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Mother Courage Aubrey Malone on the remarkable Majella O’Donnell
Of all the gin joints in all the world, he walked into hers.. It was September 1999. Majella McLellan was taking a time out from her hotel job in Edinburgh to lend a helping hand to her parents. She was a divorced mother of two. They ran a bar in Tenerife. Daniel O’Donnell had a holiday home there and occasionally dropped in. He knew Majella’s parents but not Majella – until that night. She sang a song for him - She Moved Through the Fair. The next night they met again in an Irish bar and he kissed her. She liked him and she felt he liked her. How much? Only time would tell. It would be hard to think of a more incongruous coupling than Majella and Daniel. Didn’t we all think Daniel would go up the aisle with someone as old-fashioned as himself? Someone who might have been queueing up at Kincasslagh for a cup of tea, dressed in a woolly jumper maybe, and sensible shoes? If you put on your Mystic Meg hat and predicted he’d marry someone who’d already been married before, you’d have been told you were off your trolley. That wasn’t in the plan for Daniel, was it? No, he was going to go for someone who hadn’t been round the block. Maybe not even out of the house – except maybe to see him perform. But that’s what makes life so interesting. It doesn’t conform to plans. The fact that two people connected on a level that didn’t ‘look right’ on paper is basically why computer dating doesn’t work. Because people aren’t computers. If you asked Majella herself if she ever thought she’d hook up with someone like Daniel, she’d also have told you that you were off your trolley. She was vaguely aware of who he was in 1999 but her musical tastes ran more to people like Carole King and Bob Marley rather than middleof-the-road C&W singers. But when you meet someone in the flesh, or even talk to them on the phone, all your preconceptions go out the window. That’s what I found about Daniel when I interviewed him for Senior Times some years ago. 28 Senior Times l November - December 2018 l www.seniortimes.ie
He was a lot more savvy than I expected. And a lot more humorous. Humour was the thing that first attracted Majella to him too. She wasn’t expecting it. It’s not something people bring up much when they’re talking about him. But it’s there. In spades. It’s really a sign of intelligence, especially humour that’s directed at oneself. Daniel is intelligent enough to play the fool sometimes. It makes him bullet-proof. When you laugh at yourself, it takes the sting out of the insults other people are throwing at you. Daniel has had his fair share of these over the years. They roll off him like water off a duck’s back. Majella is more sensitive. She’s protective of him. This was apparent in a television interview she did with Brendan O’Connor recently. It looked for all the world like a cuddly exchange until Majella uttered the immortal words to O’Connor: ‘People make fun of Daniel. I’ve seen you do it yourself.’ It takes a lot to shake Brendan O’Connor but she did it. He didn’t know what hit him. He became awkward. She’d got him. Majella was basically saying that, like most people in Ireland, O’Connor liked attacking an easy target. She was right. Having a go at wee Daniel is almost like a national hobby in this country. It makes people feel superior to him when they say things like, ‘Did you hear Daniel once got a girl into trouble? Yeah – he told her mother she was smoking.’ Ho ho. Majella doesn’t like these cheap shots. Which is why she put O’Connor in his box. She also said in the interview that Daniel was probably the kindest person she’d ever met in her life. That’s something else we don’t hear about too much. It impressed her just as much as the sense of humour when she first met him. She was reeling from a marital split at the time and feeling all the vulnerability that entailed. Her children were off at boarding school so she was also trying to deal with the empty nest syndrome. The marriage hadn’t ended well. Her husband had been unfaithful to her. Not once but many times. In fact he even cheated on her the night before they married. Incurable optimist that she was, she thought she could change him. She didn’t, but she forgave him. She has such a big heart she’s happy that her children have a good relationship with him now, and that he seems to be happy with someone else.