Sprightly centenarian recalls an almost forgotten Ireland

“I was running around the Aras long before Mary McAleese was ever near it,” chuckles Terry Finlay. She was reading a letter from Uachtaran na hEireann, congratulating her on reaching her 100th birthday on Friday last. “The Phoenix Park was our playground as children,” she recalls. “You could put your hand through our back railing and into the Park.” Mrs McAleese wrote of the changes in lifestyles and technologies that Mrs Finlay experienced over her lifetime, but the Kilmessan centenarian is, in fact, living history. She witnessed rebellion, civil war and world wars, and has clear recollections of them all. Mrs Finlay was born Therese Moran and was the youngest of a family of seven who lived near Islandbridge in Dublin. “The area was called Bopeep, would you believe?” she says. “That’s what’s on my birth cert.” Father Her father, John Moran, was from around Trim, and her mother Catherine was a member of the Clarke family from Bective. John worked with horses and had been with Watsons at Bective House before moving to Dublin to work with a Mr Daly at Islandbridge. Therese was the youngest of the family of seven - two boys and five girls - who lived in a section of the Daly house on the outskirts of the Phoenix Park. Ireland was under British rule during Mrs Finlay’s early years, and it was a tense time, as the 1916 rebellion took place, followed by the War of Independence and the Civil War. “The Magazine Fort was just behind our house in the Park,” Mrs Finlay recalls. “It was where the army kept its artillery. There was just a plantation between us and the fort and we were terrified around 1916 that it would be blown up some night.” One of her brothers had found an empty cartridge around this time, and it was discovered on the property by British soldiers who were out on searches. “He wasn’t involved in the volunteers or anything, but the house was raided. We were below where the Dalys lived, and their house was raided too. Mr Daly went straight up to the Vice Regal Lodge the next day, and complained about what they did, and got an apology.” Her brother, Jack, was among hundreds who, on one occasion, were rounded up and marched down Conyngham Road to the North Wall. “I remember my father running after him and throwing him an overcoat, and he threw back keys. He was kept in Wakefield Prison in England for six weeks, surviving on bread and water. He was never the same after.” One of the best-known incidents of those times was the blowing up of the Four Courts in 1922, an explosion which wiped out a great deal of the country’s records which were stored there. “We saw that explosion,” Mrs Finlay recalls. “All you could see were papers going up in the air.” She adds: “It is said that, one of the nights, Michael Collins sheltered across from us in an old barn over at Islandbridge. I don’t know if it’s true or not.” And she remembers her mother bringing her to see Arthur Griffith lying in state following his death after a stroke, just 10 days before Collins was assassinated. “There were rumours around at the time that Griffith had been poisoned,” she says. One night, there were lorryloads going by their house to Chapelizod, she’s not sure if it was by British soldiers or the IRA, but their house light was on, and a roar came in to them to turn it off. “We were afraid to go up to the shops in the city at the time, in case there’d be a bombing,” she says. She remembers the head being cut off the statue of Lord Gough in the Park - the entire monument was blown up by Republicans in the late 1950s. Despite all these tensions, living on the edge of the Phoenix Park provided an idyllic childhood for the Morans. There was so much to do and see there. Mrs Finlay recalls getting up at 6am to watch the drivers practising for the famous Phoenix Park motor races. She remembers the changing of the guard at Aran an Uachtaran, then the Vice Regal Lodge housing the British Viceroy, when they would run alongside the soldiers coming from the nearby barracks to the gates. The Spring Bank behind the Magazine Fort was a favourite spot, and she recalls a monkey in the zoo robbing her glasses off her, unbeknownst to herself. Across on the Liffey, the river was a hive of activity, with boat clubs and regattas. Trams Transport around Dublin was by double decker trams, and Mrs Finlay remembers Dublin’s original 'Tin Lizzies’, the Ford Model T. “You’d never get a lift in one, except maybe at election time, when fellows were driving people around to and from voting,” she recalls. One glorious day when the sun was splitting the stones, a great shadow suddenly came across the sky. “It was the airship, the R101,” she says. “People stopped cars and came out of houses to look up at it.” An even more dramatic event was the bombing of the North Strand by the German Luftwaffe in 1941, during World War II. “I nearly had the head taken off me,” Mrs Finlay recalls. She was at her place of work on North Circular Road and heard the planes going over and the noise. When she looked out a broken window to see if it had calmed, another plane flew over on a bombing mission. “I got in fairly quick!” She had attended school at the Sisters Of Charity convent at Basin Lane, and worked as housekeeper for John and Sam Rogers in their home on North Circular Road. They were relatives of the horsetraining Rogers family from Ratoath. It was while on a visit to her mother’s family in Bective that she met her husband-to-be, Billy Finlay from Tribley. “My mother didn’t want me to return to the country to live. She said it was a much greater hardship than city life.” However, she and Billy were married in James Street Church by Fr Lennon, and she moved to Bective. Times were hard, she recalls, and money was scarce. But neighbours were good in Tribley, and it was, and still is, a close-knit community. Over her mantelpiece hang two pictures of young lads on horseback - one, her neighbour, jockey and trainer Adrian Maguire, who went on to greater things after the photo was taken; the other, her Godson, Adrian’s brother, Vinny, who died in a road tragedy before he could realise his true potential. Mrs Finlay worked as a housekeeper in various houses, including Holdsworths of Bellinter House. When the Sisters of Sion came to look at Bellinter House before buying it, Mr Holdsworth asked Mrs Finlay to prepare some tea for Sr Maura Clune. “I only had bread and scrambled egg for her, but she must have liked it, because she asked me would I stay on after the Order bought the house,” she recalls. On Friday last, family, neighbours and friends gathered at Trim Castle Hotel to mark Mrs Finlay’s 100 years. And she had none other than a Eurovision-winning songwriter to serenade her with 'Happy Birthday’ - Shay Healy, writer of 'What’s Another Year?’ for Johnny Logan in 1980, was on hand to lead the singing. He is married to Mrs Finlay’s niece, Mary, and paid tribute to the stoicism of her generation.