FEATURE: Home is where the heart is

Paddy Fitzsimons sits in his house located a lengthy free kick away from Pairc Tailteann in Navan and ponders on the passing years.

“They go quickly all right, you wonder where they went,” he muses as he sits in the cool of his front room while outside the hot, relentless early autumn sun beats down.
Publican, undertaker, politician Fitzsimons is known far and wide and earlier this year he passed a significant milestone - he celebrated his 80th birthday. 
His story is of someone who opted to carve out a life for himself in his native town working in the family business while serving on the local council - and by so doing he sought to improve the lives of the Navan people.
He was always “happy as a lark” living in the familiar; content to spend his days in the town he loves so well. “I didn't have any hankering to go off to anywhere else,” he adds. 
This particular Navan man has enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, the companionship of friends - as well as that of a close family that includes his wife Gretta, a Galway woman, and their four children - Padraig, Dara, Arlene and Jarlath.
He is also part of a long-running family tradition that is certainly unique in Meath - and possibly anywhere else in the country.
Apart from a brief spell, one or other of the Fitzsimons clan has served on Meath County Council since 1934. It is a fine record for any family and surely unique in Irish politics. 
Paddy's father Pat was a prominent politician serving as both a county councillor and senator (a role he filled for over 20 years) - and it was he who kicked off that long impressive tradition of involvement in politics that continues today. 
After Pat the baton was taken up by his son, and Paddy's brother, Jim Fitzsimons (who was to go on to be a TD for 10 years and a member of the European Parliament). Then from 1980 to 2004 Paddy served on Meath Co Council before his son Padraig in turn stepped up to the plate to maintain the tradition. The Fitzsimons name is as closely inter-linked with politics as the Boyne is with Navan. 
From the start the Fitzsimons clan were Soldiers of Fortune; it was Fianna Fail or nothing. Pat may have even have had a role in inspiring Eamon de Valera to set up the party back in 1926. Pat was a leading member of the Old IRA in the Navan area during the War of Independence. The Republican cause was close to his heart. 
“I have a recollection in my mind, and I don't make things up, of my father telling me one time of how he wrote a letter to de Valera urging him to start a political party because the people with Republican ideas were, at the time, having a terrible time under the Cumann na nGaedheal government,” recalls Paddy. 
“My father never talked much about the War of Independence except to say that nothing much happened during the troubles around here.”
Pat Fitzsimons, came from Maghera in Cavan close to the Meath border: “The most southerly point in Ulster” Paddy quickly adds by way of explanation.
Pat was clearly enterprising and hard-working. He set up and ran a restaurant and shop in Ludlow Street. He also married a young local woman, Margaret Russell, and they went about running the business and rearing their family of seven - Breda, Roseleen, Marie, Michael, Jim, Paddy and Tom. 
Paddy recalls how his mother told him the story of how as a young girl in 1916 she witnessed the horrible reality of the Easter Rising - and specificially the fall-out from the so-called 'Battle of Ashbourne' when a contingent of rebels took on Crown forces in that part of Meath. 
“She told me how she was walking out to Athlumney probably to see her grandmother when she saw lorries and what were described as charabancs, they were kind of an open lorry, a sort of float on wheels, and they were carrying the injured and the dead from the Battle of Ashbourne to Navan hospital with the blood spilling onto the road. That was a sight she never forgot.”
As the Fitzsimons clan grew up they proved to be very capable footballers in more than one code. Michael, who worked as a solicitor in Dublin, played rugby for UCD and Lansdowne and was good enough to be selected for Leinster. There was hope in the family he would win a cap for Ireland but the call never came.

 

Paddy and Jim also enjoyed success with Navan O'Mahonys winning a slew of SFC medals in the club's famous blue and white hoops while Tom was part of the Meath minor team that won the county's first ever All-Ireland MFC crown in 1957.
Times were good but tragedy was to strike the Fitzsimons clan when Tom, who Paddy says was the most talented footballer of them all, was struck down with meningitis in 1968 while he was working in the hotel business in London. The illness took hold and Tom died. He was only 28.
The Fitzsimons family eventually moved from the Ludlow Street HQ, bought a pub and grocery outlet in Market Square, before Paddy moved to the bar in Trimgate Street that carries the family name today.
Paddy was content to toil away in the family business under the direction of his father but it wasn't exactly a life on Easy Street. Hard work was the name of the game. That was something the Fitzsimons youngsters were thought from very early on; that hard graft was the way forward. 
“I recall looking for a day off at one stage and my father looking over his glasses and saying: 'Who do you think you are, a bank clerk is it?'. You took whatever time off you could.” 
Paddy recalls all the great characters he came across down through the years; all kinds of personalities with two members of the staff, who worked in the family firm for years, particularly memorable.
“One was Joey Allen and he worked with us for years, he was a brilliant character, very funny, a great shopman. Maybe they are still making people like him but I've never seen anybody as good as him. Gerry Coffey was another, a great personality.” 

Paddy (who always was a staunch Fianna Fail man and has strong views on the current state of the party as can be seen above) points to many positive things done by Meath Co Council over the years with the building of houses for people who needed homes, right up there. The construction of the Solstice Theatre and the Enterprise Centre on the Trim road were other big steps in the right direction. He would like to see more done with the Ramparts; the creation perhaps of a proper walkway from Navan to Drogheda. 
As part of the local Vintners’ Association, Paddy Fitzsimons was involved in helping to generate funds for the Navan Meals on Wheels. It was all very much a team effort by all the local publicians. There has been, he says, a lot done but so much more to do around his native town and county; he's just glad to have had a chance to do his bit. Regrets? He has a few but as Frank Sinatra might have said “too few to mention.” If he had his time again Paddy would perhaps make a more concerted effort to be a senator - just like his father. 
These days Paddy loves to take a walk through the familiar streets of Navan, his town. Paddy Fitzsimons - a Navan man to the core. Always was. Always will be.