Shaking hands with history – Frank McNally on a childhood meeting with Erskine Childers

One night in what may have been (gulp) 1969, my parents allowed me stay up way past bedtime because of a very important visitor.

His name was Erskine Childers, and he must have been tánaiste and minister for health at the time. Neither of which details would have been as impressive in my eyes as the mysterious big black car that delivered him to our gate.

We qualified for this honour because my father was a Fianna Fail councillor and, improbably as it seemed from his accent, Childers was our local TD.

How the last part happened is complicated. Born in London, with ancestral links to Wicklow, Childers had no obvious connection with Monaghan.

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But after his long-time previous constituency (Longford-Westmeath) was redrawn, he had been given a free transfer to Monaghan, then a three-seater, in the early 1960s.

Fianna Fáil’s thinking was that the county’s substantial Protestant population, which tended to vote for an independent Protestant candidate where available, or failing that Fine Gael, might be persuaded by the urbane, mild-mannered Childers to hold their noses about the rest of Destiny’s Soldiers.

And so it happened. Improbably, a Fianna Fáiler with a posh English accent won back the seat the party had lost to Sinn Féin in 1957, during the height of the adjacent Border Campaign.

The Dictionary of Irish Biography calls it a “risky but successful gambit”, a chess analogy that reminds me of a phrase from another remote border district synonymous with intrigue. Parachuted into the Republic’s Northeast frontier, Childers was part of our Great Game.

Not that I appreciated any of this when, along with the rest of my siblings, I was presented to him that night, in the “room” (as the location of the good furniture was known).

Only years later did I read about Childers’s father, also Erskine, executed in November 1922 during the bitterest phase of the Civil War, and how he shook hands with each member of the firing squad.

And how, during a last visit from the 16-year-old Erskine jnr – excused from school in England for the purpose – he made his son promise, when time and circumstances allowed, to seek out all the Free State ministers who signed off on the execution and shake their hands too.

During my temporary release from early bedtime that night, therefore, I shook the hand that shook the hand, etc. This is my Civil War memory. I never met my namesake grandfather, an anti-Treaty Sinn Féin councillor, who might have had passed on others. But as inherited experiences of 1922 go, it’s a good one.

The only other detail I recall from that visit now is a baking crisis my mother and sisters were enduring back-stage. A cake didn’t rise, I think. But I’m sure the guest forgave that too, quietly – handshakes were hardly required.

When Childers became President a few years later, my parents were invited to the inauguration: the swankiest event either ever attended.

My outstanding memory of that is that they smuggled home some marzipan sweets disguised as miniature fruits. We had never seen such wonders before and paused just long enough to marvel before gratefully devouring them.

I was remembering all this in Áras an Uachtaráin the other day at the last in a series of seminars on the decade of centenaries. As explained by Michael D Higgins, Macnamh 100 was designed as a process of “ethical recall”, facing up to the past and trying to learn the right lessons.

Speakers included Fergal Keane (the BBC one), who inherited rather more traumatic memories of war in North Kerry, much of it through his grandmother Hannah Purtill.

She was 15 at the time of the Easter Rising and, seven years later, had been changed in more than mere age “by what she had witnessed on country lanes and on the streets of Listowel”.

Lelia Doolan talked about the treatment of the revolutionary years in film, up to and including the “moving, brutal, and hilarious” Banshees of Inisheerin. Angela Bourke discussed the forgotten history of keening for the dead.

And in his keynote address, Declan Kiberd spoke about – among many other things – the “cult of soldierhood” bequeathed by the British empire: “When they withdrew from a country, they often left conditions ripe for civil strife”.

Michael Collins may have been a victim of that as well as of his fellow Irishmen. Kiberd recalled the words of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, when she went to plead with Collins for peace. She found him “a man with a touch of the dictator [and] the usual soldier’s contempt for civilians, particularly women, though these had often risked their lives to help him.”

The proceedings of Macnamh 6, and all the previous seminars, are available on the RTÉ Player.