Rosaleen refuses to give her father part of her wages

Rosaleen’s refusal to surrender part of her wages becomes a contest over money, obligation, and who has the right to speak for the family. When her father, Francis (Frank) McGahern, demands regular payments from his daughter, she turns to John McGahern for help answering letters she finds too distressing to read. Their response contests both the demand and the story of family duty used to justify it, though the surviving account records the end of the correspondence rather than a clear settlement over the wages.

The demand and its justification

Francis’s demand followed an accident settlement involving Lenihan’s van. He appears to have resented the money he had to pay Rosaleen from that settlement and required her to contribute part of her salary every month. Rosaleen lived in a nurses’ home, where room and board were provided, but the money left to her was already limited. His request therefore fell on a young woman with little available income, not on a daughter with an ample surplus.

He framed the payment as a debt of family duty. He had done much for Rosaleen and the rest of the family, he maintained, and received too little gratitude. Now retired and drawing a pension, and with a wife to support, he argued that Rosaleen should help meet the upkeep and education costs of the children still at home. The demand joined a specific monthly claim to a broader account of what the family supposedly owed him: money was presented not simply as income, but as repayment for his past provision and support.

Answering the letters

Francis’s letters became so demanding that Rosaleen contacted John. Because reading them caused her distress, they agreed that she would send the letters to him unopened. John would compose a reply, and Rosaleen would copy it in her own hand and post it. The arrangement preserved her role as the sender while giving her brother responsibility for formulating the response. John describes the task as liberating: writing under the cover of Rosaleen’s identity allowed him to express material he had been holding back, while he tried to retain the reasonableness of her position.

His answer challenged the financial premise of the demand. He pointed to the money Francis had possessed even when he went away to die, his pension and property, and the money he had kept from the sale of their mother’s farm at Aughawillan. Against Francis’s claim that past sacrifice created a present obligation, John set another account of their upbringing, describing it as near starvation, violence, and slavery. His conclusion was that the children owed their father nothing. The reply thus opposed not only the proposed wage payment but also Francis’s authority to define the family’s history and its debts.

Francis’s reply and the correspondence’s end

The next preserved letter is dated 22 May 1960 at Grevisk and addressed to Rosaleen. Francis insisted that their mother had neither willed nor wished her any money, and declared the matter closed. He also referred to Rosaleen’s request for her post office book, treating her tone and general attitude as an insult and saying that this had put him on the alert. His answer shifted the dispute away from the monthly wage demand and toward questions of inheritance, suspicion, and how the children had treated him.

The letter did not answer the argument directly. It went on to say that money could not buy him, then complained that the children had come and gone the previous year without asking, leaving him and Margaret without time from them. A sudden sequence of place names and distances followed, including Malin Head, Tory, St Johnstons, Teelin, and Barnes Gap. John reads this obscure rhetoric as connected with Francis’s time as a sergeant in Donegal, and as carrying both a threat and an assertion of independence. Its abruptness makes it difficult to treat as a reasoned response to Rosaleen’s financial position; the letter instead gathers grievance and assertion without resolving the original disagreement.

Closure and significance

More letters followed. Agnes eventually wrote to Rosaleen asking her to end the correspondence because their father was close to a breakdown, and accused Rosaleen of being unduly influenced by John against him. John answered that letter too, again composing a reply that Rosaleen copied and sent. With that exchange the correspondence stopped; in John’s account, it almost immediately became part of the past. The episode records an act of resistance made through letters rather than a reported face-to-face confrontation: Rosaleen sought help, participated in sending the replies, and did not simply accept her father’s claim on her wages.

The conflict also exposes the competing accounts beneath an apparently practical demand for household money. Francis invokes gratitude, responsibility, and the needs of the family members still at home; John counters with Francis’s pension, property, and proceeds from the Aughawillan farm, as well as the children’s experience of deprivation and violence. The arrangement for answering the letters gives Rosaleen a measure of protection from words she finds distressing, while allowing John to state the case she has authorized him to make. The correspondence ends, but the account does not say that Francis withdrew his demand or that Rosaleen paid him. Its decisive outcome is narrower: the letters stop, and his claim is answered rather than left uncontested.