The Memoirs of Esther McCabe

The Memoirs of Esther McCabe

Esther McCabe (Photo: Mr. Louis Fagan)

Esther McCabe was born in Inchicore in March 1921 and moved to Tallaght in 1945, having married a local man. She had nine children, eight sons and a daughter, and lived in a small cottage at 'The Four Roads' in Killinarden, before moving down to Tallaght village (Newtown).

“I met Daniel McCabe from Tallaght in 1942 at a ceili in the Mansion house that had been organised by the Fenian Scouts. Now, because he was in the Fenian Scouts and his father was in the IRA, we were tailed everywhere we went for the first few years up until the time we got married. Firhouse was full of rebels and Tallaght was a hotbed for the IRA then.

When my husband was only a baby in the cot, the soldiers came and raided his house six or seven times. They'd pull the mattress, baby and all from off the cot, searching for weapons and guns.  My father-in-law was on the run up in the mountains for over fifteen months at one stage, before we married, because the IRA had tarred and feathered a British soldier in Templeogue.  All the local IRA men had to go missing for months after that.

The first day I moved up to Tallaght, my husband, the Lord have mercy on his soul, gave me a little bit of advice. He said, "Whatever you say, don't say anything about anybody to anybody else". The locals in Tallaght didn't like people marrying outsiders. Outsiders were not welcome.

I am fifty-five years living in Tallaght, and have reared nine children here, and l'm still regarded as a 'Runner-in'. When the new people arrived on the Main Street, the Tallaght people refused to recognise them- wouldn't say ‘good morning', 'good evening' or 'good night' to them; didn't want to now them. That's all changed now at last. The original Tallaght people are all overrun now and it's the best thing, God forgive me,  that ever happened to them.

I was only in Tallaght a couple of years when the big snow of '47 hit. We were living up on the top of Killinarden Hill beside Sullivans and Healys and my husband was working in Clondalkin Paper Mills at the time. Fourteen foot snow drifts there was in the middle of May. You couldn't see the bushes with the height of the snow that year. I don't know how people survived it at all! The only thing that got us through it, was that my husband would cut three lorry loads of turf from the bog every year and that saved us.  

A man I knew from Rathcoole set off one day during the height of it, to visit his mother's house in Robinhood to see if she could give him a bit of flour for the wife to make some bread with, as the bakeries couldn't get out this far.   A father of ten lovely children he was. So he set off to the mother’s house and wasn't he only a few hundred yards out the door when he needed to sit down for to take a rest. It was there he was found the next day, dead in the snow, and ten beautiful children, God love them, left without a father.

To have a decent burial was all-important to people then. It didn't matter if you hadn't the price of your dinner, so long as you didn't have a pauper's funeral. Everything was kept for when you died, not for when you lived. I remember, there would often be a collection held at the gate of the graveyard, before they would let the corpse pass. There would be some people who wouldn't have the money to get themselves buried, so the funeral would be held up at the gate, and everyone there would have to contribute so much before the auld fellas who looked after the graveyard would let you in, to make sure that they would be paid. I remember when the last of the Cunninghams, who lived behind Bancroft House, was getting old. When his sister and two brothers had died, Thomas was left on his own. Now Thomas wasn't able to wash or clean or look after himself very much, so when one of my sons was a bit older, he used to go over to Cunningham's to see if he needed anything. He was cleaning around and didn't he come across a suitcase under the bed with a new navy suit and six white shirts in it.
"Why do you keep that lovely new suit under the bed instead of wearing it?", he asked, and Thomas said “That's for when I die, so I can be laid out in my grandeur”.

The Cunninghams lived there for years, down the slip road behind Bancroft House, near where the Esso garage is now in the village. There were three auld fellas and a sister. It was very sad when the sister died. Everyone from around here went over to see her laid out and to say a few prayers for her. When it came to bed-time and everyone had gone home, somebody called over to see how they were managing. And two of the brothers had got into the bed beside her. They had got into the bed beside their dead sister for to keep her warm, God love them. They were an innocent sort of people.

To have a decent burial was all that mattered. I remember a woman who lived opposite me died on the coldest night of the year, and after she died they found twenty-four bags of coal in her shed. She would never light a fire, but keep the coal in case of an emergency. When she and her sister died they left thousands of pounds. They had asked my husband to be the executor of their will, so he had to see to it that they got the burial they wanted. At that time, when somebody died the big horse hearse would come out from Fanagan’s on Aungier Street (in Dublin). The horses would have four big black plumes if it was carrying a married person and white plumes for a single person.

Wakes would last for two or three days at a time and there would be snuff and drink to beat the band. The women would do the serving and the men would sit around the corpse with a big jar of snuff and a barrel of stout, drinking and singing until it got bright. If they heard in Bohernabreena that there was a wake on in Tallaght, they would all be down for the free booze.

The superstition was something desperate in those days. People wouldn't go outside the door on Friday the 13th or on All Saints Night in case they would meet the souls getting released from purgatory, to roam around the earth forever.

People just wouldn't be seen on All Saints Night. My own father-in-law, whose father died when he was very young, was a very superstitious man.

Shortly after he was married, he was down visiting his mother in a house in Walkinstown, and when he was coming home that night, just coming passed Wellington cottages, plain as day, this old man started walking along beside him, right up into Tallaght where he was entering civilisation. When he got to Tallaght he turned around and the old man just disappeared. So when he got home to his wife, my mother-in-law (Joanne Lawlor), he was so numb he couldn't speak. He just stood there, silent for the night, and she even had to undress him to put him to bed. When he got up the next morning he couldn't remember a thing about it. Years after, when his mother had died, himself and the sister were down in the house in Whitehall and he saw this picture of a man hanging on the wall. It was the same man that had walked with him that night years before, so he said to his sister "Who is that man in the picture on the wall?", and didn't the sister turn around and say, 'Sure isn't that your father!". 

A similar thing happened me years later, when I was still living up in Killinarden. I remember, it was a Wednesday evening at around a quarter past six, neither dark nor light, and not a mortal sinner on the road, Kiltipper road. I never met anyone on that road, because there was only a house dotted here and there. When I was about half way down the road from Killinarden, didn't I see this big tall figure about two hundred yards ahead of me, jumping over a gate into a field on the right, and he wearing a big long over-coat down to the ground. When I got to the gate, the field was empty, not a sign of anyone, living or dead! So later that night when I got home, I told my husband what I had seen, and didn't he say 'Sure everyone knows that place is haunted, has been for years'. Now I don't know whether it was a ghost or what it was, but I know what I saw!

We used to have great picnics not far from there every Sunday during the summer; all along the banks of the Dodder and up in the fields. After mass on a Sunday we would go home and cut up two loaves of bread, get some cheese out and the teapot and pile it all on top of the child in the go-cart and head for the fields along the Dodder. I had nine children in all, and while they would be paddling in the river and catching pinkeens, my husband would gather the stones to make a fire-grate for to heat the tea. We wouldn't come home until it got dark, and the kids would be in the water from eleven or twelve in the morning, not a blooming sound out of them. Great days they were.

Now I never fostered any kids. I had enough of my own. But everyone around here fostered kids, everyone. Some of them were very cruel to them, those poor kids that were fostered. It was mostly boys, because they could work harder and people would be afraid to foster girls in case they would be going off and having babies. The people would only be paid until the child was sixteen and after that the child would have to go off and get work. But if they couldn't get work, some of the families around here wouldn’t want to know- wouldn't feed them or anything.

God tonight, I saw some cruelty in my day.  A lot of people around my way would keep hens and fowl, and the leftovers from the dinner. The vegetables and potatoes would be kept in a bucket out the back to feed the hens, it might be there a week or two, but I remember some of those poor children that were fostered, only after turning. sixteen and they asking if they could have the leftovers for to eat, they would be that hungry. They would eat the vegetables cold and whatever else that was left out the back for the hens. People would call the foster kids 'rearers' because they were reared on the baby farms. They would be fostered out of the South Dublin Union, where St. James's Hospital is now. Many of the farmers up in Bohernabreena fostered four and five and six kids.

Many of those poor boys that had been fostered grow up to make great fathers, and I'll tell you, some of the snobs around here were taken down a peg or two when their daughter went off and married a 'rearer'.  I remember one fella, that had been fostered and very hard reared- went off and got three jobs, killed himself with the work. to give his children what he never had. Though his mother-in-law got the drop of her life when her young one went off and married him. He made Kings and Queens of his children. All those lads when they got married, by God they treasured their children. They all went off and had big families of their own and treated their children like Lords and Ladies.

The way it was, if your child came in for a piece of bread, about ten kids came in after them, and whether you had it or not, you would give those kids a piece of bread as well.  Then your child would go off and do the same in someone else’s house.  That’s how it was that people lived. Your neighbour always kept an eye out for you.  Nobody had anything, so if you had nothing it didn’t matter, because your neighbour had nothing either”.

Dan and Esther McCabe

 Albert Perris

(Memoirs (Edited) as set down in recorded audio interview over several days, with Albert Perris in Glenview Lodge Day Care Centre, Glenview, Tallaght, Co. Dublin in 1999.  First published by Tallaght Welfare Society in “Since Adam was a Boy- An Oral Folk History of Tallaght (Perris, A., TWS, 1999).

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