Chieftain tells executive tale
While Dublin is where her home and work are, Ellen O’Malley Dunlop is constantly drawn back to her grandfather’s birthplace, Clare Island The Interview Áine Ryan THE city is swaying in a sea of multi-coloured umbrellas, while the cobbled side streets are pummeled by a mid-summer shower. Car horns honk, an ambulance hee-haws, one of those colourful new rickshaws slides along. Like a ghost train, the Luas disgorges rural commuters at Heuston Station.
It’s shortly after 6pm on a Friday evening and the woman, who is driving west, talks on her hands-free phone – it’s just a final detail from her busy work diary. Unquestionably, two years into her role as Chief Executive of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Ellen O’Malley Dunlop has helped keep the subject of ‘rape’ centre stage on the social and political agenda.
Naturally, she would be happier if there was no longer a need to lobby for judicial and legal changes to an endemic and insidious form of violence that leaves up to nine out of ten victims of sexual assault and rape not coming forward to the authorities. Naturally too, she would be happier if there was no longer a need for centres such as the one in which she works. But more of that later.
Ellen O’Malley Dunlop now needs to escape the frenzy of city traffic and the grey monotony of suburbia. She needs to navigate onto that high road for the west. After all, in less than four hours’ time – as the sun sets behind Clew Bay and Croagh Patrick recedes into a shadowy slumber – a small boat will slip into Roonagh Harbour and silently await its sole passenger. Fortunately, the west has been basking in glorious sunshine all day and the sea is flat calm.
Born in Rathdowney, County Laois, Ellen O’Malley Dunlop vividly recalls that first voyage to the home of her grandfather, Clare Island.
“I always remember coming in on that first trip. I’ve been coming to the island since I was 16, with my Aunt Lil. We would stay with Sal and Dick in the schoolhouse. I was related to Sal. She was the teacher in the west school and Dick [Hayes] was from Wexford and had come to the island as a lighthouse keeper.”
Ellen’s paternal grandfather was John Sarah O’Malley from the northern island village of Ballytoughey Mór. Like many islanders and fellow Mayomen, due to desperate times he was forced to emigrate at an early age in search of his fortune. It was the 1890s when the young islander set sail across the Atlantic and joined the gold rush.
“The story goes that he was too young and that on the way home on the boat he managed to get the franchise for Singer sewing machines in Ireland. But, of course, his real claim to fame was that he shook hands with Frank James, Jesse’s brother.”
Both John and his brother, Pat, would later fall in love with, and marry, midlands women, Ellen Whelan from Rathdowney and Margaret Ryan from Tipperary.
“Then by the early 1900s, my grandfather had also got the agency for Morris and Austin cars. It was always said that he only went after that so he would have a means to get back to Clare Island.”
County Laois may have been John Sarah O’Malley’s adopted home but Mayo was always where his heart remained.
“He founded the GAA in Rathdowney and its colours were the red and green of Mayo.”
The quixotic irony of this vignette adds an extra twinkle to Ellen’s warm smile. We are sitting in the living room of her cottage on a panoramic cliff-edge on the western tip of Clare Island, in the village of Tormore.
This is no ordinary cottage. And not because its traditional, welcoming ambience, its cluttered organisation, its warm earthiness belies any possible categorisation as a part-time holiday house.
“It must be the only hearth in Ireland around which a house was built,” quipped builder Cyril McCabe when he first received his instructions to build the house on the footprint of the old cottage and, moreover, around the hearth, notwithstanding the fact that islanders had warned ‘that the chimney never drew smoke’.
Ellen explains that after her last relative – a renowned mystic and intellectual – who lived on the island died in 1988, she had an ‘aha’ moment.
“When Michael Joe died, he was the last blood relation I had who actually lived on the island, and with him gone, I was clear that I needed to have my own place here.”
It was her husband Sandy who actually found the place – now an idyll, a refuge for both family and friends – while out walking one day near the guesthouse, where they regularly stayed.
Known as Big Michael’s, a group of islanders were dipping sheep in the ruin when an excited Sandy returned with Ellen. She clearly recalls the poetic moment of discovering a cactus growing from the tumble-down wall of the out-chat, where ‘the woman of the house’ Bridgie had died.
Coincidentally, it is there that Ellen sits during our conversation – oblivious to the echoing clicks of Michael McLaughlin’s camera – as she captures intense snapshots from her passionate engagement with life.
After a number of years working as a primary school teacher, and in her mid-20s, Ellen O’Malley, while living in London, decided to train as a psychotherapist.
“I had a crisis in my own life when I was asking myself some of the bigger questions about life in general, which is what attracted me to psychotherapy initially,” she confides. As an afterthought, she adds lightly that while this new discipline had allowed her ‘to ask the questions’ it didn’t quite provide ‘the answers’.
“I subsequently went on to train as a psychotherapist and group analyst. I worked as a psychotherapist and group analyst for 25 years and I was a trainer of psychotherapists for 15 years in Trinity College, where five colleagues and I ran a Masters programme.”
During this period, Ellen helped establish a low-cost therapy centre in Kimmage, thus debunking the elitist perception of psychotherapy and, unsurprisingly, was also appointed Chair of the Irish Council for Psychotherapy in 1999.
In the meantime, her four rugby-mad boys – John Paul, Donal, Alex and Stuart – were growing up fast and beginning to leave their busy south-west Dublin home.
Ellen suddenly had more time on her hands and was amazed when she applied for a rather daunting job, and was shortlisted. Armed with this confidence boost, some time later when the ad appeared for the position of chief executive of the DRCC, she thought ‘what the hell’.
“Regarding Ireland’s attitude to rape, my wish would be that it would no longer exist. To get to that place we need to include age-related information throughout the education system and implement awareness-raising strategies for our society as a whole,” says Ellen.
The almost omnipresent twinkle has suddenly left her face. Her words may be measured, but they are unequivocal.
“Some of the attitudes that exist about rape are inappropriate and, as with all attitudinal change, it will take a lot of effort to change. The hope would be that given time, and the preventative interventions that are necessary, the crime will become the exception and when it is committed, the perpetrator will be severely punished and the complainant will have separate representation in court and not be just a witness.”
Still talking, Ellen O’Malley Dunlop is moving from her living room. It is the first day of the annual Bard Summer School – established by Ellen, Sandy and others in 1995 – and she is due to direct a session about mythological Ireland two miles away in the island school house.
She has five minutes to get there. But that’s enough time to inhale a sun-soaked moment, imbibe the lazy swell, be tickled by the song of a bathing gull. There’s also time to exhort briefly the ghosts of former school facilitators and friends, John Moriarty and John O’Donohue.
“You know John O’Donohue and John Moriarty are very important mediators for western society at a time when the institutional Church has declined and has lost touch with man’s search for soul and meaning. It is a huge loss for us that they are both dead but a great gift that we have their writings and can continue the inspiration they have been in life.”
Unfortunately, there is no time now for a walk ‘over the forgiving marshy land to Beetle head’. Neither is there time to pull out that guitar and sing her favourite song, Paul Brady’s ‘The Island’. Of course, for Ellen, a former Chieftain of the O’Malley clan, the lyrics go: “I want to take you to Clare Island.”
Ellen’s rusty island jalopy chortles and chokes up the boggy boreen and across through Bunnamohaun and Lecarrow.
