O’Rourke frank about Yuletide loneliness

THEY might have called it The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Politician.

It isn’t often that our public representatives display such empathy with the masses but, then, former senior government minister Mary O’Rourke is no ordinary politician.

With disarming frankness, she spoke yesterday of her loneliness at Christmas and how she misses, in particular, her husband Enda and her brother Brian Lenihan. Her thoughts will also be of her nephew, former finance minister Brian Lenihan Jr.

Speaking on the John Murray radio show on RTÉ Radio 1, she spoke of the commercialism of Yuletide and the expectations that all is bright and beautiful in the run-up to Christmas.

“We have been all conditioned with the tinsel and the holly to think that is how we should feel happy at Christmas but, in a way, why should it be? I know it is Christ’s birth we are celebrating but that has got lost a bit. You are conditioned to believe you should be all folksy and happy... not everybody feels like that.”

Mary will be spending Christmas with her son Áengus and his wife Lisa, who live with their four young children in Athlone. Like many Irish people at this time of year, she tends to count her blessings.

“I have the most gorgeous daughters-in-law, one in Dublin and one in Athlone. I am spending it in Athlone.”

However, she said not everybody can feel that sense of inclusion and “it is a very difficult for them. I will go to bed on Christmas Eve on my own and wake up on Christmas Day on my own and maybe read a bit and make telephone calls to relatives I only speak to on and off. I will then go home later and wake up the next morning on my own.”

Like most people who have lost loved ones, her thought will be dominated by Christmases past.

“I will think about Enda a lot this Christmas and I will think about the two Brians. This time last year Brian Jnr was alive and I remember phoning him on Christmas Day.”

Mary understands the pressure to remain jolly and convivial, even when the heart isn’t in it.

“I will be shopping, meeting people and wishing them a happy Christmas, they wishing you the same, but then you go home and you sit down and you are on your own.

“I think Christmas heightens that sense of isolation, because of what you remember. You can never get back what is gone, but young children are the conduit for all that is bright and beautiful and I am lucky to have those lovely grandchildren on Christmas Day. I will come home, put on the fire and the TV and think a bit. There is no harm in that kind of reflection.”

She also offered advice for those who were finding Christmas a particular challenge this year. One man, who lost his wife to illness during the year, preferred to stay home alone this year rather than go to his daughter’s family home, but Mary was adamant he should go.

“I understand how he feels. He would rather be in his own home thinking about his wife, but, really he should go. After all, she is his daughter and he can always come home early, think about his wife and go to bed happy.”

She also had some sage words for a family facing straitened financial circumstances, in particular one woman with two teenage boys whose husband had lost his job and who found her own work hours cut.

“I think she should be up-front with her sons and explain that Christmas will not be all of a glitter this year. I think they will respond to that.”

She also recalled her own early childhood when all she could think of was a pair of roller skates for Christmas.

“Sarah, my six-year-old granddaughter, said she had written to Santa for roller skates and I told her that when I was a child I longed for roller-skates but my mother told me she had written to Santa not to bring them because they were dangerous, and I never got them. Sarah got a bit worried so she asked her mother not to write to Santa and we had to soothe that over.”

Lonely or not, the redoubtable Mary revealed one of her two Christmas party pieces.

“I have a poem and a song, and they are both bloodthirsty. The poem is Dangerous Dan McGrew.”

And the song? Wild horses etc. “All I can say is that it is about 1798. It gets a bit rebellious after a glass or two of wine.”