In the presence of pure gold with Pauline Burke

Pauline Burke sits straight-backed in her living room chair. June sun streams through her window, highlighting her immaculate silver hair.

It catches, in the giant silver buttons of her red cardigan. It spreads, across the dark folds of her smart trousers and slender, athletic limbs.

She wears pristine white trainers, à la mode, on her elegant feet, both of which, are planted firmly on the ground.

Despite this, you get the sense that at any given moment Pauline could run for Ireland; take off in a winged Morris Minor; dive into the blue depths of her local swimming pool; burst into song. You’d be right.

Pauline attributes this zest for life to not being very strong as a young girl. Diagnosed with Primary Tuberculosis, she recalls her fight with it. There were visits to St Patrick’s Well to alleviate the terrible headaches, and a spell at Kilkenny Sanitorium. The force of nature Pauline would grow into was already in evidence when she said to her mother that if she didn’t come down and bring her home from the Sanitorium: ‘I’ll walk the roads’.

By the age of 18, Pauline had won her battle with the disease.

The youngest of eleven children, and so embedded in the Clonmel community, Pauline was christened Peter Pauline Power after her local parish church. In 1950’s Ireland, her all-inclusive name got her in trouble with the law.

Applying for a passport to go to Lourdes, the perplexed Dublin Passport Office launched an official inquiry when they received her application. Detective Mullins, of Clonmel Garda Barracks was dispatched, by bicycle, to her home at Oliver Plunkett Terrace. It was Mullins’ mission to investigate whether a man or a woman was applying for said passport.

Pauline recalls the day the detective came knocking on her door, in the heat of summer. The rumour mill going into overdrive, up and down the terrace.

"It was the shock of having a Garda Detective arrive on your doorstep, and you, knowing you had done nothing wrong!”

Pauline opted to make her name easier for the state to understand. She ‘crossed out Peter’.

It is this gumption, this ability to rise to the demands of any life event that defined Pauline as a girl,a woman, a daughter, a wife, and now, a proud great-grandmother. As she explains it, she was “the last to be born, the last to be married".

Yet the spirit of her entire demeanour calls to mind a maverick or pioneer: ‘If anyone asked, (about family) I used to say, get involved, keep that up,between the generations, anything they went to, I went to. Be neighbourly”.

These principles are simply put. Applied to the times we live in now, they may be life-saving.

On being neighbourly: picture a young mother, close to full term. It is Pauline, carrying her first child. She will name him John (Johnnie). Listen, as a locum doctor, seated at his desk, advises Pauline to get herself to the hospital.

She has abnormally high blood pressure, in a time of no childcare.

Picture her walking, alone, through Clonmel Town and up the hill to what was then the Clonmel County Medical and Maternity Hospital.

Here, a diagnosis of Toxaemia is given. Pauline’s pregnancy is induced, and weeks of recovery in hospital follow. By tender necessity, her community becomes her family.

"Everyone pitched in to rear him. Nurse Cahill, she knew me, and she came to help too, as she lived nearby”.

This ethos of being ‘neighbourly’, of ‘pitching in’ defines Pauline’s sense of family life.

The high value Pauline places on inter-generational connections begins with music. Pauline recalls listening to her mother, Stacia, singing in the kitchen as she made the dinner each day.

And so, like her mother, Pauline began to sing on the bus to school, sometimes ‘til she was hoarse. Her singing was rewarded with a swag of trophies won at national-level Feis’s for The Presentation School Choir.

See in your mind’s eye a beautiful child with the voice of an angel. Now open that eye wider. See the maverick-in-the-making, as Pauline, with a glint in her eye confesses: “Well those Feis’s got me out of the hell of homework and the long school day. We got away with murder!”

Her pioneer spirit endured and the family stories she tells, reveal a lifetime of firsts. A young mother of two sons, Johnnie and Cyril, Pauline became the first female singer and founding member of Sts. Peter and Paul’s Church Choir (at a time when membership at Sts. Peter and Paul’s, as well as St. Mary’s, was limited to men only). She went on to sing her way through the hallowed halls of Kerry’s Gleneagle Hotel. In her seventies, while visiting relatives in America, Pauline sang in a bar and was immediately asked if she had a manager.

Pauline offers a family maxim: “Hard work never killed anyone but torment would eat the heart and mind out of you”.

And work hard she did. Shoemaker at the Munster Shoe factory. Seamstress and hand-embroiderer of vestments for the Clonmel Apostolic Society. Usherette at The Regal Cinema.

Her sJohnnie interjects, “And she gave Twiggy (the 60’s fashion icon), a run for her money’ at the upmarket ‘Irish Lady’ Handbag store and other boutiques in Clonmel town”.

She believes it is important for a family to be ‘Giving of time to others’ and so created a sense of family far beyond her own front door.

While working and raising two young sons, Pauline volunteered with The Red Cross and gave thirty-five years voluntary service to Clonmel Credit Union.

To be with her sons, she joined Clonmel Running Club and a plethora of set dancing groups, resulting in another swag of trophies and medals, this time won by Johnnie and Cyril.

She kept her family faith too.

"You know what’s going to happen when you die. Now they are saying there’s nothing, and you know that affects you mentally, and physically…so keep the bit of religion if you can…I go to Mass…but I’m not religious”.

Pauline values her religion, but she values too, her own spirituality and the power it has to make deep sense of life.

‘Closeness’ is a word Pauline returns to often as we chat. She was a hands-on mam. “Anything they went to, I went to”.

This principle took Pauline to some interesting places. A keen swimmer all her life, Pauline remembers how "We were from The Old Bridge. I remember swimming at Beach Grove: you got thrown in”.

So, when Clonmel Swimming Pool opened, Pauline and her sons paid the ten pence entry fee and jumped right in.

Aged forty, she was ‘mad’ to learn how to dive and son Cyril duly obliged and taught her. She loved the feeling of being under the water.

If Cyril bound Pauline to the water, Johnnie bound Pauline to the air.

"I didn’t know half the things they were up to” Pauline explains.

Keen to keep his mother ‘involved’, Johnnie took Pauline on a road trip, all the way to Oola.

He had a Morris Minor car (though there was nothing minor about it), known as ‘The Galloping Maggot.’

It featured what might now be called customised wing mirrors welded to its sides, a hyperactive bonnet prone to jumping, and a grand view of the road surface beneath the car seats.

The trip, by all accounts, was a ‘Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang’ experience. Wind took hold of the wing mirrors, set them flapping.

The bonnet took off. It felt like they were airborne, that is, until the bonnet fell to earth and the passengers with it.

Now, with her feet planted firmly on the ground Pauline begins to sing. A rare song, akin to an emigrant’s lament.

The song is called ‘Clonmel’. Her pitch-perfect voice fills the room.

She remembers every word, every note, where to rise and where to fall. Pauline learned the song from her mother, who sang it at family homecomings in PJ Powell’s pub.

The lines of the chorus repeat: “For tomorrow I leave you / but I hope not forever / All those that I love / I will leave in Clonmel”.

At the end of ‘Clonmel’ Pauline slaps her hands together, delighted: ‘I didn’t know I could still sing it.’

In that moment she is a girl again, singing her linnet-heart out on the school bus.

I first saw Pauline sitting straight-backed in her chair, shining, like silver. I understand now, I was in the presence of pure gold.

She enriches the lives of many. She is ever-enlarging the meaning of family.

As I drove home, lines from Seamus Heaney’s ‘At the Wellhead’, crossed my mind. They go like so:

‘Being with her

Was intimate and helpful, like a cure

You didn’t notice happening’.

Families of Clonmel

Clonmel Applefest is conjunction with The Nationalist are delighted to share theten 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 stories of 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, anaccomplished 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

Heather Wall works and lives in Carrick on Suir. She has a keen interest in traditional andatypical family structures and an especial interest in the ways we can create and sustain intergenerational relations in our communities.