Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(30)

I’d say it was a place of entirely unspoiled natural beauty except that, like the whole of Northern Ireland, its history and landscape are pockmarked by the grisly tumult of the seventies and eighties, not least the Enniskillen bombings, which took place just two years after my parents moved fifty miles north to Derry and had me, their favoured son, and my two younger siblings. Belleek is best known for the pottery that bears its name, and rather less so for being the most westerly settlement in the United Kingdom. It is what tourists think all Irish towns are like, a place so handsomely quaint it seems unreal. If it were a comic, its origin story would be that of a normal town bitten by a radioactive watercolour painting. You can, even now, stand on any random electrical box in Belleek and whatever photograph you’d take could be framed and sold to an elderly American ten minutes later.

My father’s people were Fermanagh going back; the O’Reillys arrived in the county in the eighteenth century. O’Reillys are synonymous with neighbouring Cavan, where legend – and 90 per cent of keyrings found in local gift shops – tells us they were a storied and impressive people, the high kings of East Brefni. There is, to this day, some contention over even this appellation, since both the O’Rourkes and the O’Reillys have claimed to be the princes of Brefni in a beef that’s been going for the past seven hundred years. It’s pleasing to report that, as late as 1994, a ruling was made granting that title to the O’Rourkes over my own forebears. In one tantalising line, Wikipedia informs me that ‘in 2017, with the election of the new O’Reilly Chief, the rivalry has been rekindled’. I was happy to inform my dad that he may well be drafted into a heraldic war at some point in the near future.

Whatever the facts of the matter, my father is much given to saying that the O’Reillys made the journey to Fermanagh ‘by coach-and-four’, which, to him, implies a certain regality that must, considering our own diminished means, have been substantially watered down in the succeeding centuries. It’s his favourite part of the story, and so he was mildly annoyed when my brother Conall made him explain for all our benefit what exactly that meant.

‘Four horses!’ he proclaimed, indignant at our indifference to our high-status origins. ‘Sure the queen herself has only six,’ he added, the latest volley in his impressive, life-long pursuit of metrics by which we and the Windsors might be compared. My father’s interest in genealogy flourished during his fifties when, in place of the time, means or opportunity to have a full-blown midlife crisis, he became suddenly desirous of knowing everything he could about our family tree. It’s from this period he managed to date the time of this Cavan-to-Fermanagh migration as 1724 to 1774.

‘Long trip,’ said Conall.

The O’Reilly and McGullion dynasties were joined in 1972, when my parents married. At the ceremony, Patricia turned to Granny to say how beautiful the bride looked in her gown and fur stole. Resolutely unmoved, the elder Mrs O’Reilly is said to have replied, ‘I just hope she doesn’t spend all of Joe’s money,’ presumably before chasing a tomcat out of the church by banging on some pots and pans. She did become immensely fond of my mother, and if she shared Granny McGullion’s angst about the number of children they were having, no such indication was ever given. Certainly, she appears to have been a much more doting grandmother than she was a schoolmistress for my father.


My mother’s birthplace is a little different from when she knew it. I pop into the yoga centre to grab the keys and find that morning’s class of chakra-centred septuagenarians sipping juice and coffee on the sun-drenched porch overlooking Lough Erne. A woman named Hope approaches, squinting meaningfully at my face as though I’m an eye chart that’s slightly too far away.

‘Oh my gosh, you’re like her,’ she says, meaning my mother, who, it turns out, she used to catch the bus to school with as a child. ‘I can see her reflection in you,’ she reiterates, and as we talk I catch faint ripples of amazement in her eyes, struck by that uncanny sense of seeing the face of one long gone in someone else.

‘So, you’re digging up the roots?’ she says as I describe my trip.

‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘I guess I am.’

We are shown inside my mother’s house, which is between renovations. I’m struck by how big it is really, since I had probably internalised a little too much of my own spiel and was expecting to find somewhere the size of a spice rack, not this two-storey cottage which, though likely a tight fit for eight, is considerably larger than my flat. My dad tells me how it looked when he last saw it in the early seventies, gesturing to long-gone fittings and appliances, rearranging the floorplan with points and waves. ‘I was never allowed upstairs, of course,’ he reminds us, since his last visits would have been before they were married, and he a good Catholic boy. It’s my wife who has the presence of mind to discreetly challenge him on this point once we ascend the staircase and find that he is miraculously able to show us how the top floor looked as well. ‘I suppose you’ll be putting that in the book,’ he says, not unjustly, for about the eightieth time that afternoon.


Mammy’s house looks out on a view of the lough in all its magnificence; dotted islands, darting, diving swifts and the distant reeling of anglers, languidly drifting along the glassy lake. The hills round here don’t so much roll as jump in great big blobs, looking for all the world like children’s toys hastily swept under a dark green rug. Fermanagh is like Ireland in miniature; its vistas wide, its towns tidy, its 4G variable. Its lack of coastline is more than made up for by the long, winding, spectacular grandeur of the lough and the 365 islands that lie within. The Erne is split into two portions, Upper and Lower, but in a fit of confusing nomenclature that is very much a Fermanagh trademark these are situated paradoxically, with the Lower ‘above’ its Upper counterpart on the map. My father takes great delight in telling me this, since he spent forty years with the Northern Irish Water Service as an engineer. This trip handily combines three of his specialist subjects: the extraordinary natural beauty of his home county; the intricacies of Northern Ireland’s waterways; and schooling his know-it-all son in things about which he actually knows nothing.