Fergus Finlay: Home is where the heart is and I love my wife and family dearly

'It will be another week or so before I can boast that the most long-suffering woman in Ireland has put up with me for half a century.'

Did you ever hear of Godwin Swift? No, nor me neither, until I stayed in his house this past weekend. And I have to admit I’d never heard of Longwood either, where Godwin’s house is located. As the saying might go, it’s an hour from Dublin, but actually miles from anywhere. A lovely little village, a couple of miles from Enfield, with a supermarket, an antiques and curio shop, and one of those hardware stores where the boss can never take a day off because she’s the only one who knows where everything is.

Anyway, the house, and Godwin. It’s called Lionsden House, it’s Georgian, and it’s “associated” with the Swift family. Deep in the bowels of the internet, you can find a connection between the house and Godwin Swift. In my stupidity, I assumed he must an ancestor of the famous Jonathan, but Godwin died in 1815, and Jonathan 70 years earlier. So I’m guessing, and no doubt one of you will prove me wrong, that Godwin was actually descended from Jonathan Swift’s uncle, who was also called Godwin (you’re with me so far, I hope!) And he left behind Lionsden. Bedrooms and bathrooms all over the place, wonderful fields all around it, a huge big tatty and gorgeous dining room, and the atmosphere of a never-ending house party throughout. It was as cold as the Baltic Sea when we arrived but two huge wood-burning stoves soon fixed that. And brilliant for kids — all the room in the world for them.

It was my daughter Sarah’s idea. She won’t mind me telling you (I hope) that she turns 40 around this time. She was born on the actual day that Garret Fitzgerald and Dick Spring’s government was formed. Among other things, that had the consequence of giving Sarah an absentee father for quite a bit of the first couple of years of her life. Perhaps (I hope not) for that reason, or perhaps because of the proximity of Christmas, she’s never been good at celebrating birthdays.

So she wanted to make this one special — it also coincides with another event that I’ll come to in a moment — and suggested the hiring of Lionsden House for the weekend (it’s on Airbnb). We all readily agreed to chip in and all made our way down, laden with enough food (and wine) to keep an army of trenchermen busy for a month.

The whole thing was Sarah’s idea, and it was a brilliant one. We have four daughters and six grandchildren, and this was the first time in years all of us had spent a celebratory weekend together. My younger sister Aoibhinn came too with her husband Marc and daughter Ava.

Maybe because it was the first time with all the kids and grandkids, maybe the frost and cold, maybe the laughing and talking — it was extraordinary. I have seldom felt as lucky. 

I know so many families that for one reason or another would find it impossible to put together a weekend like that. Distance, bereavement, emigration, broken relationships — there’s bad stuff that goes with family too.

So when chances come, take them. I’ve just spent a weekend with the most important people in my life, and it really mattered. I know they all think I’m a grumpy old chap, but I’m never going to forget it, and I’m always going to be grateful to Sarah for thinking about it, and to all the others for being there.

We lit fires, we washed dishes, we cooked the biggest bit of roast beef I’ve ever seen, we decorated a Christmas tree, and we played with grandkids. It may not sound exciting, but you’ll have to take it from me that it would be impossible, absolutely impossible, to have a better weekend, one I’ll remember forever.

There was, as it happens, another reason we were gathered, and it was part of Sarah’s generosity that she was happy to share her birthday with the other occasion. In fact, she had created a family WhatsApp group to organise the logistics, and she called it the “birth-iversary” group.

Because this weekend my lady wife and I also celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Not quite on the date, because we made the timing mistake of getting married a couple of days before Christmas, and nobody ever really wanted to come to an anniversary party when there was so much else going on.

So it will be another week or so before I can boast that the most long-suffering woman in Ireland has put up with me for half a century. If I started to tell you about Frieda I’d run out of space long before I’d finished. She’s immensely talented, strong, and wise. 

She worries constantly about everything, but when she gets a fit of the giggles it’s the most infectious thing in the world.

A lot of her life has been informed by her artistic talent and astonishingly creative eye. But it’s also been shaped by the disability that visited our house when Mandy, our oldest daughter, was born with Downs Syndrome (or Up Syndrome, as Mandy insists on calling it).

Disability doesn’t just bring pressure and difficulty in its wake. If you’re like Frieda, it also brings things to learn — and to teach; ways to grow, battles to fight, public policies to challenge. One of the battles Frieda took on years ago sprang from the realisation that educational opportunities for people with an intellectual disability were so limited. That battle led directly to a decision by Trinity College in Dublin, and eventually by other third-level colleges, to admit students like Mandy to programmes appropriate to their needs and abilities.

I said I wasn’t going to go there. But there is one thing we have all learned over the years. Wherever Frieda is, home is. That’s not just because of the way we feel about her – it’s also because she has an unparalleled gift for bringing an atmosphere to everywhere she has ever lived. We started off together in a tiny flat in Ranelagh, then a converted stable in Bray, half of a pretty damp house in Blackrock in Dublin, and a variety of houses in Cork before we came back to Dublin. Every single one of them, no matter what condition she found them in, became a place I never wanted to leave.

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

The nature of my work over many of those years meant that she did most of that — and a lot of heavier lifting besides — on her own. Those first few years of Sarah’s life that I mentioned before — I lived in Dublin then and worked around the clock in crisis after crisis. Frieda lived in Cork and dealt with the needs of four young kids while learning about and coping with Downs Syndrome in an era when there was no support whatsoever.

It’s a miracle to me that she has put up with it all, and especially with me, for so long. She regards me, I think, as nothing like the complete article.

I’m unfinished business, a project with a long way to go before I’m done to her satisfaction. Luckily for me, Frieda has never given up on a project.