Joe Reilly: 'I'm making the most of the time I have left'

INTERVIEW: PAUL MURPHY

For someone who just over a month ago was handed a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Joe Reilly is remarkably upbeat.

The news came as a thunderbolt not just to himself, his family, and his party colleagues in Sinn Fein, but also to a host of people whose lives have been touched by his work as a public representative in Navan and Meath over many years. 

However, that doesn’t mean life should stop and he has approached the diagnosis with pragmatism and a determination to “keep going”, leaving little time in his life for contemplation of what might have been, instead looking forward to tomorrow – “one day at a time”.
There has been an ongoing outpouring of goodwill towards a man whose name has become synonymous with Navan. Former general secretary of his party, councillor since 1994, community activist, Northern talks negotiator, former republican prisoner, former editor (yes, in prison with a controlled circulation), a glass-half-full man (without the alcohol), town mayor, eternal optimist, he confesses a certain embarrassment at being chosen for instant public beatification by a grateful public who recognise you have a serious illness and just want to lend their support. 
Just before Christmas he held a party for Sinn Fein colleagues and he directed everyone to dispense with any mawkish or over-sentimental behaviour – “I told them ‘no sad faces’”.
“There are just two people diagnosed with this rare type of cancer in Ireland each year and I feel terribly sorry for the other person," he says.

" The messages coming in help in this situation but it is embarrassing – I suppose it goes with the territory. When you have been around as long as I have in the town and county, you can half expect it but I’d have more sympathy with a person who is maybe working in an office and has to go home and break terrible news to their family and cope with it without a big support base”. 
He had to get his mind around the fact that his doctors had told him that he had a maximum of 12 months to live, with perhaps three to four months of quality of life.

“You have to be strong, strong for yourself first of all but also for your family. I decided quickly that I was not going to be a cancer victim but somebody who lives with cancer," he says.
And he counts himself fortunate that he had a brother who broke the bad news to the rest of the family, including his sisters.

“What I’m doing now is maximising what time I have and getting the most out of it”, he said.
It’s not the first time Joe Reilly has had to steel himself in difficult situations. In 1975, he and other IRA members were caught with explosives at a house in Donabate and he was sentenced to four years in Portlaoise prison. In July 1976 while he and other members were appearing at the Special Criminal Court in Green Street courthouse in Dublin, they managed to break out. Just one – Michael O’Rourke – got away and escaped to the United States. Joe Reilly and the others were caught in surrounding streets. Just three weeks before he was to be released after the four-year term, he was charged with escaping from prison and was given a 10-year sentence. 
However, he once said that as bad as conditions were for the prisoners – “and they were bad, including beatings and constant strip searches” – they were 10 times worse for family members who had to deal with the daily struggles of life outside and who could never physically touch him while he was in there.

Joe Reilly is a Commons Road man, “the place of the yellow clay for building the mud wall houses”, the son of a father who worked in Geraghty’s factory and a home making mother. Between them they reared six children. His father died aged 65 and his mother then became the centre of the home, living into her mid-90s and passing away on St Stephen’s Day two years ago. 
“They reared the family during tough times. I just don’t know how they managed to feed and clothe six of us in the ’50s and ’60s. Women in particular performed miracles in those days. They had to be creative, productive – they just had to make sure that children went to bed at night with full stomachs”.
He started school at the Mercy Convent and then went on to Scoil Mhuire for boys. It was a school of its era, a place where corporal punishment was handed out liberally by the teachers. “It was an era when adults were able to beat up children. It’s all different now and I’m glad of that”. 
For working class boys of the time “getting a trade” was their highest aspiration and Joe Reilly was nudged into engineering. His one regret, even now, is that he did not get the opportunity to study at university.
Although he came from a family that was not politically active, Joe Reilly’s political awakening came through “the little box in the corner” which in the 1960s brought the world into Irish livingrooms. Images of the civil rights marches in the US, the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa, and the Vietnam War flickered across the screen. Then came the explosion of pent-up frustration over civil rights in the North, the news bulletins dominated by the batoning of the civil rights marchers in Derry in 1968, the attack by loyalists on the Burntollet March, the rioting in Derry in 1969.
“When I was incarcerated I decided to take it a day at a time. I’m flexible – when in Rome you do as the Romans do. I had no problem settling in. I maximised every day. I had no Irish so I learned Irish. I taught Irish. I edited a newspaper in Irish and English (the photocopied A4 pages were stapled together into 20-30 page newspapers by the prison authorities). I studied, I read – in fact there were days when I wasn’t able to complete what I set out to do early in the day”.

 

Cllr Joe Reilly photographed by Seamus Farrelly in the Newgrange Hotel

“When I came out in '85 I took the summer out to consider my options and I enjoyed that summer of freedom. I stood as a candidate in the 1987 General Election but I didn’t believe in an abstentionist policy. I thought that to achieve anything you had to be in there. But it was an uphill battle. Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act was in full force and we found it hard to get our message out. We knew that in every town, village and crossroads in Meath there were republicans. Ok, sometimes they were turned off by the activities of the IRA but they were still there and you had to reach out to them“.

As he faces the biggest battle of his life over the next few months, Joe Reilly has no regrets. “There is nothing big that I would change. I have no regrets about what I didn’t get done. I’ve had 67 years of a good life. I’m happy with our political scene – Sinn Fein has come from 88 votes and 29 pounds in Comhairle Ceanntair funds to eight councillors and a TD. I might have been a figurehead but there are many people in the background who put in the hard slog. 

“We have had some achievements – the Solstice Arts Centre, Crann, Daoine Oige, we have 1,000 children attending a child care centre over the county, and we have houses planned for a site at the back of the Aura centre. 
“Navan has a really, really bright future and that’s something we can all look forward to.”