead to the biggest demonstrations which highlighted the case for farmers and was the catalyst for the IFA which was a great, strong, valued lobbying group,” remembers Frank.Looking back on his political life Frank is philosophical about never serving as a minister for Agriculture.“Farming is savage hard work but I enjoyed every single hour I put in to it. And now, when I look at my wonderful family I think maybe I was lucky not to have been elected to the Dáil. I would have had no time for my family and I know that I have been blessed to have a wonderful family and to have lived in Fore.“My roots are in that calm safe place and from that I grew strong with a real sense of responsibility first for my mother and family as a young man. Then for the people in and around Fore and the farming community itself. The place is special, there’s no doubt about it and my family have known great happiness here,” reflects Frank, who ran in the general elections of 1981 and 1982.Fore is a tiny village that has remained for the most part, unchanged for hundreds of years. Growing up there, it is no surprise that Frank should have become an advocate of rural rights. While the rest of Europe was enjoying “flower power” and the “Swinging Sixties”, it was a far different picture in much of rural Ireland.Frank remembers that to get to the cinema in Oldcastle, the McDermott boys would climb aboard the family tractor that Frank had fitted with extra timber seats, and they’d head on to Dromone to pick up five McCormacks, and then on to “the pictures”.Once there, pockets were emptied: “We would put all our money together on the window ledge to be sure everyone had the six pence for the cinema and then if there was enough we would have bought a packet of Rolos. They had 13 in the packet back then, so we had one each and then the driver had the remainder. We used to go home singing. One night we sang Yellow Submarine the whole way home and the cattle in the fields were following the noise of us,” says Frank.This is the Beatle Mania that never gets reported.Frank met his wife at a local dance. Glenidan Hall, with neither toilets nor a supper room, was the hottest venue ‘round Fore.One night in January, the Firehouse Five were playing and Frank McDermott met Ann Bartley from Kilgar for the first time. Frank and Ann were married the next year:“Everybody then brought their ducks and geese to Carton’s Poultry Market in Mary Street, Dublin. We left Kilgar at 4am with turkeys and geese from both families. Arrived and joined a queue at 6am. When they were all sold, we went to a jewellers on O’Connell Street and bought an engagement ring.“I remember waiting in the van for Carton’s to open and we were listening to the music from Chitty, Chitty Bang Bang. We were married in Kilallon Church and had our reception in the Greville Arms. Then we went on honeymoon to Paris,” says Frank, clearly a true romantic.Frank has three children, two daughters and a son. His eldest daughter Audrey is a teacher, married to Harry L’Estrange and has two grandchildren - the apples of Frank’s eye - four year old Joshua and three year old Rachelle. His second daughter Sinead works at 3c Imaging, a Printing House in Dublin and his son Daniel works in Health and Safety and is an All-Ireland medal holder and the captain of Castletown Finea Coole Whitehall football team.