A New Life: Forget the stereotypical granny. Sylvia Thompson meets one lady whose grey years are her finest yet.
Mamo McDonald is sharp, perceptive, insightful, wise and open to new ideas.
The 76-year-old mother of 11 belies any stereotypical views or unconscious prejudices one may have of older people.
As she chats about her childhood years moving around the country as her father got new posts in the bank, her own short-lived career in the bank, her years rearing a family of 11 children and her husband's untimely death at the age of 56, one quickly realises the wealth of experience she has gathered.
But, even more striking is how, following her husband's death, she developed a tea shop alongside the family clothes shop in Clones, Co Monaghan after she had risen through the ranks of the Irish Countrywomen's Association, becoming national president in 1982.
Then, at 70, she went to UCD to take a higher diploma followed by a master's degree in women's studies.
And it was this late introduction to academia which allowed her to best understand how so often personal realities reflect the value system of a society at a certain point in time.
"Studying helped me to become more analytical in my thinking. I had always seen myself as a gut reaction or personal conviction type of person but it has given me an appreciation for a lot more and encouraged me to read things I wouldn't have tackled before," she explains.
For instance, she discusses at length how women's work in the home - and often in farming - isn't given an economic value and how then later in life women who don't have entitlements gained through paid employment can suffer at the hands of the State.
"It has to be taken on board that older people are entitled to the same rights as other citizens. Sweeping statements about older people being 'bed blockers' is very insulting.
"Some of these patients are suffering from the consequences of neglect and now they are being blamed as victimising others. It's so unfair," she says passionately.
Prior to her academic studies, McDonald had already been involved in what she describes as 'the politics of ageing'.
She chaired Ireland's first national day on ageing in 1987, which led to the setting up of Age & Opportunity, of which she was chairwoman for a number of years. She is currently a director of the Older Women's Network.
"It meant as I was getting older, I was learning about the process and was instilled with positive attitudes through the work. We became very conscious that creativity should play an important part of the work we did," she explains in direct reference to Bealtaine, the month-long countrywide programme of creative activities for older people held every year in May.
A diarist for years herself, McDonald has more recently begun to write poetry and belongs to a poetry group called the Bealtaine poets.
Yet back in Clones, she will be fondly remembered for the tea shop she ran with the help of her dear friends and employees, Patsy and Polly Toye, from 1989 to 1995.
"After Eugene died, I got a housekeeper who became part of the family. She was like a second mother to the children and became a great friend. There was a lot of conflict in the border region at the time. Setting up the tea shop was a matter of survival.
"It was very hard work for a modest living but I enjoyed it. I liked feeding people. I wanted it to be a traditional tea shop - not a coffee shop - so I baked scones, brown bread, apple pies. There were tea cosies on the teapots, round tables, nothing in little packets and the outside was painted in the style of a country shop."
In 1995, the family business was sold and Mamo McDonald moved on. She now lives five miles outside the town of Clones yet remains proud of the town which was probably the one which suffered most during The Troubles.
"The hinterland of the town was in the North so when a lot of the roads along the border were closed down, it deeply affected the town," she says, adding that the town has strong architectural merit with its narrow streets radiating from the town diamond: "Northern towns have diamonds, not squares," she explains.
Her son, Donald McDonald, who ran the family business now works for the Peace and Reconciliation Programme in the area. All of her other children live in Monaghan or the counties north of it.
She readily admits that she doesn't get much time to spend with her grandchildren, adding that there is a lot of exploitation of grandmothers as unofficial childminders.
"A lot of older women are doing it beyond their physical capacity and some aren't even getting paid for it," she says.
Meanwhile, McDonald is on another learning curve herself.
"I'm trying to learn more about information technology at the moment. I think e-mail and websites are one of the greatest ways of keeping older people connected but the key [to successful learning] is for older people themselves to give the courses," she explains.
When we met, she had just finished a reading with her poetry group in the National Gallery.
A few days earlier, she was enjoying the tropical landscape in Madeira and later that evening, she was off to see A Doll's House at the Abbey Theatre.
So, how does she manage to maintain such zestfulness? "I've always found life interesting," she says, simply.
