Growing Up So High: A Liberties Boyhood

Sean O'Connor - Author

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Currently living in Rathmines with his second wife Viola, Sean owns a 'family flat' in a block of apartments which is on the exact spot where his former family home stood on Francis Street. It was owned by his granny, Ellen O'Neill, who had a butcher's shop just across the road and where the Tivoli Theatre now stands. Turn to your right and walk a few doors up from the Tivoli Theatre and you're outside a graffiti-covered front door — No Francis Street, where Sean's paternal grandparents William and Margaret O'Connor lived and where his dad Thomas was born.

There were always at least 10 of us living there," Sean recalls during our walk down memory lane through his old south city neighbourhood.

Though fairly deserted these days, it was once a bustling city community. Like meeting his pals on the steps of the old Iveagh Market and thinking that the faces engraved on the stone facade of the market were those of Apache chiefs which had to be escaped from, causing a competition to see which Francis Street nipper could run the fastest. I'd say the modern apartment is about the same size as the room which we all lived in all those years ago," Sean says.

When his parents, Thomas and Ellen, decided to move their family out to Keeper Road in Crumlin, Sean arranged to stay behind to run messages for his grandparents and to light their fires. Already his hunger for opportunity and self- discipline had been noticed. And the teacher said 'where else would he go for the information?

So it was a terrible blow when at age 13 it was decided he was a few weeks too old to qualify for a scholarship for secondary school. All things considered, he fancied an office job would be his way up, and got himself the position of office boy at Joseph Mallagh and Son, Consulting Engineers where he mastered the art of drawing and became a draftsman. Showing his true grit, he went back to school at night, became an engineer, and then achieved a master's degree in science from Trinity.

Not satisfied, he returned to Trinity to study law, went to King's Inn and qualified as a barrister and practised as one for a few years before returning to engineering. Isolated and stressed, disputes turn physical, leaving a pregnant Erin Greene in a poor state of mental health, and Philip Montague wanting an escape. They decide to go on a drive and head for Erin's favourite place as a child, the Wicklow Mountains.

However, a simple oversight leaves them both stranded, with no fuel and a blizzard due.

Sean O'Connor - Author

With no other choice, Philip heads off to the nearest town in search of help, leaving his fiancee alone. With Philip gone and the inevitability of a snowstorm looming, Erin, in order to survive, must battle against her plagued mind and the supernatural elements that lie hidden deep in the hills. With no other choice, Philip heads off to the nearest town in search of help, leaving his fiance alone. Sean O'Connor was born in Francis Street, in the Liberties of Dublin, a neighbourhood famous over the centuries for the sturdy independence of its people.

Now, in this evocative and affectionate book, he recollects the unique and colourful district of his childhood: Remembrances of the s classroom, of bird-watching in Phoenix Park, of roaming towards adolescence in the streets of his ancestors are mingled with tales of ancient ghosts and the coming of change to the Liberties.

O'Connor, father of the novelist Joseph, tells his story with honesty, warmth and style, and the often wry wit of his home-place.

About the Author

This tenderly written testament of one Liberties boy builds into a vivid and heart-warming picture of his own extended family as part of a proud community and its all-but-vanished way of life. If this is your author page then you can share your Twitter updates with your readers right here on LoveReading.

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