On revolutions and revelations

Fionnula Flanagan - Holywood actor and daughtr of Irish International Brigadier, Terry Flanagan.

Hilary Flann in The Irish Times, Saturday, July 4, 2009

Flanagan was born a long way from the verdant hills of Hollywood, a long way from the red earth of California and a long way from the dazzling roar of New York City. From the vantage point of her comfortable suite on this balmy morning, we pad gently back to the past, to Whitehall on Dublin’s northside, and a corporation estate bathed in post-Emergency hardship and conformity. Flanagan’s mother, a genteel woman from Co Dublin who had worked in the civil service prior to her marriage, wanted to “break us out of the confinement of the projects, the corporation scheme”. Flanagan recalls a woman who believed in the power of song and theatre, and wanted that for her children. “We used sit in the back row of the Gate on a Saturday, for 1/6d, my mother and I, and that was when I knew that they were having much more fun up there in the light than we were having in the dark.”

Her mother favoured the Gate, and the European drama produced there, over the Abbey, which, under the yoke of Ernest Blythe, seemed tethered to endless kitchen-sink cottage dramas. “Dublin was so divided, class-wise, in the 1950s. You felt it in the air; it was pervasive,” Flanagan says. “But my mother really did believe that education was important. The world is large, she told us, get out and see it; the only way to develop respect for other people is to get out and meet them.”

Although Flanagan’s mother had only a smattering of her native language, and her father communicated as Gaeilge solely with the word “tá” (“he used it for everything”), both of her parents instilled in their five children a love and respect for the Irish language, and gave them an education that helped them master it. “They believed that a country without a language is a nation without a soul, and I am profoundly grateful to them for that access to that language, literature and metaphor.”

Flanagan goes on to describe a childhood rich in culture, pulsing with life, but also riddled with insecurities, where finances ebbed and flowed with the unpredictability of the weather. At the helm of this loving, capricious family was her father, Terry.

“We always called him Terry, never dad or father,” she says. “He was Terry, and he was the one who called me Manon, while my mother called me Fionnula – a split identity right from the beginning. My father was old IRA, a member of Saor Éire. He went to Spain as a member of the International Brigade to fight against Franco. He was wounded, came back, joined the Irish Army and became a captain during the Emergency.”

She goes on to describe an expansive nationalist, a man who was a passionate defender of Ireland but who befriended and chose to socialise with an emigre community in Dublin, people who had escaped fascism and now found themselves living under the shadow of the bishop’s palace.

“My parents’ friends were socialists, communists, old republicans,” she says. “They were a small population – writers, painters, refugees – not the normal friendships you would find in Dublin’s corporation schemes. I had an awareness of a sense of difference. My mother was a Catholic socialist, but my father had such a hatred of the Catholic Church that no priest would ever cross our door. He was not in favour of us going to Catholic schools – that was one of the reasons that we didn’t stay at Holy Faith.”

Instead, the children went to a “model school”, Scoil Mhuire, on Dublin’s Marlborough Street, which was populated, according to Flanagan, by the children of old-school republicans bussed in from the suburbs, and by city children from the area. Run directly by the Department of Education and staffed by lay teachers, the teaching was entirely in Irish. “We got a slap on the hand if we were late,” she recalls, “but there was none of the horror and brutality we now know existed.”

A man prone to great bursts of enthusiasm and entrepreneurial fervour, Manon’s father started several businesses, including the joyously named Flanagan Floral Enterprises, the vehicle for his plan to install and maintain window boxes around a predominantly grey city. “He also developed a little magazine, Furniture and Floor Covering ,” Flanagan says. “He wrote, say, about Irish rope, encouraged the advertising and promotion of Irish products. He understood that Irish industry needed accelerated promotion.”

Terry Flanagan went on to work for a time at the Irish Press. “Then he crashed some cars,” says Flanagan wryly. “He drank, disastrously.” Her piercing eyes watch me, like a hunched cat over a trapped bird. She is searching for recognition, knowing well that there is none of us in this sodden country impervious to the consequences of drink.

“Drink defeated him,” she continues, evenly. “Our fortunes fluctuated: sometimes it was great, sometimes we didn’t know where the next meal was coming from. His ability to connect with moneyed support was not very good, or maybe people just thought, ‘I’m not going to give Flanagan money’. I was ashamed and I was frightened, but learned to cope with the fluctuations of fortune.”

Shame is a resonant and chillingly honest word, one which Flanagan repeats more than once when discussing her father and the vagaries of their family life. Candidly, she talks about the shame of poverty, the shame of covering up poverty, and fear of the bravura among people on the estate who didn’t try to cover up the difficulties of poverty. She recalls with tender clarity her anxiety that people might be laughing at her father behind his back, and her need, as a little girl of 11 or 12, to “protect him from ridicule, knowing my friends and neighbours were capable of laughing at him – that was searing pain”. She speaks poignantly about Terry selling long-stemmed wine glasses from a small leather suitcase – she does not know how or to whom, or indeed if a single goblet was ever sold.

“People who are revolutionaries for the most part have difficulties with the day-to-day arrangements of life,” she says. “In his quest to change the world, he very often neglected to look after what was right there under his nose, a wife and five children.” She pauses and smiles. “But I never considered us poor, although I knew when we didn’t have money.”

The coffee in the metal pot is cold, but I pour it anyway. I need to look away from her, afraid that my empathy will be misconstrued as sentimentality.

“Certain colours I will never have in my house,” she says, accepting the cup. “A certain dark green that was on the inside of all the doors of all the houses in Whitehall, a dark green that was put there by the corporation, and to me that symbolises the grey 1950s of Ireland. It symbolises poverty.”

© 2009 The Irish Times