By the time he was 10 James Power had lived through the Great War, Spanish Flu, the War of independence and the Civil War. He had also confronted the Black and Tans and spent months being force fed a cocktail of goat's milk and stout as doctors fought to stop his young lungs being ravaged by TB.
As he celebrated his 104th birthday in his daughter's south Dublin home on Friday, the man who is older than an independent Ireland expressed amazement at all the "big big changes" he has witnessed since his birth at the end of the summer of 1916.
One of his earliest memories is of the Black and Tans. When he was just five years old he and his father were building a wall on a country road in Kilkenny but were interrupted as a truck pulled up alongside them and decanted a group of men in paramilitary fatigues.
Immediately they started shouting and pointing guns in the boy and his father’s faces.
“They thought my father was building a road block,” he told The Irish Times. “I remember being very scared and then they wanted to arrest my father and it was only when I went into convulsions that their commander told them to leave us alone and off they went,” he said.
“Then in the late 1920s I got consumption and was in hospital in Kilkenny for a month,” he recalled. “For months after that I had a tonic of stout and goat’s milk, the two of them mixed. It was an awful thing to drink but you got used to it,” he said. “And it was great tonic.”
His grim experience in a medical setting back then may explain his loathing of all medicines today and apart from a daily dose of cod liver oil he stoutly refuses to take so much as an aspirin.
The goat’s cheese and Guinness cocktail did not, however, turn him off the black stuff and he remains fund of the occasional bottle of Guinness and the odd drop of whiskey in his tea but apart that he has never been one for vices. “I have never smoked,” he said.
He has been living with his daughter Rita at her Shankhill home for the last seven years and she said the only impact coronavirus has had on her father’s life so far has been to meddle with his summer plans.
She has been looking after him and getting groceries delivered since the middle of March. “I’d be very nervous about the virus” she said. “I am in my seventies as well so we all have to take care.
Every summer the family have decamped to his home place of Thomastown for the summer but that has not been possible this year as the family continues to cocoon as he waits for the curtain to come down on the latest dramatic chapter in the story of his life .
