House of the Week: Four-bed family Cork home must be a contender
Is this 1,280 sq ft four-bed family home, called Marigold, the most accommodating and fully lived-in family home in Cork?
Given how it was able to cater for a family of five children, most of them six footers-plus and a few of them such as ‘retired’ rugby giant Donncha O’Callaghan grazing the door frames at 6’ 6”, it must be a contender.
Oh, and Marigold also managed to squeeze in a few Cork RTC/CIT students too along the way. Yep, it has been fully lived in, has worked its passage.
The name Marigold picks up on a nickname of matriarch to the O’Callaghan clan, the good-as-gold and competitive sportswoman Marie O’Callaghan. It was pinned on No 4, Glencairn Park, off Rossa Avenue in Cork’s Bishopstown, when she and her husband Hugh moved here more than 40 years ago, with a young and growing family.
They bought No 4 new, in a fast growing suburb just as Bishopstown’s Melbourn Road was being opened up and the RTC was starting to burgeon.
Dad Hugh O’Callaghan could come home and give regular updates on the college’s progress, conveniently, as he was working for a period as a plasterer on the RTC campus.
Tragically, he died at a young age, leaving Marie to rear the couple’s five children, Edward, then aged 13, Ultan, 12, Emmett, aged 11, Donncha aged five, and Emer, aged four.
Sport, she says, came to her rescue, and having been a competitive swimmer and a swimming coach, she threw them in the deep end, literally and metaphorically, of swimming, soccer, rugby, and anything else that kept them active, and out of trouble.
After school, they played ball over the boundary where Melbourn Road scythes through now; they’d come in for tea “and then begged to go out again ‘for a fast tap’.”
Energy expended, they might then do their homework, Marie recalls, and admits she was strict with them, going to call them with a clap of her hands “and they’d come in in a line, like ducks”.
On Sundays, she’d walk them up from Rossa Avenue to Churchfield swimming pool, where she gave lessons for several hours, before walking them home again “and I made them swim all the time when I was coaching.”
Then, they’d walk back down again to Rossa Avenue (an image of ducks in a row come to mind, again), exhausted, no bother to them, ready for a meal that would have been put on a slow cook, many hours beforehand. Job done, day sorted.
Maybe the water, and the exercise, made them all grow so much? The boys played soccer with Glasheen and Rossa Rangers and rugby with Highfield, burning fuel but at least staying out of trouble.
How to feed such a growing, hulking brood, the Irish Examiner asks, Angel Dust? Not far off it: “The answer I’d give when asked was to say I gave them 10:10:20 and a bale of hay,” Marie O’Callaghan says of a much delivered line of deflection.
Over time, the semi-detached bungalow home had to be extended, and a few small rooms out the back occasionally hosted students, and Marie recalls times trying to cross a room with enormous, fatigued bodies stretched out on the floor after hours at play.
Of course, they had to knock a wall, and join a few rooms together just for breathing space: one can imagine some of the lads charging it down, like a scrum pack, leaving a cartoon-like hole in the wall which is now covered up with a convenient arch.
(Ultan O’Callaghan’s still involved in Munster rugby, while his just retired pro-player ‘kid’ brother and Munster stalwart, 39-year-old Donncha, has ticked the winning boxes of Heineken Cup, Grand Slam, Triple Crown, and toured twice with British and Irish Lions.)
The five active O’Callaghan siblings are now (thankfully) fully grown adults, notes Marie with steely pride, and she’s got 15 grandchildren to date (“My children say I’m far softer on them than I was on them, but sure I had to be tough, and I was,” she says).
So, after more than 40 years at Marigold, and full of praise for lovely neighbours, and after some recent surgeries, she says it’s time to sell up, get a place with smaller gardens, and continue to enjoy her large brood.
No 4 Glencairn Park comes to market this month, listed at €294,950 with estate agent Humphrey Hogan, who says the four-bed home, with three reception rooms and two bathrooms, not only has a couple of outbuildings, but also has full planning permission secured for a two-bed detached additional new-build in the side garden.
Like certain members of the O’Callaghan family who were reared here, it has some of the hallmarks of a bustling and bruising past, and in mere property market terms will have an equal appeal to investors, and to private buyers, and has some kudos too as Donncha’s first, formative training ground. Humphrey Hogan says:
“It’s extended, with a large south facing the garden, planning for an additional two-bed house. It has oceans of potential and it is all about the location.”
VERDICT: Line up, line out, Marigold has more than earned its keep, and its caps.
