The Stars Are Our Only Warmth

THE STARS ARE OUR ONLY WARMTH

Doing my rounds.

Tipperary-born Alice Leahy began her working life as a nurse and midwife and went to help the outsiders in our society through her Simon community work. She was Co-Founder and Director of TRUST from 1975–2015, and remains a director of The Alice Leahy Trust – a non-judgmental, befriending, social and health service for people who are homeless.

Alice is also a former Human Rights Commissioner and former Chairperson of the Sentence Review Group and is a contributor to public policy, a writer, commentator, broadcaster and lecturer, giving a voice and a helping hand to the marginalised.

Alice co-authored, with Anne Dempsey, Not Just a Bed for the Night (1995), and edited With Trust in Place – Writing from the Outside and Wasting Time with People?

Alice has featured in social documentaries, including the film A Fragile City (1999) and documentary Wasting Time with People? (2010).

Alice was awarded an honorary fellowship from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (1999), an honorary fellowship from The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (2017), an honorary doctorate from University College Dublin (2003) and has been named Tipperary Person of the Year (2004). She has received many other awards, including Person of the Year (1988) and the Crystal Clear MSD Health Literacy Award (2009) for her life’s work combating social exclusion. Alice always emphasizes that her work is a ‘team effort’.

Catherine Cleary is a journalist, author and broadcaster. She began her career as a reporter with The Irish Times in 1994 and became security correspondent of The Sunday Tribune. She met Alice Leahy in the 1990s while reporting on social issues around crime and poverty. Catherine’s publications include: Life Sentence, Murder Victims and their Families (2004) and A Month of Somedays, How One Woman made the most of Now (2012). She co-wrote Counter Culture, The Sheridans’ Guide to Cheese in 2015. She also co-wrote and presented the RTÉ radio series History on a Plate with historian Juliana Adelman. She has been writing a weekly restaurant review in The Irish Times for the past seven years.

THE STARS ARE OUR ONLY WARMTH

Alice Leahy A MEMOIR

with Catherine Cleary

First published 2018 by The O’Brien Press Ltd., 12 Terenure Road East, Rathgar, D06 HD27, Dublin 6, Ireland.

Tel: +353 1 4923333; Fax: +353 1 4922777 E-mail: books@obrien.ie Website: www.obrien.ie The O’Brien Press is a member of Publishing Ireland.

ISBN: 978-1-78849-025-2 Copyright for text © Alice Leahy with Catherine Cleary 2018 Copyright for typesetting, layout, design © The O’Brien Press Ltd. 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 23 22 21 20 19 18 All author royalties to go to The Alice Leahy Trust For further information on The Alice Leahy Trust www.aliceleahytrust.ie Layout and design: The O’Brien Press Ltd. Cover image: Alamy. Front flap: Author photograph courtesy of the RTÉ Guide.

Printed and bound by Scandbook AB, Sweden.

The paper in this book is produced using pulp from managed forests.

Published in

Last Night Last night,

Two boys in the doorway, I watched him cry,

Genuine tears of lost undesertion You slept silently, mouth open

I wrapped the blanket around you.

They pass by in the hundreds,

Not knowing that the pavement is our pillow And the stars are our only warmth

Tony Gill, July 2000

Me and Tony Gill.

Dedication To my parents, Jack and Hannie Leahy

Thanks ‘At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person.

Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.’

Theologian, writer and philosopher Albert Schweitzer There have been too many sparks to mention by name. They all know who they are.

Some of them have died but their lives and memories still inspire me. Thank you to those who encouraged, supported, challenged and believed in me. My wonderful colleagues who work with me on a daily basis, our board of directors, our volunteers, donors and especially the people who use our service. Thanks to Michael O’Brien and his team, especially editor Susan Houlden in The O’Brien Press.

And finally my husband, Charlie, who has supported me and put up with me over the years, especially in recent times with my endless talk of an eventful life lived.

Contents My Impressions of Alice Leahy – Pat Kenny

Page 9

A Word from Alice about her Memoir

13

1 Annesgift, Fethard, County Tipperary

17

2 To Rule We Must First Obey. Training to be a Nurse

48

3 Listening for a Heartbeat. New Life in the Rotunda

75

4 My Calm Kingdom. Night Duty

96

5 The Simon Shelter. In at the Deep End

120

6 The Elephant Catchers

151

7 Trust. The Gift from a Dying Woman

176

8 Restaurant Revolutionaries

210

9 Partners and a Sort of Homecoming

249

10 Trials

284

11 The Homelessness Industry

310

12 Walkabout

338

Photograph and Text Credits

365

The Alice Leahy Trust

366

My Impressions of Alice Leahy

S

‘A tireless advocate and agitator for those who literally have no homes to go to’ Pat Kenny

omething Alice said years ago, has remained indelibly etched on my memory. It was in the context of a radio programme, and we had been discussing the homeless people on the streets and their insistent begging. Listeners phoned in to complain that the homeless would only ‘spend it on drink’. Alice quietly said, in reply, that the importance is in the giving, without being judgemental. Once we have given the money freely, the recipient is also free to spend it as they wish. And what might each of us do with a few Euro in a similar situation? I realised then that everything that Alice does is informed by kindness and compassion.

But it does not mean that Alice is a soft touch: her work is tempered by the experience of a lifetime, and woe betide those in authority who might consider this gentle and genteel woman a pushover, because she is not, as many in positions of authority have found. She is a woman of passions – for her sainted husband Charlie, for her work, for travel, 9

THE STARS ARE OUR ONLY WARMTH

for Tipperary hurling, and for the exposure of bureaucratic humbug.

She is fearless and outspoken. She identifies with absolute clarity the moment, in the bitterly cold winter of 1992, when the ‘homelessness industry’ began, and which made careers for many but did little to ease the problem.

I have known Alice for many years, but only as a citizen of Dublin. I knew that she was a qualified nurse who was moved to help the homeless, who for so many Dubliners had been an invisible presence on our streets. She had an outsider’s eye to see what many of us were blind to.

With Voluntary Services International (VSI), she discovered the redbrick tenements of Benburb Street, which we, as local Dublin children, were warned to avoid. We saw and smelt the poverty through the open hallways: Alice discovered the humanity. That’s what makes Alice different.

So, it was wonderful to be invited – in the text that follows – into the world of the child that was Alice Leahy, in a tiny place called Annesgift in County Tipperary. She has always been eloquent in speech, but she is even more so on the page. She grew up in a world of reading by oil lamp or candlelight, of rainwater harvesting, of Sunlight soap, of milk, still warm from the cow, a world of fairy forts, of nettle soup and river swimming. But she was also born into the world of ‘the big house’, because her father worked for the owner of Annesgift, a Major Hughes.

He and his young Dublin-born bride, Olivia Cruickshank, opened their home to the young Alice, and in so doing exposed her to a wider world and a different sensibility. Oh, to have known that young fearless Alice, in hand-me-down jodhpurs encouraging her mount, a Connemara pony up the soft silage mound and to gallop down again, oblivious to danger! A love of horses, an occasional flutter is a legacy that still endures. And she was also surrounded by several strong women,

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My Impressions of Alice Leahy

including her mother, ambitious and driven for local causes, who had a hand in preparing her for the challenges to come.

If she captures the world of rural Tipperary in the middle of the last century with a gimlet eye, Alice also does the same for her adopted home of sixties’ Dublin. From these pages, I can smell the ether and the antiseptic corridors of The Royal City of Dublin Hospital in Baggot Street, with its smartly blazered porter, starched nursing aprons, godlike consultants, and the invisible red uniformed cleaners, some of whom had come from county homes, institutions or Magdalene laundries. Young Nurse Alice vividly describes the shy and reclusive Paddy Kavanagh of Raglan Road being physically terrified of encountering the boisterous Brendan Behan, and we can imagine Kavanagh discovering the kindness of Nurse Alice, who also, by the way, babysat the Behan children! I can once again find myself back in Margaret Gaj’s restaurant, where all manner of revolutionary talk was on the menu. And that evocation of Dublin by Alice is still as precise for our contemporary city, which she walks every single day.

In reading this book, I was constantly reminded of the poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost: ‘I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.’

There is no doubt that Alice, at every crossroads, has always chosen the less obvious, the more difficult path, as you will discover in this book. Alice might have been lost to us, to remain in England or Germany or even New Zealand. Or perhaps to become Matron of Baggot Street Hospital and to slowly climb the ladder of promotion in a patriarchal health service. Or become a HSE housing executive with 11

THE STARS ARE OUR ONLY WARMTH

a leather and chrome office suite. But of course, it was to be none of the above. She continues her vital work every weekday morning in the Iveagh buildings on Bride Road. A cup of tea, a shower, a foot massage, a change of clothes, a conversation, simple human contact, all these things make a real difference. The ghosts of many of those who climbed down those basement steps populate this book, as do the ghosts of those who inspired the foundations of Trust in 1975.

Alice has become a tireless advocate and agitator for those who literally have no homes to go to. To quote one politician: ‘You don’t say no to Alice Leahy!’ She says unpalatable and sometimes un-PC things that rattle the cages of the policy makers and the powerful. But then as GK Chesterton so eloquently put it, ‘I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.’

Pat Kenny

12

A Word from Alice about her Memoir

W

e get people ready for the day. It sounds so simple: a hot shower, clean clothes, a shave and a spray of aftershave or perfume. But imagine how your day would feel without them. I watched a man sitting in our front room recently. He had a mug of tea in his hands and a biscuit. He was dressed in warm dry clothes. And he sat listening to beautiful music playing on Lyric FM, lost in his thoughts. There was something special about it, being sat there in the calm, a respite from the noise, traffic, weather and people on the streets, a few steps up from our basement home.

Beauty and tranquility can be in short supply when you’re living on the streets. It will be assumed you have slipped beyond the need for them. Lots of things will be assumed if you live in a doorway, a tent or a hostel. You will be labelled a client, a customer, a service user, a number. If I’ve learned anything, it is not to make assumptions about anyone. Boxes are not for people. At least, not while they’re alive.

Almost every day I learn again how challenging it is to cope with the needs of people lost to drink or drugs, living rough or feeling like an outsider.

We met a young woman who pulled out her medical tubes and left 13

THE STARS ARE OUR ONLY WARMTH

her hospital ward, chased by a doctor trying to keep her there. She told us that rehab was a place to go and eat and build herself up, a pause rather than a full stop, before heading back into serious drinking. There was a man addicted to heroin who told us he didn’t want any clean clothes. He could only get enough money for drugs if he stayed in his filthy clothes. We don’t know if we’ll see him alive again. There was the man who had been ‘successfully’ moved into independent living but came to us for a shave. In months of independent living his beard had grown down to his chest.

I’m called a veteran these days, as if I had returned from a war zone.

In some ways I did. At the height of a promising nursing career I fell into step with people who didn’t march to the beat of a typical life. This is the story of my untypical life, what I learned and saw and did in the company of those people over more than four decades.

To tell that story I worked with journalist Catherine Cleary. Collaboration has been a cornerstone of my work. And this book would not have seen the light of day without her. We talked about the past and visited people and places where I once worked or lived. We worked with an archive of material that I have been gathering since the start.

Many of our conversations about ideas and experiences from the past circled back to today. I learned a lot about memory and how precise or foggy it can be when one life event is picked out of the flow and held up to the light for examination. As sticklers for facts, we worked hard to chase down any misremembered details but it is an occupational hazard of writing a memoir.

This has ended up becoming a book not just about the complexity of being homeless but also about the complexity of being human. We are struggling in a world where things have become so far removed from people. We run the risk of being isolated into lonely individuals whose

14

A Word from Alice about her Memoir

worth is valued only by what we consume. I want to grasp the threads and pull the fabric back together again.

This is also a book about hope and the human spirit. It’s something that needs to be nurtured in these challenging times especially for those who come after us. To find hope we need to step back a bit to see how far we have come. I hope this book will help that to happen. Alice Leahy

15

Me, aged three and a half, with Gill at the main door of Annesgift, the Big House.

16

CHAPTER ONE

Annesgift Fethard, County Tipperary

I

‘There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.’

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940)

am sitting in my pram. Sawdust is piling in small drifts around the wheels. The smell is damp wood and stone. There are the sounds of horses and men in a busy farmyard. One of them is my father and he is chopping and stacking timber.

Memories flare like matches in the dark – bright and brief. Sometimes I wonder whether I truly remember this time in the wool room. Maybe it was something described to me so vividly that I threaded it into my own set of memories. In my seventies now I peer back through the window of my childhood, making new sense of things. Large chunks of time are lost and I’m left with shards.

These bursts and sparks from childhood are some of my strongest memories: blue sky summer days, glittering frosts, gossamer spider 17

THE STARS ARE OUR ONLY WARMTH

webs, tugging sheep’s wool from the grip of a briar, the jolt of joy at finding a newly laid hen’s egg, the tug of a newborn lamb sucking on the teat of a bottle.

I remember the knitted squares for Belgian refugees from World War II. Each one was bright, very much itself, like a memory. We sat on the floor knitting them in a room on a beautiful estate in the centre of south Tipperary. In winter a fire crackled in the grate. In summer the window was open and we could hear the crows squabbling in the tall trees. This was Annesgift, home, the place where I owned nothing and everything. A world where I belonged.

They were satisfying, those squares. You could knit one or two at a time, start something and finish it in the length of time it took to have a conversation. We cast on our stitches and turned the lengths of warm scratchy wool into something solid, all different colours, all the same size.

We sewed our squares together to make blankets. They were parcelled up and posted to Dominique Pire, a cleric helping refugees to rebuild their lives in Belgium after World War II. It was work that would earn him a Nobel Peace Prize. We pictured our knitted square blankets on the new beds and cots of people making new lives. The squares were small gestures that gave us the sense of being part of something bigger, a world outside life in Annesgift in fifties’ Ireland.

My mother Johannah Crean (everyone called her Hannie) was born in the townland of Ardsallagh just outside Fethard in September 1919.

‘It was all home births in those days,’ she told me. Her earliest memory was her first day at school when she was four years old. Her sister and brother held her hands as they walked away from home. Her best friend, Patty Ahearne, lived down the road. Patty had ‘dazzling red hair and a beautiful smile’.

18

Annesgift

My mother loved school and was gifted at maths but was required to finish her education after primary level. Secondary education had to be paid for and her family couldn’t afford it.

Instead, she took a domestic science training course in Fethard and went to work, at the age of sixteen, in the office of O’Sullivan’s chemist in the town. Later she worked in the market garden of the Church of Ireland rector Canon Patten, labelling flower and vegetable plants to be sent by rail to customers all over Ireland. When she was in her early twenties, she came to work at Annesgift and never left.

Annesgift is a handsome medium-sized Georgian country house hidden away from the road on nearly five hundred acres, just under three miles outside the Tipperary town of Fethard. The Clashawley river runs through the estate, splitting into two branches as it crosses the fields, one branch bigger than the other, before joining again into one river which flows into the Anner. The stone bridge that sits over the river at the entrance to the estate is, to my eye, the most beautiful place in Ireland. Wild garlic grows under the trees and trout swim in the river, luring the occasional otter to fish and hungry herons to stand watch on the banks.

The three-storey house with its long sash windows looks out across fertile fields, past tall cypress and oak trees to Slievenamon, or Sliabh na mBan, the mountain of the women.

The story I was told was that the house and lands were given as a wedding gift to the daughter of a wealthy landowner. In 1918 Major Jack Hughes brought his new bride, twenty-year-old Olivia Cruickshank, down from Dublin. He had been badly wounded in Flanders.

Olivia had studied history at Trinity. The young newly-weds had experienced a lot by the time they came to live in Tipperary. Jack Hughes was recovering from the horror of World War I. A brother of Olivia’s

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THE STARS ARE OUR ONLY WARMTH

had been killed in the Dardanelles in northwestern Turkey in 1915.

The Annesgift Olivia Hughes arrived to in 1918 was a quiet place with a tangled history. The 1901 census shows how full of voices the house had been. Back then, Major Hughes was an eight-year-old boy.

He had a five-year-old sister and a baby brother. His mother Kate was thirty-five. His father, John, was sixty. Kate Hughes, who was a Kerry woman, must have been a second wife. The major’s father had two daughters in their twenties, not much younger than Kate. The livein staff included a governess, a nurse and four servants, bringing the household to thirteen people. There is a Leahy listed amongst them, Ellen Leahy, my father’s aunt who worked as the nurse in the house in 1901.

A decade on, the 1911 census shows a much diminished household.

Kate Hughes was a forty-three-year-old widow, apparently alone in Annesgift with a gardener and two women listed as servants, nineteenyear-old Mary Cormick and my great aunt Ellen. Kate describes herself as a farmer. Sometime in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising she was driven out of the house and it was seized for a time, but not destroyed as many big houses were. It’s difficult to know what exactly happened.

The closest we get is something Olivia Hughes wrote much later for a foreword to a history of the churches of Fethard.

‘My mother-in-law had been evicted from Annesgift, Jack’s farm in a fertile and well-watered part of Tipperary. She never came back but lived in England. We settled down in Annesgift when the Sinn Féiners cleared out. The eviction didn’t last long. Jack’s workers were glad to see us again. The old steward who had worked all his life at Annesgift had wept bitterly when my mother-in-law was turned out.’

‘Annesgift was a fine Georgian house with great windows,’ Olivia Hughes wrote proudly. ‘When one looked down the lawn there was a

20

Annesgift

ring fort. There were many of these strange rings in the neighbourhood but none finer than ours which had a double ring and was crowned with fine ash trees. The first sign of spring was the return of the herons to the nest in the top of the trees.’

By the 1920s, when my mother was visiting Annesgift as a child, the house was humming with activity and work again; the farm was in full production. My father’s father, Daniel Leahy, was the steward.

He was born in a little house facing Annesgift House. Although the house is gone gooseberry bushes still grew there up until very recently remnants of his small fruit and vegetable garden. These were turbulent days of skirmishes and attacks during the War of Independence.

Dan had to shelter under a small bridge on the estate when trees were being knocked around Annesgift to keep the black and tans from travelling between Fethard and Cashel. A group of black and tans had once swooped down on my mother’s father, Martin Crean, who was a gardener in nearby Tullamaine Castle, as he walked the road. The British mercenaries mistook the large bough he was carrying on his shoulder for a gun. He was lucky not to be shot.

An annual highlight was the threshing dance, marking the end of the wheat harvest, where, in the time before combine harvesters, many hands were needed to separate the grains of wheat from their stalks, using a steam engine and a mill. The threshing took three days. Helpers came from neighbouring farms. It was hot dusty work, and my mother remembered Mrs Hughes working all day in the kitchen to prepare a hearty midday meal and afternoon tea.

On the last evening the workers and helpers went home and changed out of their work clothes to return for the threshing dance that went on all night into the early hours. Mrs Hughes sang with gusto at the threshing dance. Her party pieces included ‘Way Down Upon the

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THE STARS ARE OUR ONLY WARMTH

The Leahy family. Me behind my father, my sister Eileen behind my mother. My brother Donal standing between us, with my brother Martin on my father’s knee and my sister Mary on my mother’s knee.

22

Annesgift

Swanee River’, ‘Annie Laurie’ and ‘Phil the Fluter’s Ball’.

In the early forties my mother came to work at Annesgift, to help care for Mrs Hughes’s mother, Elizabeth Cruickshank. Mrs Hughes’s mother enjoyed jaunts in her pony and trap, with her nurse and my mother. The pony was flighty and would regularly rear up or set off at a gallop. This terrified the nurse and my mother but was a great source of glee to Mrs Cruickshank.

As a nurse’s aid in Annesgift my mother started seeing my father John, or Jack as he was called. They had known each other in school.

He worked on Annesgift farm and was a carer for the major’s disabled cousin.

My parents’ wedding was typical of its day, quiet and modest. Hannie wore a wedding suit – a skirt, blouse and jacket. Their ‘honeymoon’ consisted of a day trip to Melleray, the Abbey in Waterford. She moved into the small house where I was born, a four-roomed cottage on the edge of the estate beside the road.

The house came with the job of estate steward. Over my parents’ long and happy lifetimes, the world of big houses, servants and masters, or ‘high-ups’ as my mother called them, faded and died. We are the last of a generation that remembers the big house and its army of workers.

I was the eldest, born in that sturdy little house on 1 December 1942. It never felt small because of the bigness of everything around us. I grew up feeling (maybe precociously) that Annesgift belonged to me, its fairy forts, the abundant kitchen garden, the boot and harness rooms with their tang of leather and linseed oil, the cool pantry where butter and cream were kept, the farm animals and all the wild animals: the squirrels, foxes, badgers and otters.

Four years later, my sister Eileen was born, then our brother Donal and finally the twins Martin and Mary. Our little house filled up. I

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THE STARS ARE OUR ONLY WARMTH

spent what felt like hours staring out the tiny gable window of my bedroom, elbows leaning on the fragile wooden frame watching Slievenamon change. Its colours and shadows would lighten and darken, weather rippling and brewing across it.

We were not a family of huggers, but there was warmth and genuine caring for each other. My parents were hard-working and we learned by watching them. We grew up with a huge work ethic. Even though I was the eldest, my parents didn’t lean on me for help with my younger siblings. My childhood felt carefree and independent.

Our house had a rose garden in the front with fat pink and yellow roses that filled the summer air with perfume along with the lilac and the honeysuckle. There were two rooms upstairs and two downstairs and the windows were very small. We had no running water or electricity. The only phone in the vicinity was in the big house. There were so few phones then that the number for Annesgift House was Fethard 10.

Later when Godfreys up the road got the first television I would head up there with my siblings to sit and watch the screen, delicious chunks of Mrs Godfrey’s currant bread in our hands.

We carried washing water from the river and kept it in a bucket.

We collected rainwater in a barrel at the side of the house. Water for drinking and cooking came from a well. There was a scullery at the back of the house where my mother did all the washing with a washboard and a block of Sunlight Soap. It was back-straining work. She boiled the whites over the fire and made starch for them in the scullery.

At the other side of the house there was a hen house. We had lots of hens, Rhode Island Reds, who would cluck and fuss around you when you went to find the eggs. There was a hen run, where chickens were hatched and raised.

Oil lamps and candles were the only source of light, along with the

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Annesgift

Happy women with their lovely horse and dogs setting off for the day. Mrs Hughes and her mother Mrs Cruickshank in front, my mother Hannie behind Mrs Hughes with Nurse Connorton.

glow of the fire in winter. But there were always books in the sitting room. At night we sat around the fire and played cards, Snakes and Ladders or had a question time session. I still love sitting on the floor, although my knees no longer appreciate it. We always had an atlas in the house. We acted out parts from stories we had read in the paper. I loved elephants and had a beautiful book about them given to me by someone who visited the Hughes family.

We painted and drew and wrote and took turns to read the Curly

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