A woman you 'couldn't contain or quieten': Remembering my mum, Eileen Kennefick

Pat Sexton describes his mother, Eileen Kennefick (1921-2008), as a woman you “couldn’t contain or quieten”.

He explains: “She didn’t need liberating, but she understood better than most how some women were treated. They were starving, yet they fed their children and carried on.

“My mother said that without those women, we would never have improved as a country.”

Eileen, raised in Jewtown, had a clear window to the world of Cork throughout the last century. From a girl, and later while raising her five children, she ran the local shop in Turner’s Cross.

“A man told me once that I would never have had to work at all if my mother had been paid what she was owed,” says Pat. “The book was the only way to live back then. It was in the shop back, where my mother would record what people bought and owed.”

A different life 

Pat, now a grandfather of six, describes Cork as it was then.

“Everyone back then was poor or poorer. We were better off than most in that we had a business. Two of my mother’s sisters went to UCC, which you had to pay for. You paid for everything back then.

“In 1958, the year I was born, a little girl died of starvation outside on the road. Every family had five or six kids; there was the boys’ room, and the girls’ room, and the box room was for parents. All along Friars Road, Doyle Road, and Derrynane Road, there were hundreds and hundreds of children.”

The corner shop was where families came to get their fairly simple fare, he explains.

“You’d get your quarter pound of corn beef or ham, and your bread. There was the big skull, small skull, the basket, bloomer, or a wellington. We had fresh bread delivered every day. It was long before sliced pan. It was heavy, with very little water in it, full of dough.”

Before creating her own family of five with her carpenter husband Billy Sexton, Eileen Kennefick was one of six.

“She was kept back to run the shop as she was considered efficient. She was frustrated maybe, but having said that she was a non-conformist and she never thought college was the answer for everyone; it used to annoy her, people boasting about it.

“She married my father on Shrove Tuesday because back then you couldn’t get married over Lent so there were always a lot of weddings beforehand.”

The busy store 

As a young boy, Pat played his part in the busy store.

“There wasn’t much outside the counter. When we were small we would stand in the bread bin to mind it. At half-four in the afternoon we’d be selling the Echo.”

The family gave up the shop when Pat hit five years old.

“Times were changing then. It was the early ’60s so you had bigger shops arriving on the scene. But I remember why we left specifically. It was because I ran across the road while she was in the shop and I got knocked down by a car. I wasn’t hurt or anything, but it was enough to make her pack it in. She had one girl helping her but it wasn’t enough.”

His mother stayed busy nonetheless and Pat remembers her as always multi-tasking.

Other things held less value for Eileen.

“She couldn’t understand all the women cleaning. She’d see other women with their bums and heads out the sash windows, cleaning the glass, or putting brasso on the brass of their front doors. She couldn’t understand it.”

It became a running joke in the family. She wasn’t too thrilled with a gift she was given by the family not once, but twice.

“Yes, she got a plate that read ‘my house is dirty enough to be happy, and clean enough to be healthy’. Once would have been okay, but twice was pushing it.”

Eileen wasn’t one to hold her tongue either.

“She was an outspoken individual. She’d say the first thing that came into her mind, but she had a very good nature. She was very honest. You had to be tough in the shop too, but she certainly loved the cut and thrust of it.”

Pat has happy memories of his childhood.

“We always got fed but you were never asked what you wanted to eat. I remember the big events – getting our first colour television in 1972 and all my friends coming around to watch the game, and our first washing machine that spun. Before that she’d have the nappies sitting in Nappysan in a bucket.”

His mother was far from the retiring type, and went out most nights to play 45.

“I remember when my father died, and she asked me about three days later would it be okay to go out and play cards.

“I told her to go on out, but that night someone asked her how my father, Billy, was doing; she said he was fine. He was dead!”

Steeped in GAA

GAA was her life, according to her son.

“As a younger woman, she would cycle to Thurles for the matches because nobody would have had money for the train. She was a ‘sub for a sub on the Cork camogie team’; that’s how she’d put it. She was mad about it.”

Eileen even managed to stop the famous Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh in his tracks.

“Her knowledge of 1940s GAA was unmatched, culminating in her correcting the great broadcaster on one occasion when he got a fact wrong. He contacted her after she got in touch and interviewed her before an All-Ireland final. She kept the tape, marked ‘Me’.”

She was steeped in the GAA.

“Her father won an All-Ireland in the ’20s, and her brother won in the ’40s. Her father was actually a founding member of Nemo. Now my grandson plays there, aged six. There’s a bit of controversy over the other grandson playing for Douglas,” he adds with a smile.