Clodagh Finn: Meet the woman who ran the Mansion House for decades

She also moved into the mayor’s apartments in the Mansion House, living there from 1924 to 1930, when Dublin Corporation was dissolved and there was no lord mayor.

She attended all the big parliamentary meetings, which were then held in the Mansion House. She knew many prominent public figures and checked the credentials of those coming and going.

On that day in 1921, though, she had to revise her assessment of the lord mayor of Cork. His Dublin counterpart, Laurence O’Neill, looked out the window of his study and recognised Ó Ceallacháin’s walk as he made his way down the gravel path. He told Mary O’Sullivan to call him back.

“I had to apologise humbly,” she recalls in a witness statement that offers a fascinating glimpse into life behind the scenes at the Mansion House from 1901 to 1942.

Happily, the lord mayor of Cork did not take offence.

“He laughed and said he realised my difficulty,” she writes.

Later that day, Éamon de Valera, whom Mary tells us was “wearing a moustache”, arrived and set up his office in the Drawing Room of the Mansion House.

Ringside seat on history

Mary O’Sullivan’s Bureau of Military History witness statement takes us on an evocative whistlestop tour of her 40-year career. During that time, she worked as secretary to some 13 Lord Mayors of Dublin, including Alfie Byrne and the first female lord mayor Kathleen Clarke.

She had a ringside seat on history. She witnessed the pain inflicted by the lockout strikes of 1913, saw a suffragette throw a hatchet at a car during British prime minister Asquith’s visit in 1914, and worked with the lord mayor as he tried to get concessions for the Mountjoy hunger strikers of 1917.

“The lord mayor [Laurence O’Neill] was constantly coming and going to Mountjoy and the Castle … The ’phone was also in constant use about the position of the prisoners on hunger strike. The lord mayor was desperately worried about it. All his worry during that time and later brought him into bad health and he eventually got a bad nervous breakdown,” she wrote.

He was wonderfully brave, though, she added, describing the threatening letters he received after attending the funeral of assassinated lord mayor Thomas MacCurtain in Cork in 1920.

“Some of them had coffins and skull and crossbones drawn on them. I opened several of them myself,” she writes.

“The first I opened gave me a great shock and I took it down to the City Hall where he [Lord Mayor O’Neill] was attending a meeting as I was afraid he would be shot before he reached home.”

On another occasion, Michael Collins was having tea with the lord mayor in the Mansion House when he saw soldiers approach. “Michael took a brush from one of the attendants and started to sweep the Round Room with them, and he thus escaped arrest,” she wrote.

Recognition 

The mayors, politicians, and prominent figures of the day — predominately men — mentioned by Mary are all well-known, though few will recognise her name. Then again, that is not quite true. In recent years, historian Mary Muldowney and Fanchea Gibson, herself a former manager of the Office of the lord mayor, have shone a very welcome light on this woman who served for more than four decades.

There was no known photograph of Mary O’Sullivan, which is so often the case when it comes to illustrating the lives of the women who contributed so much to the foundation of the State, and beyond.

What we didn’t realise up to now, though, was that Mary O’Sullivan, aka Aunt Minnie, was hiding in plain sight

Let me explain. Your curious correspondent sent out a call on Twitter asking if anyone had an image of this formidable lady. Nothing for a year and then, like a message in a bottle reaches the shore, I heard from her great-nephew Gerald Hickey, who lives in England. He didn’t have a photo, but said he had cousins in Kerry, Mary O’Sullivan’s native county, and would enquire. The cousins were none other than close school friends of mine, Deirdre and Patricia McElligott. They enlisted the help of their cousin Irene Brosnan and searched the family album.

They turned up several photos of Aunt Minnie, a woman who was talked about in the family circle for years. Indeed, in visits to their home, I may even have heard snippets about this rather grand lady in passing. None of them knew her personally, as she died in 1962, but even that piece of information was new.

They sent an obituary, too, which when combined with Mary O’Sullivan’s own words begins to paint a more complete picture of a woman born in Killorglin, Co Kerry, in the 1880s and probably educated at boarding school.

Mary, herself, tells us that she got the job in the Mansion House directly after school in 1901 because her family knew the then Lord Mayor Timothy Charles Harrington. She would spend the rest of her working life there until her retirement, due to ill health, in 1942.

Her sister Hanna joined her in Dublin and worked as her housekeeper in their shared home on the North Circular Road. There’s also an interesting snippet detailing how Mary got compensation of £6 after her bicycle was damaged in a fire at cycle agents JJ Kelly and Company in Dublin city centre.

Though, it’s very possible she was interested in cars too. There’s a photograph, dated 1932, of her on a visit with two friends to Spa in Belgium, home of the Belgian Grand Prix. Did she go there to watch it?

The family isn’t entirely sure, but it goes to show how a portrait expands when you try to look at a woman in both a professional and a private capacity.

Her obituary in the Irish Press in March 1962 recalled an ardent worker and a close friend of de Valera’s who had organised meetings and functions and raised money for several charities. She worked, the paper said, in the background.

Isn’t it about time that Mary “Minnie” O’Sullivan returned to the foreground?