The death of a warrior from Ballymun

Vicky McElligott danced with a Maasai warrior under the African night sky. The stars above might have been the same she could see from her home in Ballymun, but she knew her journey was far greater than the miles that separate Dublin and Dar Es Saalam.

Vicky died in the early hours of February 2. She was extraordinary.

You have probably never heard of her, unless the name rings a bell from one of her few outings on RTÉ’s Liveline, or if you’re a fan of the National Geographic, which once featured her.

I met her a few years back. She already had the emphysema that would take her life, but her own struggles were never her primary concern.

Once, when I spent an afternoon in her Ballymun home, two plain-clothes gardai were sitting outside in an unmarked car. Vicky’s family were under 24-hour guard.

Her daughter, Victoria, had given evidence against a local gun thug who had threatened to exact revenge from his prison cell.

Victoria didn’t lick it off the stones. Her courage was a family trait, whether it was Vicky taking on criminals, or chasing down the apparatus of a State that wantonly neglected its duty to her community.

Vicky railed against the life trajectory set out for somebody of her generation and background.

She was born Victoria McAuliffe, into an urban working-class family in Ballyfermot. Education was minimal, as it was for the vast majority like her.

At 14, she took the boat to England and worked as a cleaner in Ampleforth College, an exclusive institution for well-heeled Catholic girls.

She returned home and settled in Ballymun with her husband, Tony McElligott. Ballymun had, in the 1960s, been a great experiment.

Seven towers were built — each taking the name of one of the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation — and filled with people cleared from the city centre slums.

“Seven Towers,” as Bono would later sing, “And only one way out.”

Job done, as far as the State was concerned. A bricks-and-mortar tribute to the ideals of the revolution.

Thereafter, the State neglected any responsibility to a community in which socio-economic ills were queuing up to wreck havoc.

That was the environment when Vicky and Tony arrived in the Poipentree area of Ballymun.

Vicky gave birth to eight children, and settled into the kind of life that necessity demanded of women in her circumstances. Her only path to fulfilment was signposted through her roles as wife and mother.

But an innate spark still flickered, defying the societal and class mores of the day.

In the documentary, Are We So Different, which brought her to Africa, she related how, one day, the spark ignited.

“I was always a mouthy person and, as a young one, I’d stand my ground and defy anyone who wanted to take me on. For years, then, after I got married, that changed. I became docile and the only way I could react was though my children, on behalf of my children, but never on behalf of myself. I’d lost that,” Vicky said.

“Then, one day, I was walking through the shopping centre and somebody called me by my single (maiden) name. And I remembered. For two seconds, I forgot who that person was. And then I remembered that I had lost that person. That person was gone.

“And I went about bringing myself back and spoke in the first person: ‘that’s me. I am. I am Victoria McElligott. I am Victoria McAuliffe. I am’.”

Ballymun reaped the rewards of her awakening. Along with Columban priest, Fr Noel Kearns, her friend, Mary Couch, filmmaker, Anne Daly, and others, she was involved in setting up the Columban Youth Project, now known as the Poipentree Youth Project.

In its 20-year existence, the project can claim credit for having diverted legions of young men from drifting to the dark side, where crime and conflict pollute lives less lived.

That led to her being the public face of the Ballymun Horse Owners’ Association, another initiative that has done admirable work in providing youths with an outlet through which they can strive for fulfilment on their own terms.

“Vicky was drawn always to the underdog,” Anne Daly recorded on her blog for Esperanza Productions. “Especially the young offenders. She would regularly visit them in prison. This helps explain her commitment to the horse project, which she saw as a valuable outlet for them.”

When battle was joined with the State to provide a fair shake for the youth of Ballymun, Vicky was in the frontline. She garnered a reputation for refusing to take no for an answer.

Mary Couch remembers her friend’s tenacity. “She used to say to me me, ‘Couchy, when you get the bit between your teeth you’re like a Jack Russell.’ I’d say to her ‘if I’m a Jack Russell, you’re a Rottweiller’.”

The women fought many battles, with local authority, with government departments, and with the regeneration project for the area, which some saw as imposing from above, rather than working with the community.

And with each victory, the satisfaction of something more, a battle won against the authorities, another notch in the war against the dark side, pushing one kid, two, more, to where life’s possibilities open up, rather than narrow and shut down on the cusp of adulthood.

She was, as her funeral service was told, “a force of nature in Ballymun”, and in that she typified the — mostly female — figures in disadvantaged communities who strive tirelessly to seek out the best of their people, railing against the inequities of life.

She educated herself. She began to expand her horizons, finding out what all this fuss was about the motor car. At her funeral, her son, Christy, told the packed gathering that her family never saw her “once she learned how to drive”.

Then, there was that trip to Africa. Anne Daly and Ronan Tynan wanted to make a documentary on how the struggles of women were universal, and who better to cross cultural and racial divides than the mouthy woman from Ballymun.

While in Tanzania, one night she and Daly were having a drink in their hotel when one of the Maasai warriors assigned to stand guard over the establishment asked her to dance.

And she got up, this mother of eight, this community warrior, and maybe she reflected on how crazy life can be, and how far can be travelled down the road, and maybe she never saw anything before like the night sky that hangs over the African continent. And maybe Africa never saw anything like Vicky McElligott. A force of nature. A life lived to defy parameters. A true warrior. Ar dheis De go raiby a anam.