Blessed because we are beloved and blessed because we belong

The roots are deep in Cork. Last weekend we swapped the sharp shingle of middle-age for warm childhood sands, writes Miriam O’Callaghan

THE O’Callaghans have been in Cork since Galileo was spotting the moons of Jupiter and before that, since the Earth was flat. We descend from the Eoghanacht kings, held lands at Beara and Cineal Aodha, until the Normans transplanted us to the banks of the Blackwater and, centuries later, Cromwell banished us to Clare. Being “outlawed”, several O’Callaghan aristocrats flew as Wild Geese to Spain. Hence our Chieftain is Don Juan O’Callaghan of Tortosa. We might dine at Longueville House, but we pay our homage in Catalonia.

We didn’t look the worse for any of it when 40 of us, descendants of the O’Callaghans of 68 Blarney Street, met at the Imperial Hotel in Cork last weekend. Unexpectedly, this year, we lost Colin Martin, most beautiful and beloved of our number. After his death, my cousin Elinor decided that the remaining ‘O’Callaghan Children’ and their offspring should meet again in happy times.

Cork City manager, take note: if you ever need the city fed, defended or evacuated, she is the woman to call.

So, last Saturday, the O’Callaghan descendants descended on the Imperial from all points of

Cork as well as Dublin, Kildare, England, Wales, America, Italy. There was the one-time Bermuda branch and those proudly keeping the O’Callaghan Guatemalan line. All of us gathered, for one night only, to remember the six siblings known as “the beautiful O’Callaghans of 68” and to celebrate our outrageous luck at belonging to them, by birth, adoption, love.

In the reunion photos, as in life, the siblings are handsome, signally stylish, elegant: picnics in Rosscarbery and Owenahincha, dinner dances, ‘nights’ at home, the famous pantomimes at Sundays Well, picking up Auntie Eileen and Auntie Nancy, heavily-wimpled, home on planes and liners from the missions. Then the weddings, new babies, christenings, toddlers, schoolgoers, the rugby, ballet, hurling. And above all, the singing.

A few years ago, I wrote here about the music at 68. The brotherly trio of The Bold Gendarmes and The Floral Dance aired at parties, weddings, summer nights in suburban gardens and West Cork villages when pints were drunk.

Every Sunday morning in the kitchen was the concert filling the hour’s fast before Mass: arias by Verdi, Puccini, the duet from the Pearl Fishers, Moore’s Melodies. Uncle Con’s Hear My Song, Violetta being the signal for hats, lipsticks and brooches to be put on, perfume and inhalers sprayed, cologne slapped, ties fixed, suits and hair brushed before rushing down Sundays Well Avenue where they sang in the choir, the Kyrie putting a stop to their secular gallop.

Last Saturday night, those same songs washed away the years. We swapped the sharp shingle of middle-age for the warm West Cork sands of childhood, half expecting Breda, Maureen, Rita, Jim, Barry and Pat (my father) to bustle through the door, polished, gracious, beaming.

“How is your dinner? Do you have enough of everything? More wine here, please. It’s wonderful to see you all together. And all Gillette. Don’t you look well. Take care now to be happy.”

Reunions of any kind can be tricky. Reconciling where you planned to be, and where you are, can be tough when you set out for the Cote d’Azur and end up in Yemen. On the night, though, there was no need for social armour or camouflage or a Google map flashing This is Where I Am over Juan-les-Pins or San Tropez. No one machine-gunned anyone with their success or influence or wealth.

Rather, it was all about moments, concern, care. How are you? How are the children? Do you remember when? And I often think of... And remember when Uncle Hugh shocked the Smithsonian by reading the hieroglyphs? And their clothes design company, StyleLyne, on the Grand Parade? You know, I have their mood books? I treasure them. And your Dad/ Mom was always lovely to us. And are you minding yourself ?

It’s clear the O’Callaghans know that despite its luminous moments, life can be a clusterf **k. And it’s nothing personal. No one is given a pass for the most appalling s**t to pass them by.

In its passing, time is a trickster. After my father, the last of them, died in 2013, the O’Callaghan Children became the O’Callaghan Oldies, moving up to the front line to face the heavy artillery of the years and their war of attrition. At our tables, there are spectacles searched for and shared, the imbibing is mortifyingly moderate, a few of us struggle to hear in the ambient noise. Because, yes, the new O’Callaghan Children are wonderfully rowdy.

In those years of Sundays at 68, I hadn’t even imagined my own children. Yet here they are, just 18 and 22, but still ‘old’ and obvious O’Callaghans. My son sits opposite, chatting to his cousins Emer and Eoin in their 50s and 60s, the family smile, mannerisms, hairline unmissable; the famous O’Callaghan hands, electricity coursing through them.

He tells me how my cousin Elinor, my sister Orlaith and I are ringers in how we speak, manage, move. My daughter, though absent, is present, startlingly so, in the photos of her great-grandmother Mary Nolan, her grand-aunt Breda O’Kelly. A liberal, she is horrified that in the 1860s, our great-great uncle Tom Nolan left Cork for Italy, armed with his blackthorn stick, to fight in the Pope’s Brigades against Garibaldi.

On the Sunday morning, my son and I go on the usual Cork pilgrimage: Daunt’s Square, Castle Street, North Main Street, North Mall where we sit for a while waiting for the swans. It’s nippy, suddenly blustery. We head back towards the South Mall, hoping Bradley’s might be open en-route. On Sullivan’s Quay, a dark-haired boy in his 20s, bag on his back, is walking toward us, talking on his phone.

Passing us, he starts calling out loudly, “Are you all right? Do you need help there?” to someone behind us. We look around, see only the backs of the people who’ve just passed by. He shrugs off his bag and coat, starts sprinting along the quay, down the steep stone steps, to the river.

Now the Lee at the South Gate Bridge is treacherous. All the Beamish has the river bold, pretending to be young again, its current swift, strong, churning.

There, in the fast, foamy, freezing water, up to his chest and then up to his neck, is a man, a split second from letting go of the railings, being swept away. From the quay, his head looks like a small grey ball bobbing on the water.

The Boy, at the bottom of the steps, leaning out full stretch, is speaking calmly but insistently to The Man. “Take my hand. Take my hand, please.”

Another passer-by has called 999 and I’m calling to my son not to go into the water. Sanguine by nature and training, he ignores me. Later, he tells us over hot drinks that he was trying to figure out how to get the two of them out of the river, because if The Man had let go, The Boy would have followed him. Two

English tourists stay with us for the duration. A man in sunglasses arrives with his small daughter, allowing her to look down at the scene.

In the end, The Man takes The Boy’s hand with a look of relief, disbelief. Like The Boy, others had seen him. Unlike The Boy, they had walked on.

Waiting for the ambulance, we help The Man out of his top, shocked by its heft and iciness in our hands. The rescuer wraps his jacket around the rescued, river-remnants pooling at their feet.

What brought him to the river, he says, is homelessness, loneliness, addiction, above all, not belonging. It’s not a first attempt.

The ambulance arrives. The ambulance men are kind, expert. They head for the hospital. We head for tea. “

Ah, it’s nothing,” says The Boy, ashen, sopping, unaware he is shaking. “Anyone would have done the same. Sure, you couldn’t leave him there.”

He is a student at UCC. He doesn’t want to be named here or recommended for an award. He is an outstanding human being.

That day, the O’Callaghans go on their way, back to the cardinal points whence they came. I think of us living in relays: the turn of a head, a hand to the chin, the sound of a voice seen and heard today and 100 years ago and 100 years in the future.

I believe in death in our family, we pass those we love to those who loved them before us. Last Saturday night we, they, all of us O’Callaghans were there. Blessed because we are beloved. Because we belong.

‘Like The Boy, others had seen him. Unlike The Boy, they had walked on’