Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(40)

‘That’s the rota,’ chorused Maeve and Orla. ‘We’ve worked it out. Sinead and Dara are excused as much as possible because of their exams.’ Joe ran his eye down the list; dishwashing, dusting, vacuuming, and laundry. The twins had thought of everything.



This short segment contains so many painfully notable moments it’s hard to know where to start. For one thing, my father and sisters seem to be communicating through the kind of expositional dialogue that suggests they’ve just been parachuted into their own lives and need to take stock of things and people they’ve known intimately for, in my sisters’ case, their whole lives. For another, unless confined to prison or on an oil rig, human beings generally don’t sleep in numbered bedrooms. But what is possibly most notable about this passage is something you might not even have caught. The writer managed to describe the first bungalow in the history of architecture to possess a set of stairs.

The factual points were, of course, entirely secondary to the tone and style of the thing, which left such an acrid taste in our mouths that even now, thirty years later, it makes us angry. It was grisly to think of other people reading this mawkish bollocks and taking it as some true statement about our lives. It seemed inhuman that they were even allowed to turn our story into a tawdry bit of sentimental fluff for people to tut along to and say how sad. It’s a fear I entertain myself whenever I ask my family for details of this or that part of my life story, since it is invariably a part of theirs too. None of this dissuaded my dad from taking part in Family Matters, though, perhaps because RTÉ were a much more respectable outlet, or maybe just because the presence of cameras would make it harder for them to lie about us having stairs.


At the time, it didn’t seem strange that a TV show was coming to tell the story of my family’s bereavement. It’s surreal to think that, conservatively, tens of thousands of people must have watched a segment about my home life, and we all just went about our business afterwards. I can see that our story was sufficiently family-focused to fit on a show that was primarily about family matters, but I find it hard to work out why such a show existed in the first place. I’ve never seen anything since with a remit that uninspiringly specific. Everyone has a family, the logic may have gone, so let’s create this oddly stilted, low-stakes parish newsletter television programme that was like a busybody bulletin board for parents around the country and a platform for people to complain about the frustrations of family life. It was a bit like Crimewatch, if the only crimes they covered were people charging too much for textbooks, bad parking near playgrounds and the hassle of school uniforms going tatty after a couple of washes.

None of this mattered to me at the time since, as far as I was concerned, I had pretty much been cast as the lead in a new Die Hard film. The crew descended at some point in December 1993 and I quickly made a nuisance of myself. You can see it was December because, even though the show was eventually broadcast in the spring, the footage clearly shows our Christmas decorations everywhere. This became an oddly persistent point of reference for anyone who would later see the show. ‘Saw your Christmas decorations there, in the background!’ they’d say, in a tone that suggested they’d foiled our cunning ruse. ‘Yes, it was filmed at Christmas,’ we’d say, never really shaking the sense that they considered us very neatly caught out. The crew were in our house for about eight hours over two days, and the premise of the segment was simple enough; my dad and my eldest sister Sinead spoke to camera about my mother’s illness and death, and then Maeve and Orla discussed their famous rota, which had made them stars of print and now made its TV debut.

It should be stressed just how much celebrity this conferred upon them. Their teacher nominated them for a Young Citizen’s Award, which they won, and which eventually saw them travel to London for the presentation. There, alongside people who’d raised money for epilepsy drugs or rescued dogs from disused mines, they attended a lavish ceremony and even got to meet Northern Irish funnyman Frank Carson, a fixture on local TV during the exact period of time when comedians still went by ‘funnyman’ in the tabloids.

It was undoubtedly true that Maeve and Orla took on a huge amount of work themselves when they really were too young to do so. For this, they received praise from teachers – and TV funnymen – but also near-constant ribbing from their siblings, who quite unfairly discerned in their efforts a certain self-importance.

Because we were (and still are) a mercilessly sarcastic shower of cynics, for years afterwards their award became a byword for deluded self-congratulation and was recalled exclusively in mocking tones. This ignored the fact that, eight weeks after our mother’s death, they spent the run-up to Christmas making trips out to the caravan in our back garden, scouring Argos catalogues so they could source and collect all of our Christmas presents. They’d worked out Santa wasn’t real only the year before, meaning they had, in some sense, lost Santa and Mammy within twelve months, and were now being asked to perform some of the functions of both. Looking back now, it seems odd that this job fell to two eleven-year-olds, considering a fifteen-year-old, a sixteen-year-old and an eighteen-year-old were also available, but the logic behind it was never really explained to me. It was said that the older kids were too focused on exams, but the few weeks before Christmas aren’t exactly fever pitch for scholastic activities. In any case, the twins did it. And, in return, we teased them for decades afterwards.