*The late Seán O’Shea. Photograph: John Mangan
WHETHER IT was in the post office or his political career, Seán O’Shea had a track record of helping those that needed it.
He was not the type of person to court recognition but to be honoured in March 2023 at the age of 94 by the Labour Party for his lifelong membership with a standing ovation was a source of immense pride when he received a plaque from party leader Ivana Bacik (LAB) and Senator Mark Wall (LAB), the nomination for the accolade was made by Ennistymon’s Denis Vaughan.
Seán died peacefully at Milford Care Centre on Thursday. He was born and reared in Ennis and lived next door to former TD, Paddy Hogan (LAB) who was his biggest influence in politics. Seán worked for the Department of Post and Telegraphs and was elected to Ennis Urban District Council in 1967 and was elected in 1974 to Clare County Council before stepping down in 1979.
His time in politics would see Seán play a part in establishing the Credit Union in Ennis, Ennis Brass Band plus the redevelopment of the Fair Green and Drumcliffe.
This week, The Clare Echo publishes what was Seán’s last interview and it is our deep regret that the man himself didn’t get the opportunity to read it from his beautiful home in Ard na Gréine.
In 2023, he spent eight weeks in Milford Care Centre, making quite the impression on the nursing staff. Indeed, he admitted last year, “I’d gladly die there”.
His schooldays were a time when teachers were allowed to hit their pupils and it was a practice that Seán didn’t agree with which prompted him to leave school prior to sitting the Leaving Certificate. “At that time a lot of post office clerks had joined the army due to The Emergency, I got in as a temporary post office clerk, we spent every Friday and Saturday taking the ten pounds and five pounds in morse code from England, the kids that left loving homes to go over to work to support their parents always remembered them, from nine in the morning to half past seven every Friday and Saturday the money kept coming in and not alone were they supporting their parents but they helped the town and the economy of the town, they never got credit for what they did really”.
“One day I was looking at your paper (The Clare Echo) and ye had dev’s car on it, I flew into a rage because I said how could you compare to the sacrifice that those boys were making, one man told me that when they arrived they were brought into a sitting room and all that was there was planks so each man had plank and one blanket, those were the conditions they worked in”. To acknowledge these contributions, Seán got a portrait commissioned of the £10 note with the West Clare rail line to symbolise the sacrifices made by people in the county.
He learned morse code to translate the money orders that came back into Co Clare, from a neighbour who he described as “a workaholic”. O’Shea recounted, “I thought that was one of the best acts I witnessed in my life, they were so loyal and faithful, they were all from poor families and from poor parts of the town, they were great, I hope that sometime somebody will recognise what it is all about”.
For 46 years, Seán worked in the post office. “I got to know everybody in the town, they knew me as well, after about twenty years I got a great job and I was over the transport for the county, I had a great life and was very happy in my job, my office was looking out on the Fergus in the GPO in Bank Place”.
Prior to becoming a permanent fixture there, he had to sit an exam to determine which employees would be kept in Ennis and who would be forced to transfer. “All the lads that I was up against they had their Leaving Cert and I had no exam, we had a shift from half four in the morning until half one in the day, I did that and went to bed, when my father was going to bed at eleven she’d light up the fire and I got up and studied from 11pm until 4am, did the exam and one fella Michael Brooks from Steele’s Terrace he was very clever, he got first so I was over when my letter came from the Department and there was an overseer standing over me, he said ‘open it’ and my first reaction was to stick it in my pocket, I opened it anyway and I saw sixth place so I was thinking where does that leave a lot of the lads who had their Leaving Cert, it transpired that I was the nearest to the fella who got first so we were promised places in Ennis.
“In the meantime, Mr O’Connor who was a lovely gentleman, he was very stiff but a real fair play man, he retired and a new man came and some overseers who didn’t want me, they walked around town and told me ‘you won’t be getting the job in Ennis’ and I asked why not and said that I got second place and Mr O’Connor promised it, ‘he’s gone now and I won’t be recommending you’ was the response and I said ‘you know nothing about me, you’re only a week in Ennis’ but he said that didn’t matter, he forgot that I had Paddy Hogan living next door to me, I told him my story and the exam stood so I got my place. I had a few tough years after that learning higher duties, they made it tough which I think is what directed me to the unions”.
He continued, “I worked for ten or fifteen years in the counter and I got to know all the people, they were so nice, I still swear by it that no matter where you go you will never meet people as nice as the Ennis people. I used to do tricks too, people might come to me of a Thursday saying ‘Sean I’m broke any chance of a pension’ and I’d give them the bloody pension, it didn’t matter to me all I’d get is a reprimand. Poor people were a half crown away from their burial, they’d have £600 or £700 but it would have to go through Revenue, I used to say to them ‘I’ll fill the form, it will come back to you and fake his signature and I’ll cash the cheque for you’. The people were outstanding, even the people that were awkward they would come into me and I’d make friends with them and they never once attacked me and I never got a single minute of abuse from them and they are places that you do get abuse”.
An involvement with the unions soon resulted in his appointment as secretary of the trades council, a post he had for five years. “We negotiated strikes, met the President and made representations for people on housing and everything, after that five years I went forward for the Urban Council and I was elected (in 1967), I served seven years there, I took it very seriously and used to have motions down for every meeting which are all on record in the Council offices. After that, I went for the County Council, Paddy Hogan had been a county councillor for Labour and my ambition was to win back that seat and I did, I got the last seat on the County Council”.
As Mayor of Ennis, he welcomed greeted the Astronauts from Apollo 13 when they visited in Bunratty in October 1970. He defeated the well-known Jack Daly in a vote to become Mayor by a single vote.
Clashes with fellow policiticians during his time on local government is not something he was “not proud of”. “Generally I got on very well with the rural Fianna Fáil councillors but I had a running thing with one councillor which appeared in The Clare Champion for weeks, we were sniping at each other and it was all a bit ridiculous but generally speaking I got on well with all the councillors, I didn’t give them any reason, I had a big mouth but I was cute enough at the same time to know when to use it, I didn’t fight with many of them”.
On one occasion when he visited his neighbour Haulie Kelleher, he came across Fr Moriarty “a radical priest” who encouraged Seán to go about setting up a credit union in Clare. He wasted no time and visited Gort’s credit union immediately. “It was his initiative and I did most of the advertising to help get it going, then I stepped back and stayed with the Trades Council, there was a study group formed for the Credit Union and then it took off, it was the best thing that happened the town, it was great for the economy, people that the banks didn’t recognise got loans and were able to add to their homes and do things they wouldn’t normally be able to do, that was one of the best things we ever did”.
There was also a great sense of pride from Seán on his involvement with setting up the Ennis Brass Band. “There was always a brass band in Ennis but it had faded so I had it in my mind to try revive it, this lad that I knew John Brennan was a drummer in the original band, we used to meet with George Moloney every Wednesday night in The Old Ground Hotel, the porter asked what we were doing there, I told him we were trying to get the band back and he said to meet him tomorrow and he’d show me where the instruments where. I went down to meet him in the old convent, there was fourteen beautiful instruments in the attic, I rang the reverend mother who gave them without hesitation. The secretary in Braids, Mr Maher sent them up in the van and we got them repolished and retuned, that started the band, I paraded with them myself and pretended to be playing an instrument even though I couldn’t blow a note. It has gone from success to success, the McAllister family are the mainstays of it now, COVID was the only thing that knocked them but they will come back”.
Friends of Drumcliffe came about when Seán worked in tandem with the then parish priest Fr Hogan, where they secured a grant and voluntary labour to improve the aesthetics of the cemetery.
During his time on the County Council, he tabled a motion urging that the Fair Green be developed and the visionary county manager Joe Boland rowed in behind his proposal. “We had a great county manager in Joe Boland, he kept building houses and clearing clearance areas, he did great work, I was at his funeral, it was very quiet, I thought he would have a bigger funeral because to me he was the kingpin of the whole thing, he was open to suggestion and always gave you freedom of speech, you never had to hold back when you were in a meeting with Joe Boland, he was from Kerry, he was brilliant and it was pity he hadn’t a few more years, he did miracles for Clare, it wouldn’t be the tourist destination it is only for him. He was excellent for Clare, I went to his mass and I was so disappointed, his daughter was the only one that spoke for him, I hadn’t the guts to go up myself, I was in the back of the church. What he did for Clare will never be recognised, there was people living down by the river in a two-room house with eight children in one room, it was terrible and Ennis was a very poor town, people were very badly off, nobody will ever be able to repeat what he did, he kept building houses which was his scoring point, he cleared all the bad places and gave them good houses, Hermitage, Considine’s Road, every place, he was responsible for the whole thing. He was very democratic too, I thought as a County Manager that all I’d be doing is fighting with him but no he gave you your say and listened to it, if he thought it worthwhile then he brought it further”.
On his decision to step down from the Council, Seán said, “I didn’t go anymore because my poor wife when the lads wanted grinds or anything it was she that had to make the money for it and she was left on her own a lot when I was gone to meetings so I said in fairness to her I’d resign and wouldn’t go anymore, I suppose I’d enough of it too, you couldn’t get home to your lunch because people would be asking you to fill their children’s allowance forms”.
At the age of 91, Seán returned to sit English in the Leaving Certificate, “it was great, I loved the poetry and the essays”. ‘The Queen of Dirt Island’ was one of the texts studied, written by Donal Ryan who called in to visit Seán in Milford last year when he was visiting his mother and dropped off a signed copy of his latest book.
Seán’s daughter Annette recalled, “Mum died in 2019, Dad said to me one night that his one regret in life was even though he had been successful in politics was that he had no formal education because he didn’t do his Leaving Cert. He went back in 2019 and did English for his Leaving Certificate and graduated in 2020, he was 91 at the time. It was English which was the most difficult, I wanted him to do Gaelic but because he was a native speaker it was too easy”.
Life for Seán was “not the same” following the death of Josie in 2019. “She was a great gardener and a great cook, she was a great seamstress and got great gifts from her mother, she saved us an awful lot of money because pay was small, if the lads wanted a grind she went off and worked as a waitress and earned money, when we were a bit better off when I retired we got a few pound and she was always willing to travel, the minute you suggested Timbuctoo she’d pack and be ready to go. We went over to Annette twice in Australia, she was twenty four years in Australia, we stayed in Bangkok for a week going and we stayed there for a week coming back, we stayed in Singapore for a week, we saw the whole of Europe, we travelled to Paris, Luxemburg, Brussels, Amsterdam, we did the whole lot, we went to Lourdes by land”.
He admitted to being very “lucky” with the care provided by his daughter Annette since Josie’s death. “After being thrown out of school, I took particular interest in my children’s education, I used to look at their results from Christmas and Easter exams, get them grinds where they were weak but this one (Annette) wouldn’t let me help her so I put on her file, the one that got away! I was thrilled when she got home, there was a great surgeon in St Vincent’s who operated on Josie and she got ten years, Annette was home for those ten years and they were great pals, Josie was mad into style, she thought she was still a size nine for a pair of slacks and this one used to have to take her to Dunnes and take the labels off the slacks to get ones to fit her, she’d go up to shops in Galway and spend hours trying on clothes”.
His work as a councillor was remembered decades on when he was a full-time carer for Josie. Annette recalled, “I can remember people knocking on the door at 01:30 in the morning, people were desperate and Dad never turned anyone away, we got have visitors here and Dad never turned anybody away. When I was trying to get help when Mum was sick which was right in the middle of the recession when there was no money, Dad was her full-time carer in the end, one of the people that I got on to on the phone asked if it was ‘Seán O’Shea from Ard na Gréine’ and she said ‘there isn’t one person in this town whose father or grandfather wasn’t helped by Seán O’Shea and you’re saying we can’t get help for him is ridiculous’ so she got it for us”.
Offering an example of the love between the couple, Annette pointed out, “Mum went into hospital on the 1st of July 2019, Dad was there with us, he asked the nurse if he had to leave and she said ‘no Séan you don’t, there’s no hurry’ meaning not at that moment in time, Dad took them literally and slept on a chair in the room from the 1st of July to the 31st of July when my Mum died, he never left the room. The nurses, people are wonderful”.
This was the one exchange during the lengthy interview that made Seán emotional, “they never put me out,” he said with tears in his eyes. Annette added, “It was the two of them, it was a package deal. When someone came in to say Mum had to go to a respite centre, the nurses said that if they signed off on it and if Mum wasn’t capable of being moved they wouldn’t move her so they just joined ranks and looked after Dad the same way they looked after Mum, he slept on a chair, they got him a lovely chair but he never once left the room from the 1st of July to the 31st of July, there’s love for you”. “She was a great wife,” he replied.
Prior to getting COVID-19 in September 2022, Seán was still driving, during the lockdown he managed to receive a special shopping pass and collected trolleys full of five litre bottles of water which he then delivered across the town.
When asked to reflect on his life, Seán said, “I’ve great memories, Ennis was a great town, there was terrible class distinction in my young days in Ennis, it was the part of the town you came from that counted”.
There was an emotional aspect to Seán’s recognition from the Labour Party in that it provided a realisation for him. Annette explained, “one poignant thing that Dad said to me when this happened, getting the award and his Leaving Cert, he said ‘I suppose my father would be proud of me’, I realised that he was trying to live up to granddad’s greatness”.
That greatness is of course because Tadhg Ó Sé was a well-known author and fluent Irish speaker. Seán said, “He never spoke cross to us, he never hit us or interfered in our rearing but he lived in a world of his own, he got four books published and translated a full-length novel ‘The Wild Roses of Lough Gill’ and he won a prize in the Oireachtas, it always hurt me that I let him down education-wise”.
Annette added, “the thing with Dad getting the award was more realising that he didn’t let his Dad down. That was the biggest thing for me, he felt he lived up to granddad’s legacy, Dad always felt less than, not that he needed to”. He acknowledged that there was “compensation” in the award.
Seán O’Shea is sadly missed by his loving children Annette, Tadhg and Shane, son-in-law Michael, daughters-in-law Maureen and Fiona, grandchildren Rory, Aileen, Emma, Sarah, Orla, Nessa and Amy, sister Eileen, nephews, nieces, relatives, neighbours and friends. His funeral took place at Ennis Cathedral on Monday with the burial in Drumcliffe.
