If I have a penchant for writing stories and articles, it is partly thanks to Ann Ingle. It was she, the first Editor of our shiny new local paper, NewsFour, who regularly put the arm on me to contribute copy to what was then a very Sandymount-oriented bulletin.
But as well as being neighbours and fellow scribes, Ann and I shared what seemed like a gaggle of daughters who all attended Scoil Mhuire, Lakelands, on Gilford Road. Many times, when my own daughter had much more interesting company than her dad to travel home with, I happily delivered Ann’s daughter Róisín on the bar of my bike to her door on Sandymount Green.
And even before that, when computers and word processors were not an essential in every household, it was Ann Ingle’s secretarial and typing services, conducted in her own house, that put manners on my professional and clinical writings. But she didn’t just type other people’s literary pretensions, she was a writer and reader herself. It was hard to meet Ann without hearing her critique of whatever book she was devouring. As I developed an interest in Joycean matters, I felt that she became quite sceptical of the almost religious approach that surrounds Joyceana. Though at that stage in our lives she had departed Sandymount, and I sadly never got the chance to debate the subject with her.
I’m not sure if the words “free thinker” still mean anything, but in the nineteen-seventies it was the phrase I would have used to describe Ann. Sandymount and its environs may have been accused of having a “Dublin Four” attitude, but ninety percent of its residents were card-carrying conservative Catholics. Then Ann Ingle came along and openly told people that sex and making love was good for you. It’s a wonder NewsFour wasn’t ripped from the newsstands and burned!
In recent years, Ann has become something of a role model for ageing gracefully, moderating and de-stressing one’s lifestyle, decluttering and unencumbering oneself of unnecessary physical belongings. She has described and explained the philosophy of her current life-style on a few occasions in the Irish Times. I only hope I can emulate and put into practice what she preaches.
And what a legacy she will leave behind, in the form of that splendid local newspaper she founded: NewsFour.
Rodney Devitt.
August 2024.
Read more:
Ann Ingle by Eoin Meegan
Tribute to Ann Ingle on her retirement by Denis McKenna
Tribute to Ann Ingle on her retirement by Dermot Lacey
