GETTING IT JUST WRITE
Novelist Geraldine O’Neill didn’t warm to her new home at first. But, over the years, she and husband Mike have made it just how Geraldine envisaged when they moved to Ireland. Edited by Mary O’Sullivan. Photography by Tony Gavin
It’s fair to say that Offaly gets a bad press. Ask anyone what the word conjures up and the older ones will probably recall Daingean, the infamous reformatory, while younger ones will grunt BIFFO — big ignorant fellow from Offaly, to give a polite spin to the term.
Novelist Geraldine O’Neill will have none of it. Originally Scottish, she’s made her home — and a lovely home it is, too — in Co Offaly for the last 21 years. Maybe her fondness for the county stems partly from the fact that it has a similar social history to that of her home town — both are providers of home fuel; Offaly is turf-cutting territory while Cleland in Lanarkshire, where Geraldine grew up, is a coal-mining village. Not only that, she has set many of her novels in Offaly, which is not renowned for its beauty, but she has found much to inspire her.
Geraldine only started writing after moving to Ireland. Before that she just dabbled and was first and foremost a teacher, as was her husband Mike Brosnahan, who is from Manchester. The couple met at teacher-training college in Newcastle. “We got together after a term and were engaged by the summer. We got married straight after teacher-training college,” Geraldine explains. They have two children — Christopher, also a writer, and Clare, who’s a social-care worker. After teacher training, they spent seven years in Scotland, three in London and seven years in Manchester before deciding to come to Ireland to live.
It wasn’t a totally random decision — Geraldine’s mother is originally from Daingean, while both Mike’s parents are Irish — his mother is from Clare and his father is from Limerick. “We’d been coming to Ireland for years and years,” Geraldine says, rolling the ‘r’ in ‘Ireland’ and ‘years’ as only a Scot can. “We liked the lifestyle; we liked the laid-back life. We intended to move to Clare and we came to look for an old house there, but there was no such house. We came to Offaly to visit relatives — my grandfather was alive at the time — Mike had a look at houses and found this.”
Geraldine wasn’t enthusiastic. She had her heart set on an old house, and this house wasn’t quite fitting the bill. “Our previous house in Manchester was a big Edwardian semi with old beams and lots of period detail,” she explains. “In one way, this was an old house. It was originally a cottage, but it had been extended and it wasn’t old in the way I intended. I wasn’t keen, but we’ve moulded it into what we want.”
That moulding has taken place over the years, “It’s like the Forth Road Bridge — we’re always doing little bits to it,” Geraldine says with a laugh, but a lot of things have gone along in tandem with
‘It was originally a cottage, and it wasn’t old in the way I intended, but we’ve moulded it into what we want’
the work on the house. Mike went back to college and did further degrees in social work and is now a manager with the HSE, while Geraldine got a job teaching here, although it wasn’t easy to establish herself and she had to learn Irish. There was even talk that she’d have to do the Leaving Cert in Irish. “I did substitute teaching to start, then I got a job in Daingean National School,” she says. “I had to learn Irish for a year, and I even went to the gaeltacht for a month. But I was lucky. They changed the rules and I was able to teach without it. I became a learning-support teacher and then the coordinator for special needs in Daingean NS.”
From the beginning, the couple and their childen totally settled into life in the town, and Geraldine speaks of it with great warmth and affection. “It’s quite a busy little town, you know. Daingean used to be the capital of Offaly, but they built the canal to Tullamore and Daingean was forgotten. The town hall is a Gandon building,” she adds proudly.
Her enthusiasm obviously infected her family — her parents retired and live in an annexe in Geraldine’s garden. “We’re not on top of each other. We’re just like neighbours,” the petite brunette says. One of her four sisters wasn’t long in following them and settled here too. Her one brother, Eamonn O’Neill, is an award-winning investigative journalist based in Scotland.
Geraldine retired from teaching three years ago for health reasons — she has post-polio syndrome. “I don’t remember having polio,” she says. “I got it at nine months. I went into hospital with pneumonia and I was diagnosed with polio. It was during the last wave of the epidemic, when they thought it was over. But I was lucky. It only affected my left arm and shoulder. I had about a year of physio and then I was fine.”
She didn’t think of that episode again until in her 40s, when she was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome — something she makes light of in conversation — but it obviously affected her enough in terms of energy and stamina for her to give up a job she loved. “I don’t carry heavy bags
or clean windows. I conserve my energy and, as long as I listen to my body, I can manage everything,” Geraldine insists.
Despite all the family comings and goings, never mind rearing her own two children, teaching and her health, Geraldine has always found time to write. “When we came here to live, I phoned the library and asked was there a writing group. Would you believe, they said they were thinking of starting one,” she recalls. They did six workshops to start, then the group continued on meeting. Geraldine began writing short stories and poetry, but progressed to novels. Her first was published 10 years ago and she has written 10. Her most recent is called Music From Home. Her name may not be well-known here, but her evocative novels have been published in several countries, and in various languages, bringing Offaly and Daingean to a far-flung readership. Like Geraldine, her books’ heroines often leave home and start anew elsewhere.
Making a home of a house, no matter where you live, is very important to Geraldine — a fact that’s obvious from her cosy dormer bungalow. She wanted an old house and she’s given it the look of a dwelling that’s been there for many years; there’s a sturdy clematis climbing the porch, and aged urns flank the doorway. Inside, distressed furniture abounds. There’s lots of painted pine, chandeliers, lovely lace and cranberry glass — the kind of dressing-table dishes and bowls favoured by women at the turn of the 20th Century.
In the midst of it all, Geraldine is constantly tapping away at her computer, coming up with her compulsive stories. She has a compact little home office that neatly tidies away when not in use in a specially converted, painted-pine unit in the living room.
“I could come up with a plot every day,” she says. But she does turn her computer off, to swim, to garden, to meet family friends, to enjoy her home — which is now more what she originally wanted than any of her previous homes. It’s a home which conjures up a romantic, rustic, almost fairy-tale world.
Just perfect for a fiction writer.