THAT'S MEN:WHEN I was 20-ish I was terribly impressed by an acquaintance who would declare, frequently, "I don't give a damn what any of them thinks. They can all go to hell."
The “them” in question was society in general. Society in general seemed to be made up of people so small-minded that they disapproved of him in his unique individuality.
He would expand on all this in the pub to a level of detail which, frankly, was boring even if you were drunk. He had, I am afraid, read a book on philosophy and this was recycled frequently over pints.
All the same, I looked up to him as an example of the individual against the system. Eventually, he was captured by an English girl who laughed loudly at everything, including him, and hauled him off to the north of England and out of our circle.
I had always remembered him as the rebel and the memory brought the feeling that I had not really measured up in the rebellion department.
Eventually, needless to say, he became a friend of a friend on Facebook from whom I gather that he stayed with his English girl – or she stayed with him, more accurately – and glories in the exploits of his children and grandchildren.
For while I thought of sending him a “friend” request, but then something struck me and I held off.
It struck me that while he was playing the rebel he was working in the civil service, he was wearing a suit, he was washing himself every day (so far as anyone could tell), and he was obeying the law.
In other words, he was no rebel. Still, I have no doubt that he saw himself as a rebel. Perhaps that is how he needed to think of himself as he knuckled down to "too many years spent marching in time" to quote Johnny Mulhern's song, Delaney's Gone Back on the Wine.
Had he conned me? No, I had conned myself. But to this day I like to think there is some time dimension in which he is still sitting at a pub table laden with pint glasses, holding forth, declaring, “I don’t give a damn what any of them thinks. They can all go to hell,” and means it.
Addendum: In a recent column (January 31st), I wrote about men who walked the roads of Ireland in the 1950s looking for work and some of whom passed through our farmyard. This prompted two readers to email me.
One remembers a man who walked past their farm gate near Thurles, Co Tipperary in the early 1970s after being let go from a neighbour’s farm.
“My dad took pity on him as he had nowhere to go,” she writes. “He joined our farm that day and stayed until he died on St Patrick’s Day, 2001. Little did my father know that this one act of kindness would enrich the lives of his seven children.”
This man had grown up in industrial schools and my reader’s father was the first person to show him “what kindness was”. The family remembered his birthday and he remembered theirs “and took great joy in giving us presents (some a little unusual!)”.
“He died of a heart attack close to the spot where he met my father 30 years earlier . . He would have loved his funeral as there was a great crowd and lots of people had nice things to say about him.”
A second reader writes: “We too had men working for us who also lived in a shed in the farmyard. We thought nothing unusual in this arrangement, although by today’s standards, it would be totally unacceptable.
“These were often uneducated young men, saving enough money to emigrate to England.
“Today, I am sure, many of these men are living alone in bedsits in some British city.”
There were exceptions though: one man later rose to high rank in the Garda and another inherited the farm.
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is accredited as a counsellor by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.
His book,
Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living,
is published by Veritas. His monthly mindfulness newsletter is free by email.