Is this still Ireland’s best mammy?
As Mother’s Day approaches, the extraordinary, heartwarming story of the Ballyfermot housewife who raised her 13 children almost single-handed, got a job, went into politics... and, aged 80, still looks after ‘the elderly’!
ANNE McSTAY is a hard woman to get hold of: quite apart from her 13 grown-up children and dozens of grandchildren, the 80-year-old also juggles parttime work as a carer, not to mention taking the odd training course. Busy doesn’t quite do it justice. On the weekends, she also makes hearty meals for some of her vulnerable ‘elderly’ charges, who live in an assisted living facility in Dublin. ‘I love it when they say things like, “wait until you’re my age”, when in some cases I might be a bit older then them,’ she laughs. ‘I think I must give off the aura of not having a big family or something.
‘I don’t really say anything in work about how old I am — they’d probably be a bit annoyed with me,’ she says. ‘But I’m lucky not to look my age, and I have the energy of a younger woman.
‘I suppose I should retire, but I’d fall asunder if I didn’t work.
‘It keeps me focused and gives me a purpose. Imagine just lying there thinking, will I get up or not? I need to be running to time.’
Locals in Anne’s native Ballyfermot already know her as an indefatigable wonder woman. In fact, she is something of a local legend round these parts: once crowned the Calor Kosangas Housewife of the Year in 1969, the mum of 13 later won a scholarship to Trinity College before running as a councillor for Labour in the 1980s. A life less ordinary, certainly — albeit one marked with hardships and heartache behind closed doors.
In the 1960s, the Calor Housewife of the Year was a national institution. Dubbed the ‘Rose Of Tralee of mammies’, its winners were hailed as paragons of domestic perfection, an example to housewives across the land. Upon winning, the Housewife of the Year received £150 cash and £150 of kitchen equipment — an ‘absolute fortune in those days’, according to Anne.
After the event was televised, housewives became overnight celebrities, often called on as mouthpieces to talk about issues like birth control, working mothers and even abortion.
The competition tested women on their ability to produce a meal, hold a conversation and show how busy their lives could be. At the age of 31, Anne had five children under three years old. Overall, she had 11 children at the time — five single children and three sets of twins — so producing a meal under pressure was a, well, piece of cake.
‘They used to call me the “wagon train” in the neighbourhood,’ says Anne. ‘My daughters Mary and Ethel would be wheeling a buggy each, and then I’d have three or four in the pram, and that’s how we went to school.
‘It was hard to rear a family back then but twice as hard when you had as many as I had,’ she adds. ‘It was difficult for them, they had to grow up very quickly.’
Did she plan on having so many children?
‘I never set out to have a big family, but that’s how it was in my generation,’ she responds. ‘I remember my mother worrying about me, and how I’d look after all of them. But you just get on with it.’
Anne recalls that it was her sister — who had visited the family home in Ballyfermot and was impressed with Anne’s baking skills — who entered her into the competition.
‘She came over for Sunday dinner and we had absolutely nothing, but I managed to make steak & kidney pie and an apple tart,’ recalls Anne. ‘I’m not crying the poor mouth, but the wages were small, and my husband Frank had been working as a bus driver at the time. We were no different to the neighbours.
‘I knew my sister wouldn’t sit at the dinner table if she knew the children were left wanting, so I made things look normal, like this was an everyday event. The table was set up and she was gobsmacked at the dinner. She then told me about the Housewife of the Year competition. I won the heat, then the semi-final — don’t ask me how I did it.’
The finals at the time were held in the ESB showrooms in Fleet Street and later, at an event at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin. Members of the public often arrived to watch the housewives in action.
‘I do remember thinking, what have I let myself in for?’ she recalls with a laugh. ‘I didn’t even want to win. I thought I was making a show of myself.’
While Anne remembers how she didn’t boast the hostessing accoutrements of her competitors — instead of wine and silver serving dishes, she served her winning meal of fish in her mother’s wedding dishes — there was something in her bubbly manner that caught the eye of judges.
‘Someone said to me, “you’ve no wine!”, and my response was, “you don’t do wine when you’re a housewife and feeding children!”’ she laughs.
Job done on the winning the competition and bagging the coveted prize, Anne was catapulted to national fame, appearing on the cover of Woman’s Way with her husband Frank and her 11-strong brood — two more children, John and Martina, arrived after her triumph.
‘The Lord works in mysterious ways, but that win gave me the greatest boost to keep going in the next ten years,’ recalls Anne. ‘It can be a vulnerable and lonely life, there on your own the whole time, trying to make ends meet.
‘I remember going on the Late Late Show with a religious correspondent from the Times and a theologian, to talk about birth control,’ explains Anne. ‘I think they wanted the view from the ordinary mother in the street. It got kind of heated and Gay Byrne was a bit biased towards the theologian, but I got a standing ovation that night.
‘I was recognised on the street — in fact, I couldn’t go anywhere,’ Anne recalls. ‘I got millions of letters.’
In time, the Woman’s Way cover would prove to be something of an iconic image and one largely representative of the age: that of an effervescent, formidable Dublin wife with her flaxen-haired brood. Yet behind closed doors, things often seemed very different.
‘I suffered my own depressions at
‘I never set out to have a big family’ ‘That win gave me the greatest boost’
the time,’ admits Anne. ‘You never knew what it was, never knew that it was called post-natal depression, so you just got on with it.’
There was also, as she recalls, her ‘heartache’ with her husband. Frank was an alcoholic and in the years after her Housewife Of The Year win, Anne would go on to speak publicly about the domestic violence that she endured at home.
And while having 13 children wasn’t uncommon for the time, separating from one’s spouse and becoming a working mum was unusual. Factor in a side order of local celebrity and it was a tough time by anyone’s yardstick.
‘It was heartbreaking at the time, and you don’t do that easily,’ reflects Anne. ‘But I had to if I had any future for the kids. The more kids I had, the more he receded into the pub. He couldn’t cope. And the more I got on in life, the more he sobered up.
‘We separated for a long time, and it took a lot of courage to do that,’ she adds. ‘You had to get up and go out to work. I had every type of job: I’d clean St. Mary’s Hospital at 6am and get back to the house at 8am, where Mary and Ethel would have the other children fed and dressed for school.
‘I did some kitchen work in a factory. I did a lot of radio and TV shows, which also brought in a few shillings.’
Frank hasn’t had a drink in 30 years and the couple reunited and now live together in Lucan, near several of their children and the grandchildren she’s ‘lost count of’.
‘When we moved to Lucan I didn’t know if it was a good idea or not,’ says Anne of the uprooting 25 years ago. ‘I missed Ballyfermot terribly.’
And, it would seem, Ballyfermot very much missed her too. In the 1981 General Election, Anne ran as a Labour councillor in Dublin West, after years of tireless work in the local community. Around this time, she realised with a start that she had reared the last of her children.
‘I remember coming home from the school without any babies,’ she says. ‘That was heartbreaking.’
Looking back on an extraordinary life, Anne is toying with the idea of writing her life story, and has even taken classes. And while she hasn’t lost her political bent — ‘Enda Kenny should be ashamed of himself, and Micheál Martin isn’t much better’ — Anne is keenly aware that today’s mothers have a different, though no less challenging, experience of parenthood.
‘In my day, everyone was the same and you didn’t have to live up to anyone’s else’s expectations. Now most mums are working and there are two cars in every family,’ she says. ‘These women are marvellous but thankfully, keeping up with everyone else was the furthest thing from our minds.’
‘It took a lot of courage to separate’