Fortunate to have good health and to be with lovely people

Berna Dempsey, aged sixty-seven, has lived in Clonmel all her life. She is a single parent with two grown up children.

Berna has worked as a Special Needs Assistant for Presentation Primary School in Clonmel for 25 years.

When I visited, there were photos everywhere. Frames of all shapes and sizes on every wall, every available shelf. The photos already tell me that, for Berna, family means people - her people - and I am here to find out more.

“This house is where my father grew up. My father was one of seven and now, only two of them are left,” she says. “We came up to this house as children every Sunday night. My grandfather would go to the pub in the afternoon and bring home bars of chocolate and it was the best thing in the world.

“We stayed here when Mam had a baby. Daddy was working so he couldn’t look after us. In those days you were kept in hospital for ten days but we just wanted to be home with mam. My uncle Tommy was a dressmaker. He had a fabric shop in Clonmel and made the most exquisite wedding dresses. He was a man before his time.

“My mother’s father went to America to get work. He was a police officer and sent home the fare so my grandmother and their 5 children could join him. But after seven months, he died from an ulcer and was buried in the Bronx in New York. They had to come home and move into her father’s house (he was a shoemaker and lived alone). My grandmother’s sister also lived close by, and she too had five children. Her husband went to England for work. In the beginning he always sent money home and came back to see the children but after a while, there was no communication. My grandaunt decided to go looking for him in England, found him in London and got him on the train to Paddington. He said “I must go to the bathroom” but at the next station he jumped off the train and never set foot in Ireland again.

“My mother had a famous sister, nurse Kathleen Cahill and everyone would be praying that nurse Cahill was on when they were having a baby in Clonmel hospital. She lived with my grandmother and when her younger sister went to England and had a baby, she sent the baby back. It was Kathleen who reared him. She was ‘Person of the Year’ in Clonmel a couple of times. You wouldn’t get the likes of her now.

“My father was a coach painter. He did a lot of fine paint artwork for Bourke’s, a pork and bacon shop who had their own fleet of yellow trucks. My father carefully painted each individual letter with a pencil brush in a cold garage.”

Berna shows me a photo of her mother and father on a date in 1954. They were married the following year in Clonmel. Berna grew up with three other siblings: Marie the eldest and Berna one year later. Billy was born five years after that and Martin was the surprise, 10 years on.

“My mam was the secretary at Mulcahy’s and when they were first married, they lived at the very back of it. We got a council house but then transferred to be closer to my grandmother. We went from a house with a bathroom to one with none, only an outside toilet. The three houses behind ours had a bathroom, so we would go in relays to have a bath. We always had a bath on Saturday evening, for Sunday mass.

“My mother never said a cross word to us. She was a very kind person. We had a very good childhood, but we had nothing. On Thursday evenings there was nothing left in the press so we had cream crackers, banana and brown sugar. My mother would not get paid until Friday. I collected the wages from Daddy’s work at Prendergast Garage on Fridays so that Mammy could do the shopping.”

Berna smiles as she remembers how every summer, her father would hire a car to take them to Tramore.

“We would go to Mass, get our hair done and off we went. I remember my father in his navy, knee length swimming shorts getting into the sea and my mammy screaming at him, ‘You’re after having your dinner and you’re going to drown!’ Daddy couldn’t swim but he thought he could. Daddy would say that Tramore was his annual wash whether he needed it or not!

“I was married young; the marriage didn’t last. We had two children together: Shane was eleven and Susan eight when we separated. Shane is forty-five and has one son Cillian, aged seven, with his partner Cherelle. He is very involved in the arts and was the director of stagecraft for twenty-two years. He is now a director in London. My daughter Susan, aged 42 lives in Clonmel. She married Nigel, who was widowed early and had two boys Kelan and Lennon. They now have two more boys, Bobby and Ollie. As children, Shane and Susan loved going to my mother’s house at lunchtime for food and then back to school. She had a very special bond with them. They adored her and she lived till ninety-two.”

When I ask Berna, “What does family mean to you?”, she says one word: “Connections.” Talent follows down the family line.

“It’s funny how my father was artistic, I am artistic, and so are Shane and Susan. My mother couldn’t sew a button, but her mother was a great knitter.”

Berna sees herself more like her Dad’s side – like Tommy, she loved dressing up and is more flamboyant like her Dad’s sisters. “One of them was wearing a purple coat when no one was wearing a purple coat.”

Values too travel down the family line. Berna was raised to not be flaithiúlach, to do the best with what you have, and she raised her children that way. Family rituals are important. From a young age, Berna’s mother would regularly bring them down to St Patrick’s Well.

“When she was too sick to walk down, she would stand near it.”

Berna regularly visits St Patrick’s Well to this day. On Christmas Berna always goes into Clonmel town.

“To this day even if I don’t buy anything, I have to go because if I didn’t, it would not feel like Christmas.”

To maintain family connections, Berna says social media is fantastic. She stays in touch with relatives in the UK and Canada: “When I put up photos, people see them right away and say things like, ‘Oh, I see your mam in this one’.”

These days Berna finds herself sounding increasingly like her mother, even using her old expressions.

“It is almost like you are trying to keep them alive. One time I bought my mother perfume called ‘Noa’. To this day I still wear it. She is alive in this perfume, she is really there. When Shane was home a while ago, I said, ‘Smell that scarf.’ And he said, ‘Nanny’. It’s amazing. We get ice cream in a shop after school and they call it Nanny Greene’s shop even though she never went there. We would buy her an ice cream there and bring it back. Today, Bobby finished primary school and when I said, ‘Let’s get an ice cream’, he said, ‘Nanny Greene’s shop’. There was no question of anywhere else.

“My mother was the link with everyone. Now that she is gone, the link is gone, the chain is broken.” In mammy’s, Berna would know what was happening and where people were. “Mammy would tell you everything about everyone whether you wanted to know or not.”

When her mother passed away the house was sold, and Berna has never gone back. “We meet up now, but it is just not the same. Now my life is Shane, Cillian, Cherelle, Nigel, Susan, Bobby, Olly, and Ger my partner. I have wonderful friends - I will put them in the pot as well. Also, the children in school, that I look after. I have been lucky in life, lucky to have good health and wonderful people around me to share the joy of being alive. ”

When asked about the ties that bind a family, Berna says that the top three ingredients are communication, friendship and spending time together. That special time on holiday is important, when you are not working or running to football, so you get closer to people. “As a single parent, I didn’t have much, but I worked hard and saved hard, so we went to Clonea.”

As the interview comes to an end, I notice the pink sheet of paper framed just above the sofa in the middle of the wall.

“Watch this,” Berna says as she holds out her phone, so the QR code opens up.

The room fills with her Mother’s voice singing a song on her ninetieth birthday. You can hear the encouragement of Berna and Susan as they join in to help with the words. (I wish I had something like that to hear my own mother’s voice.)

The story of Berna’s family is one of unexpected adventures that all somehow work out for the best in the end. And so, it is only fitting that the song her mother was singing was Que Sera Sera, what will be will be.

FAMILIES OF CLONMEL

Clonmel Applefest is conjunction with The Nationalist are delighted to share the ten stories that comprise its ‘Families of Clonmel’ book launched during last September’s Applefest.

Ten Families originally from or who have lived in Clonmel for at least 10 years are included in the book for which nominations were sought and secured after a lengthy selection process. For each cohort, the family head was interviewed in their homes with a final photograph by John D. Kelly included with the wider multigenerational family. Families come from a wide spectrum of backgrounds, from well-established Clonmel natives to more recently arrived families. Included in the book are: The Burkes, Caseys, Dempseys, Gleesons, Hacketts, Hewitts, Mcnamaras, Molloys, Purcells, and Sheikhs. All shared what they enjoy doing together and why family is important to them.

This project would not have been possible without the participation of a vibrant cohort of locally-based committed community writers who took an interest, interviewed and wrote about the selected families under the mentorship of Sean O’Connor, an accomplished writer and editor from Nenagh. This ambitious project was made possible with a grant from the Arts Council of Ireland and additional support from Age-Friendly Tipperary and The Museum of Hidden Histories.

The festival theme in 2025 was ‘The Ties that Bind’ and these stories demonstrate love, humour and caring in a very real and meaningful way. Copies of the book can be purchased for € 12 at Hickey’s Bakery, the Narrow Space Gallery and Chou’s Cottage (including via shops’ websites).

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About the writer

Dr Marie Walsh is a Lecturer and Researcher with the Technological University of the Shannon (TUS), Ireland. Her specialty areas are the study of Post Traumatic Growth, the psychology of teams and leadership. She has two amazing children and she expresses her creative side as a singer/songwriter. Marie sees herself as a cat person - curious about everything and enjoying the adventure of life.