Sunday Blog 199 – 7th September 2025
I’ve been on the road since Friday 23rd August. I’ve flown across the world, driven hundreds of kilometres in Ireland, both in the Republic and Northern Ireland, then travelled to Italy for five days and am now in France. Two Sundays have gone by without a Sunday blog. I either haven’t had the bandwidth (because, 17 hour 45 minute direct flight from Perth to London) or energy (because transit day Ireland to Italy). And I’ve been marinading a blog on Ireland which needed time to simmer. There’s been a re-arranging of some of my bedrock thinking going on.
Today in Australia it’s Fathers Day, and I’m reflecting on my father, his father, and his grandfather (see photo, top row, left to right). Let’s start with my grandfather, the middle black and white image. Patrick Brennan. He was born in 1870 and was the “fine big lad” destined for the priesthood. He left his home in Corballa (see bottom left, a selfie of me showing the humble home where he was born in the background) to study to be a priest at Maynooth (bottom right beautiful ivy-coloured college, me and my American cousin on our Ireland adventure).
To get in the mood for this Ireland trip and to while away the 17 hours 45 minutes Perth-London flying time, I chose to watch the 1996 movie Michael Collins starring Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts. It was an excellent preparation (apart from Julia Roberts’ token female role) and a perfect take-off point for my binge listening to The Rest is History’s podcast series on Ireland. Walking around the streets of Dublin, Belfast, Derry, Donegal, Galway and listening to them debrief of how the map of Ireland is as it is today. Slipping into Northern Ireland with no fanfare, and out of it again so quickly I had to buy another stamp for my postcard. The Ulster stamp I’d bought in Derry wouldn’t work in Letterkenny.
But back to family history and the line of my father. Spoiler alert, my grandfather didn’t become a priest in Ireland.
Family legend has it that a priest preached against Charles Stewart Parnell, a politician who had advocated strongly for Ireland to have Home Rule, i.e. Irish self-government. Parnell had had a long-term affair which became public around 1890, perhaps to stem his huge popularity across Ireland. His advocacy for Home Rule was working, and the revelation of his long-term affair seems to me to have been a cynical move by UK politicians to provoke conservative Catholic opposition to Parnell. In other words, have the priests do their work for them.
As Parnell was a Protestant I would have expected my grandfather to revile him. But he was incensed enough by the anti-Parnell sermon and walked out of Mass. This led to his expulsion from his priesthood studies, from this beautiful seminary of Maynooth.
As the Fine Big Lad from Corballa, who’d been given every educational opportunity by his father, also called Patrick Brennan (mutton chop whiskers, top left), my grandfather left Maynooth and took the boat to Australia, never to return to Ireland again. After about thirty years rambling around the goldfields and wheatbelt and Midland, he married a 21-year-old and had twelve children, eleven who survived infancy. My father Gerard Brennan was his sixth child (top right, classic black and white 1960’s image).
As I made my way through the The Rest Is History podcast, there were other discoveries that highlighted to me the endless complexity and nuance of colonisation in Ireland. When, exactly was the boot of England really pressed against the neck of the Irish, and who exactly felt it? While colonisation began in 1169, it wasn’t until Henry the VIII when the screws tightened, when the overthrow of Irish churches and monasteries were violently enacted. The mystery of why Ireland stuck with the Roman Catholic church while England, Scotland and Wales didn’t can be traced back to how much the church supported the poor. Those with no land, living in poverty weren’t always interested in politics – if it was an English Lord or and Irish Laird they were still disenfranchised and powerless.
And so, fast forward to 1890, when Parnell, a politician who was bringing Ireland closer to Home Rule than it had been for centuries was destroyed by the Catholic Church adherents because of his illicit affair.
When my grandfather made it to Australia, he became a teacher because of his excellent Maynooth education. No matter the heat, he taught in his three piece suit, and my father, who was one of his pupils, commented that he wasn’t a teacher to set an exercise and sit at the front of the class lounging or mopping his brow. He taught actively, full tilt, all day long in the heat in his waistcoat and jacket. It was true that he also began each school year saying in his thick Irish brogue “stand up the Protestants.”
The weedy children from goldfields, wheatbelt and south west towns had no idea what a Protestant actually was. My father and his many brothers who usually made up half of his father’s small classroom would helpfully elbow their classmates and assure them they were Protestants. Uncertainly, the students would stand, only to be marked out for denigration and abuse for the rest of the school year.
So it confounds me to this day that my grandfather threw away his education and opportunity all for Parnell, a Protestant. And this is the complexity I was chewing over while in Ireland. But also, he may have realised that the priesthood was not for him. The vast brood of children he produced would indicate this is a possibility.
How many of us would not be alive if he had stayed listening to the anti-Parnell homily. So thanks Patrick, and thanks Gerard (modified thanks to mutton chop great-grandfather Patrick who sounded like quite a pill) for grandfathering and fathering my siblings and vast amounts of cousins. Happy heavenly Fathers Day.