The Trib (22 page)

2 April 2006

H
undreds of mourners filled St Patrick's Church in Aughawillan, Co. Leitrim yesterday for the funeral of John McGahern, who died on Thursday. The remote and beautiful setting was fitting for the burial of a man who found acclaim by describing the simplest elements of Irish life and its landscape.

McGahern died in the Mater Hospital in Dublin, and it was there that his journey back to Leitrim began early yesterday. Friends and family, amongst them the broadcaster Mike Murphy, Labour TD Joan Burton, actor Mick Lally and journalist Eddie Holt gathered in a small room in the basement of the private hospital.

With the red eyes of morning and mourning, anecdotes were thrown around like coins in a well of remembrance. The hearse was followed out of the underground car park by a black car with tinted windows. It carried McGahern's wife, Madeline Green, and the writer's siblings.

Beyond the N4 Motorway, the brown and beige fields of Leitrim, interrupted by gorse, pointed the way to where McGahern spent most of his life walking the countryside, taking pleasure in what it offered him.

In Roosky, the swept reeds alongside Kilglass Lough and the marshy fields preceded the winding road from Dromod to Mohill, where people gathered at the crossroads on Lower Main Street. By Early's and Carroll's Public House, a butcher in a striped red apron chatted to elderly men in caps. As the hearse passed by, they quietened. A book of condolence was set up outside Carroll's, the peace just briefly disturbed by an excitable dog jumping amongst waiting children.

Beyond Mohill, past lanes enclosed in tunnels of joining branches was Garvagh, where rain threatened and clouds rubbed the hilltops that looked down over the lake. In Fenagh, crowds lined the paths beside Quinn's pub, leaning against the moss-topped stone walls which led to Ballinamore, and then up and down hills to Aughawillan.

Most people parked at the national school, and walked down the lane to St Patrick's Church as dark clouds shifted over Garadice Lough. The old, white, pebble-dashed church was already full three-quarters of an hour before mass. As the minister for the arts, John O'Donoghue, signed the book of condolence, McGahern's admirers and friends from the arts community arrived.

They included Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney and Eugene McCabe. Hundreds of local people lined the walls of the church, eyeing the novelty of crowds of press photographers and TV cameramen.

A loudspeaker was set up outside the church, so the many who could not fit could hear the mass, which was said by McGahern's friend Fr Liam Kelly. Kelly, also a cousin of the author, said it was appropriate that the funeral took place in St Patrick's as it was here where McGahern first came to church as a child, where he learned to say mass and where he experienced ‘his first brush with discipline' when he was denounced from the altar for rattling his beads too loudly during prayer.

Fr Kelly told those gathered that McGahern was very aware of his impending death, and spoke openly about his funeral plans in the weeks leading up to it. ‘He wanted no fuss, no frills, just a simple mass'. And that is what he received. As the coffin was brought from the gates of the church through the crowd, no music played. No music played either when his sisters Rosaline, Margaret, Monica and Dympna brought up the gifts of the offertory, or at anytime during the service.

In a touching sermon, Fr Kelly praised McGahern's writing: ‘His work, like all good art, is essentially spiritual.' He said McGahern tapped into ‘the minutiae of life, the things that others see, yet never notice ... only a person with a great gift and deep spirituality could produce such fair and lyrical prose about ordinary days in ordinary places'.

Fr Kelly, originally from Leitrim but now based in Cavan, reminded mourners of the lane just outside the church door, quoting from McGahern's Memoir: ‘I must have been extraordinarily happy walking that lane to school.'

Fr Kelly spoke about the last few weeks he had spent with McGahern, a man he counted as a dear friend for more than thirty years. ‘He loved life, but did not fear death. He liked to quote Achilles: ‘speak not soothingly to me of death'. He was never one to run away from the realities of life and death ... to him, one was as natural as the other. He was completely at peace in his last few days,' Kelly said, as a couple of drops of rain fell outside and then stopped. ‘He never complained about dying. A great writer and a good man has died and we are all the poorer for it.'

As the coffin was carried just the few yards outside the church walls, the crowds gathered around the plot where McGahern was to be buried alongside his beloved mother. The grave was blessed. And heavy sleet fell as the dirt hit the coffin's wood to the sound of a rosary being said by those who loved him. As the crowd were invited by family to the Landmark Hotel (one of McGahern's last wishes), the priest repeated the writer's final reminder: that there was to be no sympathy offered.

When Kelly Fitzgerald was dying from neglect, she asked her sister Geraldine to tell their story. Most parents comfort a child after a nightmare; the Fitzgeralds' parents were their nightmare.

3 June 2007

T
he last time Kelly spoke to Geraldine – maybe the last time she spoke to anybody – she said she was going to die soon. The children were sitting on the ground at the back of the house in Carracastle. They looked like Dickensian urchins; Kelly (15) and Geraldine (12), skeletal and shivering in their nighties while the rest of the family wallowed in the ample glow indoors on a winter's night in the West of Ireland.

‘She was saying about death. She asked me to promise if anything happened to her to tell what was going on,' Geraldine remembers, dry-eyed. ‘She was so calm about it.'

After that bleak conversation, Kelly stopped talking. ‘One minute, I noticed she had diahorrhea and she was sick. The next minute, she was whacking her head off the wall. It was like she couldn't help it. That's all she did, day after day after day. I can hear her head whacking against the wall. She was doing it and she was crying. One day, my father caught her and said: “Right, if you want to whack your head, I'll whack it for you.”

‘He brought her into the house and started whacking her head against the wall. He was whacking her head inside. She was whacking it outside. She didn't shake, didn't scream, nothing. When I looked in her eyes, it was blackness. It was like she was gone. Not even blinking. Just dead. The next day, I went to school. I was very upset. I told the social workers and they went to the house and asked to see Kelly but my father said she was in bed sick. They left soon afterwards.

‘My father rang Uncle Gary in England and he said to put Kelly on the first plane to London. The night before she went, my father brought her in to eat. She couldn't lift her arms or hold herself up. Tears were streaming down her face. Everybody else went with her to the airport the next day but I was sent to school.

‘That's my last memory of Kelly. Looking into her eyes and seeing nothing. Nothing. I don't think I'll ever get over her dying. Every time I think about it, I feel the same pain I felt then. I have to deal with that and live with that for the rest of my life and nobody has any idea how that feels and nobody gives a shit.'

On the table, as she speaks, lies the only possession of Kelly's that Geraldine managed to salvage from her sister's life. It is a child's miniature diary with tiny blank pages and the title ‘Zoe Zebra' printed on its little plastic cover. She keeps it on a green string in her handbag, always. The written entries are sparse. On the first page, Geraldine has recorded: ‘Kelly RIP February 4, ‘93'. Page two reads: ‘Better by far you should forget and smile, than you should remember and be sad.'

The only other entry is for 13 June next. It says: ‘Kelly's thirtieth birthday today ... if she wasn't killed by our parents. I will always love you.'

The life and death of Kelly Fitzgerald was described in Dáil Éireann by the former Minister for Justice Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, as ‘the most horrific abuse case in the history of the state'. Kelly died, aged fifteen, in a London hospital from blood poisoning, triggering an avalanche of recriminations, much of it aimed at the Irish welfare authorities who had been alerted by their English counterparts that she was officially registered as at ‘high risk' by Lambeth Council before the family came to live in rural Co. Mayo in 1990. The first indication of her maltreatment had been recorded when she was four months old and admitted to a London hospital in a state of emaciation and dehydration. After Kelly died, her parents Des and Sue Fitzgerald pleaded guilty in Castlebar Circuit Court to a charge of wilful neglect and were sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment.

Lambeth Council had warned that another child in the Fitzgerald family was also on the at-risk register. The official minutes of a case conference at St Thomas' Hospital in London in March 1990 described this second child as ‘withdrawn, losing weight, marks noticed on her when doing PE, eating excessively, reluctant to go home from school at the end of the day, clingy, wants affection, pale, ghostlike eyes, sad and scared'. She was the Fitzgeralds' third-born child, Geraldine, three years younger than Kelly and already stealing sandwiches from her classmates' lunch boxes at Larkhall School at the age of nine. Preparatory notes for a Western Health Board case conference about Kelly and Geraldine on 5 February 1993, under the heading ‘Suspected Neglect', noted that at school in Scoil Iosa, Carracastle, ‘both had a frightened look about them'. In the welter of media coverage following Kelly's shocking death, Geraldine was obliquely mentioned in reports but never identified and then, wraith-like, she receded from the public's mind and ultimately vanished.

Fifteen years on, she is still underweight and riddled with bad health. Her lungs have collapsed twice and she has undergone surgery for a life-threatening condition classified as spontaneous pneumothorax. She has bad eyesight and suffers from asthma, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome and occasional kidney infections. She takes Valium and sees a psychologist every week. She believes her illnesses are associated with the trauma she has suffered throughout her life. She still bears scars on her back from the ritual beatings she says her father administered every day when she was aged ten, eleven and twelve.

Alienated from her parents, who remain in Carracastle, she lives in the West of Ireland with her husband Wade Thompson, a South African who has lived in Ireland for fourteen years and whom she married in September 2001. That was before she finally severed the communication cord with her parents. Initially, after their release from Mountjoy Prison she kept in touch, primarily to maintain contact with her siblings, including her baby sister who was born while Sue Fitzgerald was serving her jail sentence.

Geraldine invited her parents to her wedding reception in a hotel in Castlebar. Her father arrived late, dressed in mechanic's overalls, and told the bride: ‘You look like shit.'

‘She is intelligent, attractive, distrustful, dignified, angry and strong-willed. She has no qualifications to pursue a career, having dropped out of secondary school when she went into ‘self-destruction mode' while in care. She receives €185-a-week disability allowance and Wade receives the same amount in job seeker's allowance. Community Welfare contributes €74.50 to the couple's €150 weekly rent. They have fallen behind in repayments to the credit union for the loan they got to buy a car so that Geraldine could keep her appointments with the psychologist every week. ‘I've asked Community Welfare for money for clothing and food but, apart from once, they haven't given it to us. The rent allowance we get keeps going up and down. At one stage, we slept in the car for three nights. We'll soon be in serious debt.'