Easing an early life crisis for a little boy called Mary

Country Living with Francis Farragher

One of the terrible crosses (well it seemed so at the time) from being a boy child born in the month of May, was the custom for parents to add on the name Mary on the birth certificate, because of the connection of the fifth month of the year with devotion to the Virgin Mary.

So it wasn’t good enough just to be called John Francis . . . no, not at all . . . the Mary bit had to be stuck on at the end, and in a house with no sisters, my siblings would occasionally taunt me with the line of: ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary’.

My aversion to the Mary title had nothing to do with disrespect for religion but how could any self-respecting, hard core, macho country lad be happy with a girl’s name attached to his birth cert.

Only once was there a little smidgen of consolation when a published list – either in the Tuam Herald or Connacht Tribune newspapers – of those who had graduated was included in the local papers.

Strange as it may seem, that was the practice of the time (the 1960s), with the full list of graduates, honours and pass, published in the local papers, editions that would be forever treasured and stored away, as a proud little momentum of family success.

Anyway in one particular edition during the mid-60s or so, one of Galway’s three-in-a-row footballers – they were the Man. United or Liverpool of our day – had his name listed in full for attaining degree status.

To this day, if memory isn’t playing tricks with me, I think it was the late Enda Colleran from Moylough, the two-in-a-row All-Ireland winning captain ’65 and ’66, a clean cut hero of the time who we absolutely adored as kids of that era.

When the paper came out, the mother took particular relish in reading out the name and leaning on the Mary word, she pronounced: “Now look at that great footballer, isn’t he proud to be called, Mary.”

My reply wasn’t verbal . . . just a reluctant contortion of the face acknowledging the written fact that one of the great heroes of the time hadn’t minded the name Mary being tagged onto him, not like the unappreciative brat in Abbey Road, who had pleaded fruitlessly on a number of occasions for something to be done about the ‘striking out’ of this word from his official file.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.