Ireland has long attracted dark foreigners, and they were with robust honesty called as much: dubh gall. Whence the names McDowell, Doyle, McDougald, Macdougald. For there is no aboriginal Gaelic nation, merely different waves of immigrants leaving their footprints on this island.
William Macdougald was a perfect representative of the true mongrelness of Ireland. His maternal grandfather was an Englishman named Standing, who helped bring gas to Dublin, and whose name is - or so it is said - even today on manhole covers in Dublin.
He was an only son, born in 1922, as civil war was spreading across Ireland. His mother Mabel, who had served as a nurse at the front in the Great War, and was presumably weakened by illness there, died when he was just three, leaving his father Hugh, a former British army officer, to raise him.
He went to Colomba's, where he established the college's Natural History Society, and kept peregrine falcons, ducks and a deer. He played rugby for Monkstown, shot in season, fly-fished and falconed. To be sure, he came from the privileged Protestant business caste, but privilege did not guide his life so much as his love of animals and his endless, youthful enthusiasms.
Enlisted in RAF
He left school in 1939 and entered veterinary college: but just as he had been born when war was beginning, so he embarked upon adulthood when an infinitely more deadly conflict was spreading across the planet. In early 1942, at the age of 19, he went to Britain and enlisted in the RAF.
Why do 19-year-olds do anything? Motives are never simple at that age. When I asked him why he had gone over to enlist in perhaps the most dangerous arm of the British forces, RAF Bomber Command, he smiled - which is something he did an awful lot - and said it seemed the right thing to do. And indeed, many Irishmen were doing much the same thing (including two of the Clancy Brothers, who years later helped start the great ballad revival).
Mac, as he was known, trained in the US, but an infection on the troop ship back (open sore, dirty hammock) delayed his entry into active service by at least six months. It could well have saved his life, because the draft of young pilots he trained with then passed through the Golgotha of the Battle of Berlin, from which so few returned. In the meantime, based in Wales, he would take unauthorised trips to Ireland, flying low and fast to catch a glimpse of his beloved Wicklow hills before returning to base, his face radiant with innocence.
The infection cured, he finally saw front-line action in the closing months of the war; and then home to Ireland with his young English wife Billie, to lay the basis of the life with which he was to adorn this country for nearly 60 more years.
First mink farm
He resumed his studies as a vet, and began to practise in Dundrum, then a sleepy rural village in Dublin. He and Billy and young Suzanne moved into Glenville, a stately manor house, where he began to accumulate family and animals alike, from where he set about the revival of the fortunes of the South Dublin Hunt, and where he started the first mink farm in Ireland.
It is easy now to condemn this; but no-one ever intended mink to escape, and people knew no more about ecological balance then than they did about the dangers of asbestos or cigarettes. Moreover, Ireland was in a dire way: decades of stupidity masquerading as policy had turned this country into the Albania of Western Europe. Mac was determined that amid all this depression, his life and that of his family would not be marked by the abject failure which had consumed much of the country.
In time he built up a famously successful mink farm, moving the business to Ballymanus House - Henry Grattan's old home - in Laois. Glenville, meanwhile, was to become a signpost to a new Ireland. It was turned into the spectacularly ugly Dundrum shopping centre. Only the trees alongside it today serve as a reminder of what was once there.
Billie was the administrative wing of the relationship, and at the height of the mink farm's prosperity it had some 70 employees. No other work awaited these people: in the absence of the Macdougald enterprise, they would have been lost to Laois and probably lost to Ireland.
Bustling family life
Ballymanus also became the centre of bustling family and animal life: five children, uncountable pets - terrapins, parakeets, Arab and Welsh ponies, numerous show-jumpers, leopard cats, labradors and falcons - while Mac stocked the countryside with pheasant and partridge. They teem around Ballymanus to this day, the Macdougald footprint remaining in the soil long after the foot has moved on.
That finally occurred in 1987, when he and Billie moved to Castledermott, taking with them various species of livestock. His energy and his charm so late in life enabled him still to make fresh and far more youthful friends.
He died just before Christmas past, and his funeral was a remarkable occasion of pleasure and pride from those who loved him or had been part of his life - most especially Billie, his wife for 59 years, and his five children. For he had done his youthful duty to freedom and civilisation; he had then served his country well, and had raised a fine and enterprising family who adored him. His death in fine old age was no tragedy, but a proud conclusion to a splendid and honourable life, splendidly and honourably lived.
KEVIN MYERS