‘Out of everything, if you look for it, there is something good’

LOCAL LIVES WITH CIARA O'HARA

Marian Mooney grew up in Ballinafid and moved to Ballinalack after getting married. For most of her childhood, the family of five lived in the gatelodge of Clonhugh House – a two-room cottage where they “ate in the kitchen and slept in the bedroom”.

They moved to a house next to the Covert when Marian was 15 and when she was 16, their first television arrived. “All the neighbours came down that night to watch it, every one of them, because we were the first in the area to get a telly. There was a farming ad on and I can still see them all going, ‘Oh, look at the size of that tractor on the television!’.

“I remember my grandmother sitting there saying ‘Mind! Mind!’ She thought it was going to come after us!”

Marian had a twin brother, James, who died at six weeks of age after being admitted to hospital with a relatively common infant gut condition. The surgery went well but he caught pneumonia while recovering.

Despite being “a real cheerful sort” and loving company, Marian’s mother did suffer from depression on and off later in life. Marian thinks this was due to the trauma of losing a child and the lack of counselling and other supports in those days. Marian often reflects on how difficult it must have been for her mother, especially when there was no counselling available. “Until you have children of your own, you don’t understand that at all. It was only when I had my own, I used to think, ‘God, she must have suffered’.”

Marian’s mother was Tess Mahedy from Bunbrosna and her father, Mick Duggan, was originally from County Clare. They met while working for Colonel Harvey-Kelly at Clonhugh Estate. Marian’s mother was a parlour maid and her father was a herdsman. Marian’s mother enjoyed “acting the fool” and playing tricks on the other housemaids.

Marian’s aunt was the cook and “a little bit strait-laced”. She would get annoyed with Marian’s mother “but they had great craic”.

When the colonel’s son got married, the staff were invited to the ceremony. Though it was considered a “mortal sin” for Catholics to enter a Protestant church, Marian’s mother couldn’t resist attending, “to see if it was any different”. Afterwards, fearing she might go to hell, she went to Multyfarnham Friary to confess. “The priest took her out of the confession box and announced to the whole chapel what she had done. So she told him she wouldn’t come back any more and she left. She didn’t go near the friary for years, until after that priest was gone!”

Marian met her own husband Pauric in the 1990s through a cousin who “went out with him once”. Originally from Meath, Pauric was living in Mullingar, where Marian worked as a psychiatric nurse in St Loman’s Hospital.

Marian “loved every minute” of her 40-year nursing career, even though she found her vocation by accident. She only attended the interview to keep a friend company. The friend’s application was unsuccessful but Marian was offered a position, which she eagerly accepted.

“In my era, the thing you wanted was a permanent job so that you knew you had a job for the rest of your days. Now, if you told somebody they were going to be 40 years in one job, they’d say, ‘I will not’. The mindset has totally changed.”

Marian began her training in St Loman’s in September 1972, when there were 925 patients. Today, there are just two 24-bed units in the hospital. “It was challenging back then. Treatments weren’t as good and there were enormous numbers on the wards. It has all changed; people who were automatically taken into St Loman’s are now treated in the community which is much better. There is a place for it still. It’s like a physical illness; you have to go to hospital if you’re severely ill and it’s the same with mental illness.”

Attitudes have changed drastically too. “Now every time you turn on the radio, somebody is talking about mental health. Then, you were terrified to mention it. We would have had residents in Loman’s whose own families didn’t know they were there.”

People often didn’t discover relatives had been admitted until years later when researching their family trees. Marian remembers one woman who found her sister. “She had always thought she was dead because their parents had brought her to Loman’s and never mentioned her any more. It’s very sad but people thought that if you were around someone who was mentally ill, you might catch it yourself. You can’t blame people for that; it wasn’t their fault. It was a different era and people can still have little understanding of the chronically mentally ill today.”

It upsets Marian when the term ‘incarceration’ is used in relation to how psychiatric hospitals functioned in the past. “If a patient’s family didn’t want to take them out, the system couldn’t let them out. The law simply didn’t allow it. But for those people, the hospital was their home and the staff loved them. They went to occupational therapy during the day. They went to town at the weekend. They watched the match when the All-Ireland was on. They went to any parties that were on. They lived their lives in hospital. I know they had become institutionalised but they were happy and it saddens me whenever that horrible word, ‘incarcerated’, is used.”

“We cared about the patients. When you met somebody every day for years and years, you had to care for them. We were like family and even some of our retired nurses are still in contact with some of the people living out in hostels. They bring them for coffee every now and again, or ring them for a chat.”

Being a psychiatric nurse makes you “more aware of people” and Marian and her colleagues developed exceptional observation skills. “People wouldn’t always be able to tell you how they were, so you depended on your observation skills an awful lot.” Marian’s nursing experience was also helpful when her mother was diagnosed with dementia and came to live with Marian for five years in the 2000s.

“The fact that I had done the nursing meant that I wasn’t stressed. But it is extremely difficult to take care of a relative at home, especially in the case of dementia, as it never improves, and you have no ability to change it. A lovely woman from the Alzheimer Society came to see how we were getting on one day. She said, ‘Just be where they’re at, that’s all you have to do, you don’t have to do anything more.’

“When she went into St Mary’s first, she was in the old part and it was a six-bed unit. And she loved that, but she was moved to the new part then when it was opened, and they all got single rooms. And she almost lost her speech then because she was in a room of her own. And I have to say, I don’t agree with single-room systems at all. You’ve just built a prison cell for an elderly person.”

Marian had two small children at the time but they never noticed anything the matter with Nana. In addition to “fabulous carers”, Marian received wonderful support locally. “I think I got back 12 house keys when my mother went into St Mary’s because I had people doing a few hours here and a few hours there. It was a huge task but everybody came together to help out. As well as the official carers, friends and neighbours did an hour here and there; it was brilliant.”

Ballinalack remains close-knit and Marian’s children still live at home. Her daughter Cassandra lived in Greece for years but returned when the pandemic hit and is the activities director in Multyfarnham nursing home. Her son Patrick is an engineering teacher in Clondalkin.

Marian’s brother Joe moved to Bedford when he was a teenager, and brother Fred lives in Mullingar. While Marian feels lucky to belong to such a supportive community and have family nearby; she worries that conversation is becoming a “lost art”.

“Older people came up in a generation where they all loved to talk. It was the only thing they had. They never went on their holidays or phoned somebody because they didn’t have any of that; they just had each other. There was always someone in my house talking to my mother. Someone would always call in for a cup of tea. That’s my biggest memory: there was always conversation.

“Look at the way we’ve lost that art now. Who meets just to talk now? It’s gone out of fashion and it’s a pity. And I do think that a lot of the depressions and the suicides, and all this sort of thing, are because of that. Because people aren’t meeting often enough to talk to each other. And you might eventually say to someone, ‘You know, I don’t feel well’, if you’re meeting people more often. And they might have a chance to say that to you, but you won’t say that over the phone, and you get vibes from people when you see them.

“I’m sure there will be research done on it in the future and they’ll realise how much it has affected people. We’re in touch more but it’s not meaningful. It’s an unusual world now. I go down to Connaughton’s in Rathowen once a week. It’s a tiny little pub and there’d be maybe eight or 10 in it and we’d all be talking to each other. Young and old, we’d all have a chat. And I go for the chat; I don’t go to get plastered!”

When Marian hitched all over Ireland with a friend in the 1970s, she never had any bad experiences, just plenty of funny conversations. They once got a lift with a lorry driver who cracked jokes continuously for two and a half hours. They were exhausted trying to laugh politely for the whole journey and Marian “could have killed” her friend when she fell asleep.

“You couldn’t afford to be paying for buses and trains, you just had enough money to be going where you were going.”

When Marian’s son was three or four, she showed him the field where she and her brothers would play for hours as children. She described how they made tents by hanging old blankets off tree branches. After a pause, Patrick asked, ‘Mammy, why didn’t you buy a tent?’. “He couldn’t conceive that you wouldn’t have had the money to buy a tent. It just shows you the change in the thinking.”

Marian keeps in touch with her former colleagues and they marked their 50th anniversary together in September. When Marian retired 10 years ago, she became a founding member Ballinafid Multyfarnham Bunbrosna Active Retirement Association (BMB Active). The group has grown from 12-16 people to 258 members and Marian has been on the committee for years in different positions.

In 2012, BMB Active began playing pickleball, a cross between badminton and tennis. This led to the establishment of two clubs in Multyfarnham with 100 players aged between 16 and 83. Marian plays six days a week; “it’s great fun and a great activity for all ages.” Her daughter Cassandra is similarly “addicted” and has won gold medals for Ireland when competing internationally.

In addition to staying active, Marian believes a positive attitude is crucial for getting the most out of life. “You have to take all the good out of things. If you sit down and dwell on the hardships, you just go down. Out of everything, if you look for it, there is something good.”