LOOKBACK: This piece was published this time last year
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One of the few and possibly only times the Treacy family as on the same page when it came to an election was the 1967 elections for what was then known as Dublin Corporation. Younger folk will know it now as Dublin City Council.
Whereas the normal course of events would have dictated that the household at 34 Brandon Road – or Branding Road as it was called by Brendan Behan who had lived not that far away on Kildare Road – would have reverted to 1920s Civil War mode, there was a unique factor that set all of that aside for the time.
My Dub granny Treacy was a staunch Free Stater and Blueshirt of fearsome disposition when it came to such matters. My Tipp grandfather Mattie had been on t’other side and appears to have retained a cynical view of all manner of politicians, and their sons who were still about in the house were all subversive republicans of one stripe, and varying degrees of engagement, or another.
My father had married so was no longer resident and I have no idea who he might have voted for then or mostly later apart from Sinn Féin in latter years. The last person I do know he voted for was former Wexford County Councillor Maurice Roche. A decent man.
What I do know for certain is that all six votes in the house that were cast on June 28 1967 in the Crumlin/Kimmage ward were in the interest of one Laurie Corcoran, Independent. For not only was he a neighbour’s child but he was a member in good standing of Cumann Lúthchleas Gael, Muire na Dea Chomhairle, the club whose founding my family had been part of in 1954.
It was better known as Good Counsel and most of all known for having been the club of Kevin Moran who won two All Ireland football championships in the 1970s with Dublin as well as later trying his hand at the Tan football with some crowd called Manchester United. Kevin’s parents used to own the Kokonut newsagents at the bottom of the Long Mile Road.
I have no memory of the 1967 local elections but I do recall Laurie Corcoran’s name being used as a threat when around about the same time when as a toddler I was festooning myself in a white with black collar and cuffs Counsel jersey and brandishing one of the hurls that were stored under the stairs beside the gas meter in Drimnagh.
I have no idea of whether this had to do with his being charged with the safe keeping of the club laundry and arsenal, or whether it might have been that my Granny and Grandad detected some early sympathy with Communistic doctrines. “Laurie Corcoran will be around soon” was in any event a reason to leave the manly-perfumed jerseys alone.
As far as I can make out from a perusal of the Dublin newspapers around the time of the 1967 local elections, Laurie Corcoran’s chief selling pitch to the good burghers of Crumlin and Drimnagh was that he claimed to be in possession of a list of names of Communists who worked for Dublin Corporation and maybe other agencies charged with the well being of the people of Dublin.
This may have been original in the Irish context but had been taken from the example of Senator Joe McCarthy who had risen to prominence in Washington on the basis of his claim in 1950 that the US State Department was “infested with Communists.” It may not have been infested but subsequent intelligence regarding Alger Hiss and others proved that he was on the money with regard to Stalin’s successful subversion of the top levels of the Democratic administrations of Roosevelt and Truman.
It is unlikely that the Irish Communist Party were similarly successful other than turning the heads of a few lads in the IRA. In any event, Corcoran was successful because the archived results inform me that one Laurie Corcoran topped the poll with 3,211 votes, just over 20% of the total numbers of votes and thus earning himself the title of Alderman to go along with Councillor.
Corcoran also contested the 1969 general election in Dublin South West as an independent, but the red peril must have abated as he only took 7% of the vote and trailed in fifth. His fortunes did improve somewhat the following year when the death of Labour TD Seán Dunne led to a bye-election on March 4, 1970.
Corcoran again ran as an independent but although his vote share increased to over 19% he was not elected. He had, however, attracted the notice of Fianna Fáil and retained his council seat in 1974 in the new ward of Ballyfermot and Kilmainham. He got more votes in that election than new party colleague Eileen Lemass, daughter-in-law of one Granny Treacy’s bete noirs, the former Taoiseach Seán Lemass. His own affiliation with the Irregulars must, however, have been a blow to her heart, I fear.
Laurie contested the 1977 general election for Fianna Fail but this time Eileen Lemass and another Fianna Fáiler Joe Dowling took the seats. He retained his council seat in 1979 but fell well short in the November 1982 general election in Dublin South Central when if memory serves he may have been on the anti-Charlie wing of the party. Which would have lost him any lingering sympathy from at least one of Granny Treacy’s sons and grandsons. And that was the end of his political career, God be good to him.
Good Counsel was also the club of another Fianna Fáil politician, and a slightly more successful one than Laurie Corcoran, in the late Liam Lawlor who along with my uncle Matt, Fergus Cooney, Harry Dalton, Terry Potts and Matt Allen hurled for Dublin in the late 1960s and early 70s.
Lawlor also managed to invoke the wrath of Granny Treacy when for some reason best known to himself he decided to call to the house with an unsuspecting Fianna Fáil tyro in the course of another election. There were only some things that club loyalty might excuse, and that was not one of them.
There will be all sorts of forces at play as people make their way to the polling booths today. Maybe even some as odd as those that decided who got the stroke from the Treacys of Brandon Road.