From Mosney to Mallow — and back

LIFE is a lottery, they say, and you certainly don’t get to pick your parents.

So it’s with gratitude that I say my numbers came up at the Bon Secours maternity unit in November 1958, when I crash-landed into Cork and into the arms of Siobhan and Connie Creedon.

My Mom and Dad were kind, colourful and, above all else, compassionate. They were further united by their love of place and their love of people. That love of place was no doubt founded in the fact that they came from two of the most beautiful places in Ireland.

My mother grew up in Adrigole, amidst the rugged beauty of the Beara Peninsula. She lovingly described a happy home, framed by big blobs of fuchsia over-hanging a stream that gurgled and blurped its way over the rocks and away to the majesty of Bantry Bay and the Atlantic. Travelling west, as a boy, I viewed Beara from the car as a sort of impressionist painting of blurred mauve and grey hills and red-speckled lush green hedgerows with a turquoise foreground. I still do.

My father, on the other hand, was born away from the salty Atlantic’s roar, in beautiful Inchigeelagh, where the fresh water of the new-born River Lee grows into Lough Allua, in a boisterous rite of passage.

In 1969, both Ireland and myself were going through a similar growth spurt. Although, at the time, I thought mine was far more important. You see, my primary school days were coming to a close and the following year, aged 11, I would be leaving the incessant chatter of my 11 siblings and entering a seminary.

The country was also moving … but in the opposite direction. Ireland was modernising and liberalising. Dublin was getting the Ballymun high-rise towers. Cork was getting the Tivoli dual-carriageway. Irish women were finding their voice and so too was the nationalist population in the North. That was the summer my Mom and Dad decided to take their children to see the changing face of Ireland.

My father hitched a huge caravan to his red and cream Mercedes, we piled in, and away we went.

Day One... and wouldn’t you know it. Half of us got sunburned. But undeterred, we ploughed on to Cashel where Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann had turned into Ireland’s Woodstock.

The first Irish hippies emerged and the records show that the festival was “marred by drunken depravity and debauchery”. I expect we kept the curtains in the caravan drawn.

Along the way, we spent a day with my eldest sister Norah who was working with Munster & Leinster Bank in Dublin. Then there was a day in Butlin’s Mosney, where two other sisters had summer jobs as ‘Redcoats’. Wow! This place had all kinds of exotica from ‘Nightly Cabaret’ to women in bikinis.

Next stop Drogheda, to see the skull of the martyr Blessed Oliver Plunkett. All the while this little martyr is sulking. “Why do we have to go and see some dead guy’s head when we could have spent another day in Bikiniland?” Clearly, I wasn’t paying attention to what the guide was saying, because when I got back to school in Cork, I told Brother Gill that I had seen the skull of Oliver Cromwell, blissfully unaware that if I had, Irish history would have taken an entirely different course.

We rolled into Belfast at a time when Civil Rights marches were just about to start, but I remember it as the closest thing to a foreign holiday I had ever encountered. The sun was shining, the police had guns, and everything from the money to the post boxes to the policemans’ uniforms was different.

So last summer, I decided to do it all over again. I hitched a caravan of Father Ted proportions to a 1964 Mercedes Benz and set out to travel the same roads. It would be an opportunity to see for myself how we are doing 40 years after the original roadtrip… to view the state of the nation.

The result is a four-part television series that starts on RTÉ 1 this Sunday at 6.30 pm.

In four weeks, I managed to revisit virtually all of the original locations, with one or two detours, including Laharn Cross near Mallow where cross-roads dancing still thrives. Lough Derg, to recall the many pilgrimages my father and his beloved brother John had made to this stoney grey place at the other end of the country.

The diversity of landscape and cultures and accents on this island is still remarkable... Rangers jerseys and sashes on Sandy Row... the soft Roscommon tones of 93-year-old Paddy Concannon, a man who still works his stretch of bog there. He told me that he is still in good health “.. save for a light sprinkling of arthritis”, as though it were a light penance or even a blessing.

The Irish-speaking rastaman with whom I busked in Galway ... the grey and gritty urban reality of the last Ballymun tower … the cacophony of 17 small traveller children in the back of a barrel-top wagon in Carlow as I took the reins and became ‘Boss of the Horse’ until we got ‘wedged’ and I was demoted to the woodsmoke beside the stove in the back of the wagon.

Four decades and three currencies later I found an Ireland that has changed hugely in terms of infrastructure and the rights of the individual. However, not unlike my journey, I find in many ways, we’re back where we started. Yes, we have learned to speak up for ourselves, but only after the event, it seems. Values have changed somewhat but some things endure like the fuchsia, the craic, and a sense of fairplay.

Creedon’s Retro Roadtrip (four one-hour documentaries) starts this Sunday at 6.30pm on RTÉ 1 television.