The Reynolds At Home: A behind the scenes look at the private lives of the Taoiseach and his family.
The stained pine garden shed under a mature tree on the lawn is actually a security hut, but the officer on duty seems to notice you almost as little as you do him until you get right up on the terrace outside the unlocked back door.
Then he puts down his cup of tea and emerges, jangling keys and looking mildly amused.
“Yeah, I thought that’s where you were headed all right,” he says, ambling ahead to rap on the glass of the back door. “Is she expecting you?”
If he’d just had a glance into Kathleen’s spotless kitchen, there would have been little need to ask. Inside, the Taoiseach’s wife is bustling around the perfectly-fitted units, dressed in the sort of chic and pricey little suit that other Irish women keep for “good” weddings, setting out handmade dark chocolate cookies on a china plate and grinding fresh coffee.
She is expecting us, of course, although you can’t help suspecting that the Reynolds’ home, and the woman who is its source of light and life and slightly discordant humming, are always this pretty and this welcoming. Kathleen stands in the living room, propping pastel armchair cushions about her seven month old grandson Robert, and fussing just a little.
“Now you’re certain you wouldn’t rather tea? Have one of those chocolate biscuits, I love them, well, I don’t know where the Big Chief is, I’ll have to ring his office and get them to hunt him straight home.”
Women like Kathleen Reynolds don’t actually exist in American politics, of course, and so the spin doctors and the media meisters have to invent them.
Family values are suddenly the gilt-edged securities in the top U.S. politician’s ambition portfolio, which is why you’ve got Barbara Bush and Hilary Clinton racing each other to the kitchen stove to turn out another batch of brownies and banging on about the detergent that gets his shirts bluey-white.
But the difference between Kathleen and the Barbaras and the Hilarys is that Kathleen is for real. When she tells you that she wouldn’t let anyone else iron Albert’s shirts, “even when I get sick” (recovering from breast cancer surgery, actually), you know she really means it. A little room off the corridor of their elegant Ballsbridge apartment is known as “Mam’s Office,” it’s her laundry room and it’s where she says she feels at home.
When she laments “the state of the place” and it looks as though it’s all set for “The World of Interiors” to do a feature shoot, you wonder if she’s having you on. And when she admits she worries herself sick about “the children, their exams, politics, everything”, “you wonder just how long it will be before Bill Clinton’s campaign manager arrives waving his cheque book and hires her as a consultant.
Actually, he’d have to recruit the entire, effortlessly beautiful and singular successful Reynolds family too, all five strikingly lovely girls with their mother’s dark hair and delicate peach-skinned features, the two tall handsome boys and seven month old Robert, a golden cherub with a wise gummy smile. This morning, Robert has just arrived at Granny’s in the arms of his mum Ann, eldest son Philip’s wife, and he sits propped on the sofa, crumpling a noisy chocolate box wrapper with the rapt frown of a traditional accordion player.
The seven Reynolds children have made carcers for themselves in business, economics and law, the eldest, Philip, runs the pet food factory which made his father a millionaire, so little Robert, says Kathleen, is the family’s only budding politician. She concedes, though that he “Il never make the diplomatic corps: “Well, you should have heard the laughs out of him the other night when we brought him in to Albert and said, ‘say goodnight to the Big Chief.’”‘ She chuckles, tears in her eyes at the memory, “he pointed at his granddad and he just laughed and laughed.” Just then, the Taoiseach’s shadow passes the sitting room window, Kathleen announces, “Here comes the Big Chief,” and little Robert begins to gurgle right on cue.
There’s much domestic bustle before the Taoiseach finally gets settled on the sofa beside his wife: no, he hasn’t had lunch, no, he doesn’t want a coffee, he’ll get a sandwich later at the office, yes, there’s a function tonight so he promises he’ll eat a proper dinner.
“Honestly, he’d forget to eat unless I kept after him,” says Kathleen, “sometimes he wouldn’t even know if he’s had a bite or not.”
It went against the grain, she admits, to have been the source of most of the worry in the house at one of the most crucial periods in the Reynolds’ family history.
Her breast cancer was first diagnosed last November, just a few days after her husband was sensationally sacked from the Government front bench for leading a challenge to the then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey.
It was on the evening of a major party dinner, the annual Cairde Fail function, when Kathleen first found the lump in her armpit. “I’d had an ache in my shoulder. my upper arm”, says Kathleen, running a palm over the smooth tanned skin of her upper chest. ” I was having a shower when I found this lump, the size of a golf ball.” She showed it to her daughter Kathy, and they summoned a doctor that same evening. “But we had to go on to the dinner,” the Taoiseach cuts in. “If I hadn’t turned up, after being fired, there’d be all kinds of talk. And, anyway, it’s always something you think will happen to someone else.” Still it happened to them. Within a week cancer had been diagnosed and Kathleen underwent major surgery. “I felt a bit bad about it happening at that time, because I’m the worrier in the house, I’m always down on my knees asking God for favors – people have this notion that I’m the bubbly type but, sure, someone has to do the worrying….
“…But you never worry about yourself,” the Taoiseach adds: the Reynolds have the long-married couple’s habit of finishing each other’s sentences. “You, now, spot on.”
“That’s her illness muted the joy of his first six months at the summit of his mountain of political ambitions. “The first six months has been tough and testing. All sorts of social issues that had lain dormant for years suddenly flared up when I took office: rape, abortion, contraception; sure l was only in the job a few days when that X Case (where a 14-year-old alleged rape victim was prevented from obtaining an abortion in Britain. A High Court decision was later reversed by the Supreme Court) blew up. And it’s been six months in which Kathleen couldn’t participate, so that made it all the more difficult.”
“But the girls were marvelous,” Kathleen hurriedly adds, “they went to all the official functions with him, and they managed great. Now I’m getting back to it, although I’m taking it easy, because I know you’re never really cured of cancer, even though I’ve got the all-clear and I feel healthier than I have for years.” She’s regained a healthy appetite, too, she says, and soon she’ll be able to accompany the Taoiseach on official trips abroad.
Kathleen rocks with laughter at the memory of the outlandish meals they’ve had to stomach for Ireland for fear of insulting foreign hosts: “They’d be giving you raw fish and all kinds of things and saying, it’s good for your eyes, good for your skin, good for your hair.”
Actually, Kathleen Reynolds’ hair and eyes and skin need no tonics to glow.
Photographs don’t do her justice because she is illuminated as much by her goodness as by her newly-recovered health: she had poor circulation and feels cold all the time, a fire burns in the grate on this humid summer day, but a warmth really does leave the room when she bustles out to get more coffee.
They’ve been married for more than 30 years, they met in McGettricks’ auctioneers and general drapers in Ballymote.
County Sligo when Kathleen did secretarial work and Albert was a stranger in town, a handsome novelty in a sharp overcoat.
“Oh, all the girls were after him, he looked so well in his Crombie coat.” That was before he had the notion of converting animal offal into pet foods, when he was still employed by CIE, the semi-state transport company. “The bank managers in town were probably better catches,” he laughs now, “although I was a good long-term investment.”
The Taoiseach is a different man at home with his family. The Big Chief takes a back seat and speaks with the resignation of a man well accustomed to, but still puzzled by, the concerns and caprices of a household of women.
“We’ve been lucky with the kids,” the Taoiseach says. All seven children, Philip, Miriam. Emer, Leonie, Kathy, Andrea and Albert Junior, are well set on their careers, none of the seven ever gave them cause for worry and none – and the Reynolds seem relieved at this — is keen on politics. They are plainly proud of their dad: young Albert, who works in banking in New York was “cock of the walk” in his office when pictures of the Taoiseach appeared on international front covers after the Irish vote for Maastricht effectively rescued the Treaty last June, his father says, but “they all saw how much work has to be done at ground level.”
Now the Taoiseach’s own ambitions in politics have more or less run their course, he says. “I won’t be overstaying my welcome now, l’ve gone as far as I can go and Iknow there’s life after politics. I’d love to do law, it’s something that’s always interested me, and I think I have an aptitude for it. Even before I entered politics, I used to help out with hard luck cases, winning against the odds always gave me real satisfaction.”
He has needed all his articulation in recent months. “I think I was the best man for the job when all these social issues emerged The kids here are a great sounding board, their friends are constantly in and out and they don’t mince words when they give me their opinions, I can tell you that. And I enjoy a debate with young people, I used to love going to the universities when I was a Minister to talk to a room of 250 of them, although some found it hard to understand why I couldn’t do anything at the time of the X Case, why couldn’t I change the law, and I had to explain, it was out of my hands. It was up to the courts then…. Kathleen was as upset as anyone else over the recent rape and abortion controversies, she says, worried as the mother of daughters, and uncertain as the thousands of women like her who called the radio stations and wrote to the newspapers while the debates raged to talk about their dismay and confusion. “It was an awful time.” she says, “awful, God help us.”
If she is eager to see her husband put such stressful no-win trials behind him, at a time of their lives when other couples begin to take it easy, Kathleen Reynolds will never tell him.”When I met him first,” she says, “he was working 18 hours a day and more, all the hours God sent, and he’s the very same still. That’s the way he is, I didn’t try to change him then and I won’t try now. If I was to give advice to a young couple starting out now — and I look at Philip and Ann and I see ourselves 30 years ago — I’d say do your own thing, be yourself… but stick with it. Because it’s worth it.”
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the September 1992 issue of Irish America. ♦
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