Seán Staunton, community man with a broad vision

Community man with a broad vision


Life and times
Áine Ryan

ON the day that SeΡn Staunton was first elected to Westport Urban District Council, having topped the poll as a Fianna FΡil candidate, he attended one of the first Westport Horse Show Society’s annual events on the lawns of Westport House. It was June 13, 1967, and his twenty-third birthday.
Over the coming decades the quintessential community man would be a leading force in the town’s Social Services Centre, the Chamber of Commerce, Mayo Vocational Educational Committee, Ireland West Tourism, Westport Tourism Association, as well as a proactive member of Fianna FΡil, a town councillor and dedicated Editor of The Mayo News. He was also on the first Board of Scoil PhΡdraig and was the first lay chairman of the Sacred Heart Secondary School. SeΡn Staunton also contributed a lifetime of selfless community work to numerous other groups and organisations.
With his characteristic humility, he observed in a recorded interview in December 2011: “Maybe there was a little bit of vanity thrown in there somewhere that you wanted to be involved, but I think by and large you did it for your community and because you wanted to make a contribution.”
Whether SeΡn was aware that some referred to him as ‘The Saint’ is a matter for conjecture, but it would undoubtedly have caused him amusement. Because, despite his perceived  gravitas, he took himself very lightly.
This, however, did not mean that he was not an arch-pragmatist and strategist who, over half a century, was one of the most-influential and effective citizens of Westport and, indeed, County Mayo.
“Things were fairly dire and dismal in Westport in the 1960s and ’70s, and we knew as a [urban district] council we had a lot to do. So over my 37 years on the council, one of the things we always did was cooperate on a fairly high level.”

Humble
IT was humble beginnings for SeΡn Staunton at The Quay, but his memories were all happy ones, with many enduring friendships made throughout the 1940s and ’50s. Because he had an aunt who was a Mercy nun, he was sent to the convent national school for ‘Babies and High Infants’ before transferring to the Christian Brothers, then located where the Dunnes Stores shop is on Castlebar Street today, for the remainder of his primary education.
He was sent to Blackrock College, in Dublin, which was founded by the Holy Ghost Fathers in 1860, for his secondary education, as for a time he harboured thoughts of joining the priesthood. However, he became quite sick during his Leaving Cert year and decided to return home. But Blackrock College had been a positive and eye-opening experience for the teenage Staunton, and the fact that there were other friendly faces from Westport, such as brothers, Stephen, Liam and Seamus Walsh, meant he never felt too lonely. The school’s progressive educational and extra-curricular ethos meant SeΡn learnt Spanish and, in his own words, received ‘a holistic education’.
“We were sent out to local nursing homes and marginalised communities, which was great for giving you a broad outlook on life,” SeΡn said in that interview with Ollie Whyte.
Growing up at The Quay in the late 1940s and ’50s was a simple and happy experience for SeΡn. The traffic was very quiet, and his football was his most prized possession, along with his turns on the family bicycle.
“I have no recollection of ever being bored as a child. There were some orchards in the area which were regularly relieved of their apples, and from time to time we would be given money for the pictures in the Ideal Cinema or the Town Hall,” SeΡn observed glibly.
As he grew into adulthood the regular ‘good bare hair cut’ at old Mr McKenna’s, the barber, cost one shilling, but he was always given two-pence back. A group of friends would collect a few pounds between them and hire a car for the night to go to dances in Achill, Castlebar and Pontoon.

Political patience
WHEN he was asked to stand for Fianna FΡil in 1967, he was aged just 22. He recalls that he ‘thought he could change the world’.
“I soon discovered that I couldn’t change the world, and that patience was the most important characteristic for a public representative. I was there for 37 years, and irrespective of party numbers, we always rotated the chair and kept party-politics out of our decisions.”
While over those four decades of public life SeΡn recognised a growing cynicism in the body politic – a characteristic he clearly acknowledged had damaged his own party during its last term in Government – he remained hopeful that Fianna FΡil would rebuild and become relevant again.
“The last Government was out of touch with people and paid a heavy price for that. An exception was the late Brian Lenihan who, to me, was a man of vision, a statesman who wanted to look into the future.”
Like the late Minster for Finance, SeΡn’s breadth of vision always allowed him to always see beyond the parameters of party-politics. Since the appointment in 2011 of Castlebar native Enda Kenny as Taoiseach and Westport man, a former Fine Gael councillor, Michael Ring, as a Minister of State, he often acknowledged their significance for the county.
Presciently, he observed in that 2011 interview that: “Nobody wants to pay water charges, nobody wants to pay property taxes. I think all of these are going to become an issue in the future, and I hope that decisions aren’t made on the size of people’s properties, because many a pauper is living in a big house. The essential criterion for imposing taxes on people is on their ability to pay.”
Another observation, which has very contemporary reverberations, was that ‘ultimately, those who govern us will always be the democratic decision of the people’. Any party, he argued, who forgets that reality, ‘does it at their peril’. However, he maintained that if  people believed politicians were acting for philanthropic reasons, ‘for the good of the country’, their decisions would be accepted.

Faith
Critical of the culture of greed and self-centredness that flourished throughout the Celtic Tiger years, SeΡn had renewed hope for society since the economic collapse. He welcomed the fact that a lot of people seemed to be caring and looking out for each other and, moreover, returning to the Church and a faith that had for so long been a cornerstone of Irish society.
“I can see faith being more in their lives than had been in the past, and maybe a lot of people began to realise they cannot paddle their own canoe all the time … that maybe there is a superior being out there keeping an eye on us all, and that maybe religion has a real role to play in our lives into the future.”

Elsewhere mayonews.ie
Thousands bid fond farewell to Westport’s SeΡn Staunton
‘Spartacus in a sports-jacket’
Memories of a great man