Chapter One
Early Years Rooskey, County Roscommon, is a tiny place sitting beside Ireland’s largest river, the Shannon. The village is part of Roscommon but is at the conjunction of Counties Roscommon, Longford and Leitrim. These Shannon counties have, historically, been amongst the poorest counties in Ireland. In a Central Statistics Office survey of Irish counties in 2018, Roscommon emerged as the second poorest after Donegal. It was into this county that Albert Reynolds was born on 3 November 1932. His mother, Catherine Dillon, was from the nearby county of Leitrim, the county of origin of the Reynolds clan. As a young woman, she had emigrated to the United States in search of work, like so many others from the impoverished west of Ireland counties. On a return visit to Ireland to see her sister, then living in Rooskey, she met John P. Reynolds, also a resident of the village. They married and settled down. Albert Reynolds is by far the most famous person to have been resident in the village. The only other person of great note was a Michael Whelahan, who, in 1878, became both captain and co-founder, with a Fr Hannan, of the Scottish soccer club Hibernians. The club’s founders recognised a need among the poor Irish populations living in Edinburgh and so the club was born. The website of the Hibernian Historical Trust gives some background on living in Roscommon at around the time Albert Reynolds’ father, John, would have been growing up: ‘The Whelahan family was typical among those living in the Western province of Connaught at that time – they scratched a meagre existence from the soil. The great famine had traumatic effects on peasant families like the Whelahans, as their communities were decimated and their folk customs, pastimes and Gaelic language lapsed with the increased need to speak English.’1 -1-
