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- Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In this witty, engaging and deeply personal memoir, Superquinn founder and Senator Feargal Quinn shares his memories of the ups and downs of business and public life in Ireland over seven decades. He recalls his family's commercial and political roots, his childhood at Red Island holiday camp and his battles to succeed in the face of personal tragedy. He reflects on the culture of innovation he introduced in Superquinn, and his decision to sell the company that bore his name. Quinntessential Feargal provides a unique insight into the life and career of one of Ireland's best-known entrepreneurs.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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QUINNTESSENTIALFEARGAL
A Memoir
FEARGAL QUINN
Contents
QUINNTESSENTIALFEARGAL
A Brief Note Of Thanks
I can’t even begin to thank all the colleagues, customers, friends and family members who have helped me over the years. In fact, if I were to attempt to do so, I would probably need another book just to fit everyone in. So I won’t do that here! But a memoir does not write itself; and with this in mind there are a number of people who have provided me with help, encouragement and advice in bringing this most personal of projects to fruition.
Denise and my children Eamonn, Giliane, Stephen, Zoe and Donal as well as my sister Eilagh were always at hand to lend their support and provide context throughout the writing and editing process. This is deeply appreciated.
Vincent O’Doherty, Damien Carolan, Pat Byrne and Jim Treacy provided a watchful eye and helped to proofread relevant sections.
I also owe a very special thanks to John Downes, Bairbre Murray and Anne O’Broin, who researched and compiled the interviews that form the basis of this book.
Finally, to Michael O’Brien and all at O’Brien Press, and Brendan O’Brien (freelance editor): I (literally) could not have done it without you.
Prologue
Selling Superquinn
I will always remember the day I sold the company that bore my name. As I sat in the offices of William Fry, Solicitors, just off Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Square, there was an unmistakable sense of celebration in the air. Champagne bottles were on ice; those present in the room were in a happy, positive mood.
This surprised me: I had expected the day to be a dull affair, filled with legal formalities.
My sons Eamonn, Stephen and Donal and my daughter Gilliane, as well as the former Executive Chairman of Superquinn, Vincent O’Doherty, had accompanied me to the meeting where we finalised the signing over of the company. After that day, it would no longer be directly run by me or my family. Even saying those words now, at more than a decade’s remove, seems a little strange.
Earlier that morning, I kissed my wife Denise goodbye as I left our home on the hill of Howth, where we have lived for forty years. She muttered a brief few words of encouragement and reminded me that this would be a happy day for us, as a family. Onwards and upwards to the next chapter.
As always, the thirty-minute car journey to Dublin’s city centre took me through Sutton Cross, past the Superquinn store, my base as a retailer for decades.
During the drive into the city, I couldn’t help remembering the many great times we had over the years at Superquinn. It all started in 1960 when we opened our very first shop, Quinn’s Supermarket, in Dundalk.
The fun times ranged from madcap publicity ideas involving soap stars, elephants and tractors to general election candidates taking part in hustings off the back of a truck in one of our car parks. They included price wars, public speaking engagements and much more besides.
The many brilliant people who worked alongside me in Superquinn truly made it what it was. They helped to generate a lifetime of memories.
And yet on 25 August 2005, as I prepared to sell up, I was more convinced than ever that it was the right decision for me, for my family, and to secure the future of the company and its staff. In truth, that day in the solicitors’ office represented the culmination of a conversation within my family that had been taking place for some time.
The reasons for selling when we did were many and varied. The advent of increased competition, both from German retailers Aldi and Lidl and the response of other larger competitors with much deeper pockets, was a definite factor.
At Superquinn, we had always insisted where possible that we would own our own sites. But in boom-time Ireland, such sites were becoming increasingly hard to find at rates that made any kind of financial sense. This meant that the scope to continue our company mantra of sustainable expansion was becoming seriously curtailed.
Also, others valued our land at multiples of what we could make from running a grocery business there. I remember one developer saying to me, ‘I can’t believe you don’t put eight floors on top of that shop and two levels of car parking underneath. You could make much more money.’
It was a way of looking at the Superquinn sites that was alien to me. At heart I was a grocer, not a property developer. Also I was keenly aware that all good family-owned companies need to have a well-formulated succession plan, allowing the founder to exit the company in a controlled fashion.
The perils of failing to prepare properly are plain to see in the ruins of many such family companies around the world. As I will talk about later, this is something that directly affected a previous generation within my own family.
I was anxious to learn from these experiences.
Fundamental to any such succession planning is whether there are members of the family who wish to take on the mantle, to build on whatever success the company has enjoyed to date. So I went to my five children and outlined the lie of the land. Some, like my sons Eamonn and Stephen, were already involved in the company on a day-to-day level and were well aware of the pressures we faced.
‘Others value this company highly, and I’m getting to the stage that I’m not going to start getting into construction and building,’ I told them. ‘Do you want to?’
Quite rightly, particularly with the hindsight that the collapse of the Celtic Tiger allows, they said ‘We don’t know anything about property development. It’s not for us.’
It was abundantly clear to me that all five of my children’s interests lay elsewhere. As parents, Denise and I had always tried to encourage them to follow their passions. It just so happened that these did not lie with property development.
Amid potential interest from some of the biggest players on the scene, one offer stood out. The successful bidder, Select Retail Holdings, would go on to be fronted by an experienced and dynamic young Dublin-born retailer, Simon Burke.
As I sat in the lawyers’ offices there was an undoubted element of sadness at signing over a company that had meant so much to my family for almost half a century. A business that had started with me and just seven others working in one small shop had grown, almost fifty years later, to employ about 3500 people.
But this sadness was tinged with relief – and celebration – that the day I had been anticipating for some time had finally arrived.
I was ready to sell the company, to wish the new owners well, and to start a new chapter.
This is my story.
Section 1
To Begin At The Beginning
1
The Making Of Me!
To say that I have retailing in my blood is something of an understatement. I am a third-generation grocer. And it all started with my grandfather John Quinn, who was born in 1865 in Atticall, Co. Down, a small village in the middle of the Mourne Mountains.
Grandfather Quinn was the early business pioneer in our family. He left home at an early age and went to Liverpool, where he worked in a grocery shop called Hughes (which still exists). It was along the lines of the well-known Findlater’s grocery stores in Ireland. To the best of my knowledge, that is the first family link to the grocery business.
By dint of sheer hard work, and more than a little flair for the business, he rose to General Manager at Hughes, a prestigious position in this most Irish of English cities.
He travelled home to a wedding in Saul, Co. Down, where he met the love of his life, my grandmother Mary Fitzsimons. They were married on 2 June 1898 at Saul Church, Downpatrick, and went on to have ten children. The first six (!) in a row were boys: Seán, Padraig, Eamonn (my father), Malachy (father of my cousins, the former Labour Minister Ruairí and Lochlann of Glen Dimplex fame), Brian and Kevin. And, as luck would have it, their last four children were girls: Una, Joan, Sheila and Máire.
In 1909, my grandparents decided to move home from England, along with their ever-expanding brood. Later that year, Grandfather Quinn opened his first shop in Newry. He called it ‘Quinn’s of the Milestone’, after a milestone on the building that signalled it was fifty old Irish miles to Dublin.
A black and white photo of that shop – which is now owned by Dunnes Stores – hangs proudly on the wall of my office at the end of my garden at home in Howth. It paints a picture of a very different era. You can see the proud staff lined up in their crisp uniforms outside what was quite a large store, with sides of bacon hanging beside them. The idea of taking photos of staff members, displaying pride in their work so publicly, was something I would apply in Superquinn many years later.
Grandfather Quinn was known in the area as a canny businessman, introducing innovations like the first slicing machine for rashers. In 1910, he introduced tomatoes to his store for the first time – a delicacy that was unheard of in the town.
He built the company up over the years, opening a number of other shops. Within a decade he owned between eight and ten such shops in what would become Northern Ireland, in places like Warrenpoint and Banbridge.
When Irish Independence came in 1922, the next big move was to have a shop in Dublin. So he did just that, eventually opening three shops – in Dún Laoghaire, Moore Street and the Phibsborough/Drumcondra area.
By this time my father, Eamonn, born in 1902, had joined the family trade. But before settling into his own business career, my father did something quite extraordinary and completely in tune with his natural curiosity.
Not many people realise this, but I come from a family with deep Republican ties. Grandfather Quinn was an ardent supporter of the Irish Republican movement, and in particular Sinn Féin. In fact, just two years after the 1916 Easter Rising, he acted as the proposer for future Taoiseach Éamon de Valera in the 1918 general election. At this time the political climate in Ireland was extremely unsettled.
Shortly afterwards, perhaps in an attempt to keep my father out of trouble, he sent him to Liverpool to stay with his cousins. My father was just seventeen years of age.
The relative proximity of Liverpool to Ireland was never going to suffice for my father, who was known to have an adventurous spirit. Even at that relatively tender age, he had always wanted to have a first-hand look at what he called ‘the other side of the hill’: the USA.
One day he met a sailor in a Liverpool pub, who was going to America the following day. The sailor said ‘For £10 I’ll get you on board, but you are on your own from then on.’ The story goes that the pair just walked on board, bold as brass, with a sack thrown over my father’s shoulder! And with that, he stowed away on a boat to the New World.
As a youngster I didn’t hear much about his time in the USA from my father; he wouldn’t have talked about it for fear it might give me ideas to go gallivanting too! But years later, I heard more about how he got on. Apparently he made a pal on board the ship. He and his new pal agreed that when they got to New York they would go their separate ways and then meet the following day. The only building they knew of was the famous Woolworth building.
They said ‘I’ll see you at the front door of Woolworths.’ At 11 a.m. the following day, my father dutifully turned up to Woolworths, but he never saw his new friend again! The other young man may have been standing at another door: in their naivety, neither had realised that because Woolworths was so big, it covered the full block and there were at least four front doors.
So there he was, just seventeen years of age and completely alone in New York. He managed to survive, working his passage around the USA. All the while, he was honing the spirit of enterprise and innovation that so characterised him in later years.
He ended up in Canada, working in a variety of jobs. At one stage, these included a job in forestry in a small town called Sioux Lookout, in Northwestern Ontario. By this point he had been away from Ireland for about four years without having once contacted home to tell his family how he was getting on.
Almost the entire time he was in the USA and Canada, his family had little or no idea where he was, or even that he had crossed the Atlantic. A far cry from the Skype generation of today!
While he was working in Sioux Lookout, he had an accident where he injured a finger. The nurse assigned to him in hospital asked him if he had been in touch with home. His response shocked her! This kindly nurse encouraged my father to write home, which he did. I gather that Grandfather Quinn told all the family to write back to him, with the aim of coaxing him back to Ireland.
I still have one of those letters, dating from around 1923, written by his brother Kevin, who was at school in Newry at the time. One sentence in the letter paints a vivid picture of the political climate of the time in Ireland. Kevin advises his older brother that ‘The Free State is falling apart at the seams, nobody gives it any more than 6 months.’
Ultimately, the familial entreaties worked, and after five or six years away he went home. Ireland had changed almost beyond recognition. His country of birth had just come to the end of a bitter Civil War, which claimed the life of his own brother.
A year previously Seán and Pádraig, his brothers, had been fighting with the IRA under the command of Frank Aiken in the fourth northern division. They were surrounded by Treaty forces in a safe-house near Ardee in Co. Louth.
They made a break for it, but were shot as they climbed over a wall. They were taken to the Curragh; sadly, Seán died there some weeks later. He would have been around twenty-five years of age. Pádraig lost a leg in the same incident. He would go on to train as a doctor and raise a family of his own with his wife Marcy.
Many years afterwards, on my wedding day, we introduced my wife Denise’s father, Commandant Ned Prendergast, to my Uncle Pádraig. To our amazement, it emerged that Ned had been the officer in charge at the Curragh army camp where Pádraig and Seán had been jailed. The pair had not met since. I remember them shaking hands. So, our wedding at the Lucan Spa Hotel in Dublin was the site of an impromptu reunion between my uncle and his jailer.
Ned himself had fought with the IRA during the War of Independence. I remember asking him ‘Was it a big decision of yours as to which side in the Civil War to join?’ He replied ‘Not really; it was just Mick Collins [the great Irish Free State leader Michael Collins] picked up the phone and said “I need you on Tuesday.” So I went with him.’
* * *
So, my father found himself back in Ireland in his early twenties, full of the ‘can-do’ American spirit of enterprise. He took a job working in the Dún Laoghaire branch of Quinn’s of the Milestone, but soon found his opportunities to innovate quite limited.
Grandfather Quinn was a traditional grocer and believed it was not right to cut the price on goods in order to woo customers. In other words, you had to compete on service and quality, not on offering better prices than your competitors. That would be considered ‘unethical’.
Looked at through a modern lens, this seems utterly bizarre. But it was the way business was conducted in Ireland at the time. In fact, a Government policy called ‘resale price maintenance’ was in force right until the mid-1960s, meaning it was actually against the law to compete on price for certain ‘controlled’ items.
So, if Jacob’s said the price for one of their goods was to be a shilling, they wouldn’t supply you if you sold it for eleven pence. If Cadbury’s said ‘That’s a sixpenny bar of chocolate’, you couldn’t sell it for fivepence ha’penny. The approach was very much ‘If you do, we won’t supply you.’
I can well understand how frustrating this must have been for my father. He had come back from America, where simply everybody competed for business. By 1936, the year I was born, he had been working for over ten years at Quinn’s of the Milestone in Dublin. Now in his mid-thirties, he decided that words alone would never convince his father of the need for innovation.
So he did the unthinkable. He opened a new shop in Kilmainham that year in order to show his father exactly how such a model could work.
Unknown to my grandfather, he asked Tom Barry, a man who had worked for Quinn’s of the Milestone, to manage the shop for him. The name he chose for the new venture was Payantake. Apparently, such was the secrecy of this new enterprise that my father would visit the shop wearing a fake pair of glasses so that nobody would recognise him!
It is difficult to overstate just how different the retail climate was in those days. Up until that time traditional grocery businesses had been trading under the old style of ‘credit and delivery’. My father’s big idea was to ask customers to pay for their goods and take them away with them, there and then.
The way it worked was that when you went into the shop there were four or five departments, and you had to pay cash at each department. So you went to the fruit & veg department, you went to the bacon department, etc., and paid in full at each counter. The shock and horror of it all!
My father cut prices but he also had very tight controls on stock. There were a limited number of products. They didn’t sell meat, apart from bacon, but you would have had a whole side of bacon. Other staples on sale included eggs and butter, which came in on a big slab. You had to cut it up into fifty-six 1 lb portions and then wrap it for the customer to take home.
It is hard to imagine nowadays, but back in those days the Payantake way of conducting retailing was a huge innovation in the grocery trade. At that time, Quinn’s of the Milestone would have employed horses, carts and bicycles and would have delivered the goods alongside offering credit. This meant they often didn’t get paid for weeks or months.
Payantake had no vans, no transport, no bicycles and no delivery. And it only sold for cash, rather than offering credit to its customers.
The new venture was a big success from its opening day, leading to queues outside the store as word got around that household staples were cheaper there than anywhere else. It was then that tensions within the wider Quinn family reached boiling point.
Grandfather, who by this stage was fairly wealthy and travelling abroad on holiday a lot, was also spending most of his time in Newry. So he was perhaps not as aware of the goings-on in Dublin as he might have been.
Meanwhile my father lived in Dublin, helping to run all three Quinn’s of the Milestone shops, as well as his new venture. He always saw Payantake as a way of illustrating to Grandfather Quinn just how important it was to innovate. He maintained it was never his intention to compete with the established shops, but rather to show the way forward for the company as a whole.
When grandfather came back from holiday he was met at the boat and told that ‘Eamonn has opened up a shop in Kilmainham in competition with you.’ There was a huge row, with much misunderstanding, and Grandfather Quinn and Eamonn fell out badly.
Eventually, in order to resolve the impasse, it was agreed that they would close Quinn’s of the Milestone in Dublin and change them all over to the Payantake brand in 1936. Meanwhile the Quinn’s of the Milestone shops north of the border would remain as they were, with my father playing no role in the operation of these stores.
But he would now own 45% of the new company formed to operate Payantake in Dublin. His father and the rest of the family would own 45% and two managers, Tom Barry and Hugh Boyle, would each own 5%.
The business continued to prosper in the following years. By 1946 my father, having run Payantake during a period that included the Second World War, when it was extremely hard to prosper in any line of business, had opened eight shops. He was quite well off, and had bought a lovely house on Vernon Avenue in Clontarf three years earlier.
Payantake was doing very well, and was a successful business. But, unfortunately, tensions in the family erupted again. They must have been bubbling for the previous 10 years or so, and the dispute ended up in court in 1946.
I know this upset my father hugely, and no doubt my grandfather also. On one side were grandfather and all of his other children in the business. On the other side was my father, pretty much on his own against his family apart from the support of one of his Payantake managers, Tom Barry.
So what was it all about? Well, I know part of the reason was that a number of the family had jobs in Payantake but it was felt that they weren’t pulling their weight. In truth, I think some members of the family also felt, probably unfairly, that my father wasn’t sharing the proceeds of the business equally with them.
Matters got so bad that the rowing parties ended up in court three times. The third time, the story made it into the papers. Unfortunately for him, my father got the blame and was embarrassed over the fact that people would say ‘It’s terrible that there’s a family feud and it is getting into the papers’, and ‘Why did you take them to court?’
Eventually this most bitter of disputes was settled, essentially by the less than scientific method of tossing a coin! Whoever won the toss would place a value on the company. Whoever lost could either buy out the winner or sell their shareholding to the winner based on that valuation.
My father must have won the toss, as he placed quite a high value on the company. This was because he felt he could make the business pay and the other family members would automatically sell to him. But, to his surprise, they called his bluff and bought him out of the business.
In 1946 this left him, at the age of just 44, with a considerable sum of money but no real job anymore. There was no question of him not working: it was simply not in the DNA of this energetic, driven entrepreneur.
But under the terms of the deal, he could not go back to the grocery business in Dublin for a long period. This would have huge implications for my entire family, and ultimately the success of my own business career.
It meant that, for the first time, we would be entering the world of entertainment.
Based on the simple flick of a coin!
2
An Entertaining Childhood
She has smoothed out the ruts which at times came in my path and by her sweet personality has cheered me when I most needed cheering. I thank God for placing me in her way … Any success or good I have done in life I owe to her.
(Excerpt from the Last Will and Testament of Eamonn Quinn, June 1933)
It is fair to say that my mother, Maureen Donnelly, made a huge impact on my father from the very first moment they encountered one another, in the not-so-romantic setting of Dún Laoghaire Post Office, Co. Dublin.
My mother, known as ‘Daisy’, was one of six children born to her mother, Mary Corr, and her father, Simon Donnelly, who lived to be 85. She grew up on a farm in North Armagh. Her family were Catholics in a Protestant area, so they farmed the less fertile land on the banks of Lough Neagh. Their income would have come partly from eel fishing.
I remember driving out from Portadown to their home one day. One of their neighbours had painted the roof of his barn green, the walls white and the doors orange. So you could see this green, white and orange Irish tricolour from a distance. It was a move aimed at goading the Unionist members of the community who lived nearby. It was that kind of place.
Within her family, Daisy was regarded as a bright, intelligent young girl. She left school at about the age of sixteen in 1918. She got a job in the post office, which was still the Royal Mail in those days as Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. She was sent immediately to Aberystwyth in North Wales. She often talked about it because she loved Aberystwyth. There was a university there and there were a lot of students around her age.
After a while she applied to be transferred closer to home. She went first to a post office in Clones before she was moved to Dún Laoghaire. That was when fate, and a few phone calls, intervened.
Back in those days, when you wanted to phone home – as my father regularly did to Newry – first you had to ring through to the local post office. My father discovered that the telephonist who took his call had a nice Northern accent, like his own. After speaking to her a couple of times, he was quite taken by her and said ‘We must meet.’
But then he got a little apprehensive. What had he done, organising a date with a woman he had never set eyes upon? He decided to investigate surreptitiously.
He went along to Dún Laoghaire Post Office; there were three women behind the counter. He recounted that ‘There was one auld one, one plain-looking one and one smasher!’ He bought a penny stamp from the ‘auld one’: she had a Cork accent. He went out, entered again and bought a penny stamp from the ‘plain-looking’ lady. She had a Dublin accent.
To his eternal relief, by a process of elimination he knew the ‘smasher’ must have been the one with the Northern accent. From that moment, he was smitten.
I told this story at an event in Dún Laoghaire Post Office not long after I took up the Chairmanship of An Post. The postmaster brought up a big book, about the size of a table. We opened it and there, to my surprise, in my mother’s handwriting was how much she earned in the different jobs she had. It said ‘Left upon marriage’ in May 1931, when she was twenty-nine.
My parents got married on 17 June in Maghery in North Armagh, on the banks of Lough Neagh. While my father was still young, he was the son of John Quinn, a very successful businessman. He was seen as an ‘up and coming’ person, so to a certain extent she got a ‘catch’ as a husband. At the same time he was lucky to marry a smart, intelligent woman who was fiercely loyal to him.
I don’t remember hearing my parents talking much about their courtship or relationship, but I do know they loved each other deeply.
Some years after my father died in 1972 (of which, more later), I got a call from Newry to say they had opened a safe and found an envelope inside. It was the Quinn’s of the Milestone safe, and the letter in the envelope was from Eamonn Quinn. It said on it ‘Not to be opened until after my death.’ I went up and got it.
It is dated 3 June 1933, and is described as his last will and testament (see Appendix 1). But in truth, it is also the most wonderful love letter to my mother. I brought it down to Dublin and showed it to her and to my sister Eilagh. My mother burst into tears as we read it together.
I would love to be able to write a letter like that. It had lain unopened in that safe for over 40 years.
My parents had one of those relationships where everything is debated. In fact, some people would get into the car with them and say afterwards, ‘Your mother and father are always arguing.’ But we never saw it as that; rather we knew they got a real enjoyment out of debate and discussion.
My mother would have been the more ‘religious’ of the two, although my father would never have suggested that he wasn’t religious. I remember when Eilagh and I were young, he would kneel beside the bed to say prayers with us. We had to say the rosary every night, with all the trimmings. But I always suspected he was doing it as much to set an example to us both as anything else.
My father was a tickler, a talker and a fun man. He was a far less austere father than Grandfather Quinn. He would come home in the evening and tell me all about what had happened in the office that day.
It is something I continued with our own children years later. I remember our youngest son Donal would ask as I came in from work, ‘Dad, Dad, what happened today?’ I always had to have a story, just as my father would have had stories. He was running Payantake and there was always something happening. Some of the stories I heard, particularly the excitement of drumming up extra business and that sort of thing, sounded like great fun.
My mother had come from a different background. Her brothers were very astute and became successful fruit farmers in Co. Dublin. She wasn’t a fun person as my father was, and most certainly was the disciplinarian in the family; she ensured that we learned our manners. But she was absolutely devoted to us both. As a couple, they complemented each other brilliantly.
I was born in November 1936, three years before the Second World War started in September 1939. Overall I have very happy memories of my childhood. My sister, Eilagh, is two and a half years older than me. We are extremely close to this day. Her real name is Sheila Mary, but she has been known as Eilagh because as a child I could not pronounce her name properly, and it stuck. So she has me to thank for that!
That is not to say that growing up we always agreed on everything. We were always having rows. I would come running into the house in tears saying ‘She did this’ or ‘She did that’, like any other brother and sister.
One of my earliest memories of the war years is of when I was about four, and we went on a day trip to Rush in north Co. Dublin in my father’s car. I had a great time going up and down the sand dunes on the beach there. I was at school the following day when everybody was talking about the German attack on Russia.
Now this didn’t make any sense to me at all. Somewhat indignantly, I told the class this could not be true as we had been there the day before, in the sand dunes. When I got home my father had to tell me that that we had not in fact been to a different country, and that Rush was not Russia!
One of the things my father would often ask, if anybody came to the house, was ‘What do you do if the bombers come?’ Eilagh and I would answer immediately: ‘You run under the table or run under the bed and put your hands over your ears, that’s what you do.’
We never saw German bombers overhead, but at midday on a Saturday the air-raid sirens went off to remind you what they sounded like. So the threat of war was always present.
Then one night, we were at home in Blackrock and the air-raid sirens went off for real. We could hear the sound of planes overhead and shots being fired at them. Then we heard the sound of bombs being dropped on Dublin’s North Strand.
That was 31 May 1941, and I was five years old. I don’t remember being scared: it was all a bit of a game to us children. But twenty-eight people were killed that night, a further ninety were injured and around 300 homes were damaged or destroyed.
Two years later, in a fit of patriotic fervour, I got it into my head that I could stop any more bombings of Irish territory. We had just moved to our house in Clontarf, so it would have been around May 1943. The reason my parents chose to live in Clontarf was that my mother’s brothers and sister had moved to Oldtown in north County Dublin, and she wanted to be closer to them.
I had transferred to the Holy Faith Convent in Clontarf, which taught boys up until their First Holy Communion. Our new house was on a good five acres of land, and you can imagine my excitement at seeing the size of the fields for us to play in. There was even a fish pond with a fountain in it. Marilyn, my cousin, came to live with us for a number of years as her mother had died. I remember exploring the house with her and Eilagh.
I was upstairs when they came across the fish pond with the fountain. The girls figured out how to turn the fountain on, and I was very excited running down to look at it, along with all the different fish in the pond.
But looking at the field, I was most taken by the huge number of daisies and buttercups. German warplanes would pass overhead on their way to bombing missions in Britain. So I had a bright idea: a way to tell the planes that they were over Ireland and not to bomb us. I mapped out a huge area of the field – it must have been around 100 metres by 200 metres – and divided it in three.
I decided that if I picked all the daisies and the buttercups in the first section it would be green. Then if I picked all the buttercups in the middle, that section would be white. Finally, if I picked all the daisies the last part, it would be gold. I knew the Irish tricolour was technically meant to be green, white and orange, but I figured I was close enough. I diligently set to work.
Unfortunately, I was a little too ambitious in choosing such a large area! I got the green bit done, but by the time I picked the buttercups in the ‘white’ section, the daisies and buttercups were being blown all over the ‘green’ section, and when I moved on to the ‘gold’ section … well, let’s just say I never actually finished my Irish Garden Tricolour Initiative!
I maintain to this day that the concept was good: to save Ireland from the war; to protect us from any planes coming over to bomb us by mistake!
Overall, they were very happy days, with lots of fun and plenty of freedom to explore. In many ways it was very different to the type of upbringing young children have today.
For example, I remember vividly that a few months earlier, when we were still living on Newtownpark Avenue in Blackrock, my father decided to teach me a lesson about being independent.
At this stage he had offices in the city centre. Mummy would put me on the tram in Temple Hill, Blackrock, and Daddy would wait for me at Nelson’s Pillar on O’Connell Street. His office was on Chapel Lane, off Parnell Street, but you could approach it from Moore Street.
This one time, he asked ‘If I wasn’t there some day, would you know your way?’ Full of chutzpah, despite being just six years old, I replied with absolute confidence that I would.
I was preparing for my Holy Communion at the time, and I travelled in to visit Danny McDevitt, the tailor who was making my suit.
When I got off the tram on O’Connell Street, my father wasn’t there to meet me. I wasn’t too worried. I headed down Henry Street and counted out the streets. But there’s a little lane which I counted as a street, so I found myself on Moore Street instead of Liffey Street.
And suddenly I didn’t know where I was. The tears started to flow. There I was, standing in the middle of Moore Street, alone in the world and bawling crying. Out of nowhere a man from my father’s office came up to me to ask if I was all right. Of course, he had been sent by my father to watch me all along.
It’s interesting now, looking back, that my mother didn’t have any worry about regularly putting her six-year-old son on to the tram. And my father, ostensibly, didn’t have any worry about me getting off the tram and heading down to his office on my own. How times have changed!
* * *
I made my First Holy Communion in May 1943 at the Holy Faith School in Clontarf. I was small for my age: in fact, I’m by far the smallest in the Holy Communion photograph. I then left Holy Faith and went to the local private school, Kostka College. It’s named in honour of a Polish saint, St Stanislaus Kostka. I loved that I could cycle to the school on Seafield Road, Clontarf, as we lived just down the road on Vernon Avenue.
By the time I was nine years of age, I had made my first firm plans to become an entrepreneur. A section of our field at home was cordoned off for growing vegetables, and I was helping to grow lettuce there. It got me thinking: ‘Could I sell these lettuces?’ So off I went down to Madden’s store, now called Nolan’s, on Vernon Avenue with two of my finest heads of lettuce.
They were glorious, big heads of lettuce! Clearly impressed, Mr Madden said ‘You probably picked the best of the lot, did you?’ And I said ‘Yes, well, I wasn’t going to pick the worst!’ He said ‘They are very good lettuce; I’ll happily buy them. I’ll pay you three pence a head, three shillings a dozen. And I’ll take two dozen.’
This meant I had to pick out two dozen every day or every second day. He wanted to get them before I went to school, too. I was growing them in the big field, and there was no shortage of lettuces to meet demand. But supplying them could prove a logistical challenge!
I had a bicycle, but was not sure how I was going to get two dozen down to Madden’s to fill the order. So I roped in a school pal, Liam (Bill) Thompson, who now lives near me in Howth, and we struck a deal.
Liam would come up in the morning. We cut the lettuce together and put them in the boxes. He put a dozen on the back of his bike and I put a dozen on the back of mine. And off we cycled down to Mr Madden.
But the perils of the fluctuating lettuce market intervened. Mr Madden decided that ‘I’m afraid the lettuce isn’t selling all that well and I can only pay you 2/6.’ In other words, 2 and a ha’penny per head of lettuce, which was a big hit on our ‘margins’!
At nine, I was too shy to argue. After all, I was still getting a decent price, although I had to share it with Liam. I got my deal, but I wasn’t tough enough to negotiate. Looking back, I probably could have got 2/9 instead of 2/6. And, of course, to this day a part of me still smarts at the fact I didn’t get the best deal possible!
As a nation, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to the former Irish rugby captain, Brian O’Driscoll, or BOD as he is known to many. I have spent many an afternoon in the Lansdowne Road stadium marvelling at his exploits on the playing field. But not many people know that I have a much more personal reason to be thankful to the O’Driscoll family. In fact, if it wasn’t for them I would not be here today.
If you ask my sister Eilagh to describe me as a child growing up, one thing she would say is that I was accident-prone, constantly getting cuts and scrapes. One incident in particular stands out.
I was nine years of age, and was playing in a loft at home when I fell and hit my head on the stone floor beneath. I remember being brought up to bed and my father being sent for. He came home and ran up the stairs to me. I don’t remember much else after the accident, but apparently I was talking nonsense at the time.
My father immediately phoned our local doctor, a certain Dr O’Driscoll, aka BOD’s grandfather, who lived on Mount Prospect Avenue. Dr O’Driscoll insisted that I be brought to hospital, rather than ‘sleeping it off’ at home, as he feared I might have fractured my skull. He was proved right!
He knew a skilled head surgeon who had just returned from the USA and was working at the Richmond Hospital in Dublin. Luckily for me, he was able to get the surgeon to examine me. I was very ill, and was in a coma for three days. But with time, and thanks to Dr O’Driscoll’s quick intervention, my life was saved.
I was in hospital for a few weeks and missed a whole term at school. I went up North and my mother, who refused to leave my side, stayed in the guest room of my Aunt Kathleen and Uncle Jim Joe’s house while I recuperated.
Many years later, Dr O’Driscoll met my father and told him: ‘Do you know, I’ve been a doctor all my life and if there’s one life I know that I have saved, it’s your son Feargal’s.’
In the early 1980s I got a chance to thank him personally. I was working in our Sutton shop on a very wet, dark night. The place was packed with queues of people at the checkout and this older man, who was about 80, came up to me with a big box of chocolates that he wanted to buy. It was for 10/6, so it was an expensive box of chocolates.
He had only a pound note on him and he said ‘Do I have to queue up at the checkouts, young man?’ Never one to inconvenience a customer, I said ‘I’m sure we’ll get you through somehow; you’ve only the one item.’ As I was trying to find out where I could get change for his one pound note, he looked at me and said ‘You know, I saved your boss’s life.’
I looked at him and said ‘You must be Dr O’Driscoll so!’ And the man nearly burst into tears. He did not realise who I was. I tried to cover my tracks by saying something like ‘Sure everybody in Superquinn is told the story about how Dr O’Driscoll saved Feargal’s life.’
I said ‘Dr O’Driscoll, there’s no way you are paying for those chocolates’ and I walked out to the car with him. I had to decide ‘Will I tell him who I am?’, as I was on the point of letting him believe that every member of staff in Superquinn knew he had saved my life forty years earlier. But as I put him in the car I introduced myself.
It was a really lovely moment, and explains just why I hold the entire O’Driscoll family in such high esteem.
I mentioned previously that we grew up in a family with strong Republican ties. I have a vivid memory of being on my father’s shoulders in O’Connell Street in 1945 when Seán T. O’Kelly was inaugurated as President, as well as being taken at a very early age to the Mansion House to a public meeting featuring a man representing the Mau Mau secret society in Kenya. At the time, the Mau Mau would have been regarded as similar to the IRA; the British would have seen them as killers. But my father clearly sympathised with their cause.
Later my father became Chairman of the Dublin Green Cross Committee, an organisation that existed mainly up North. It was established to help the families of Republican prisoners who were interned. It still exists.
I remember that I came home from school one day during the war, in 1943, and there was a strange man sitting there. I had no idea who he was – all I knew was that he was put up and sheltered in our home.
Later I learned that there had been a jailbreak in Derry and a number of prisoners had escaped. When my father went to his office he was told there was a man who wanted to see him. The man was one of the escapees, and he said ‘Your cousin was in prison with me.’ This was John (Seán) Quinn. Apparently Seán had said to him ‘If you ever go to Dublin look up my cousin Eamonn; he’ll look after you.’
Without batting an eyelid, and despite being in a room with an escaper who was being hunted by the authorities, my father asked ‘What do you do for a living?’
‘I’m a roofer, a tiler,’ was the reply.
My father responded, ‘Well, you can come home with me because we have some tiles that need repair.’ So this man came home and stayed while he did the work. When it was finished after a few days, he said ‘I’m going back for the cause.’ My father tried to counsel him against such a move, but he was resolute.
As soon as he crossed the border on the bus he was arrested and interned again.
