Con O'Brien

Con O'Brien is a baker’s son from Kanturk whose hopes of musical success give way first to building work in England and then to a mobile fish-and-chip business at home. His marriage to Breedge begins in the exhilaration of mutual attraction, but the memoir follows that promise into a more difficult pattern: Con pursues his own plans while Breedge absorbs much of their cost. When the business collapses, her father’s intervention brings her back to the family home, but he ultimately sides with Con’s claim to authority over his wife.

Background and Meeting

Con grew up in Kanturk, where his father was a baker. He left school at fourteen to enter the bakery, and later played saxophone and sang in a small-town dance band while working there. When the band folded, he joined the stream of people leaving for England. He found work on building sites, but still hoped to become a star in another band. His path into the memoir therefore begins with two kinds of work: the practical trade he learned young and the musical career he continued to imagine.

He met Breedge in an Irish dancehall in London. She was drawn to his looks, confidence, fashionable clothes and knowledge of popular songs; he was attracted by her beauty and confidence, and especially impressed that she was a trained nurse and the daughter of a sergeant of the guards. Their engagement followed almost immediately. The speed of the match conveys the intensity of their mutual admiration, but also helps explain why Breedge expected her family to share her enthusiasm before they had come to know him well.

Marriage and Family Approval

When Breedge brought Con home, his appearance and manner jarred with the conservative world of the barracks. His jewellery and fashionable outfits seemed theatrical there, and his heavy drinking and talkativeness did little to win over her father. The response Breedge received was grudging rather than openly welcoming. She was hurt, but her emotional attachment to her father led her, after returning to London, to recast his qualified response as a strong endorsement. The discrepancy reveals how much she wanted both relationships to agree, even when the evidence did not support that hope.

Breedge postponed entering nursing school to attend the wedding in London and asked her father to give her away. He did not travel to the wedding; he sent a small cheque toward the expenses. This was a concrete measure of the distance between Breedge’s expectation of familial celebration and her father’s limited participation. The marriage nevertheless went ahead, and by 1960 Breedge and Con had a baby, with another child on the way. They were living in a London bedsit while Con found the reality of building work increasingly intolerable in contrast to his earlier hopes of stardom.

The Fish-and-Chip Van

Con’s response to the strain of English life was to propose returning to Ireland and buying a fish-and-chip van. Breedge had saved enough for a house deposit, but the couple used that money to buy the van instead. Con planned to travel wherever crowds gathered: football and hurling matches, race meetings, markets, shows and dances. His bakery training made the cooking manageable, and the idea itself had commercial promise. The memoir distinguishes the viability of the plan from Con’s ability to run it: he lacked the business instinct that might have turned a promising enterprise into lasting security.

The work fell heavily on the household. Breedge and Con’s family peeled and sliced potatoes while Con travelled with the van. When he made a profitable day, he celebrated rather than building on the gain. The family was crowded into a small council house, and Breedge often stayed in a small room that Con’s relatives also needed. She seldom saw her husband; when she did, he was usually tipsy. Con, by contrast, was content with the arrangement, spending time on the road with the van or with old friends in town. The venture thus brought them home geographically without giving Breedge the settled home for which her savings had originally been intended.

The business ended after Con sold everything at a hurling match and celebrated with friends. On the drive home he fell asleep at the wheel. He was not injured, but the van and the enterprise were a total loss. The crash turned a pattern of risky celebration into an irreversible financial consequence: the couple had spent the house deposit, and now the means of earning from their new plan was gone.

Return, Authority, and Narrative Significance

Distressed, Breedge turned to her father, who drove to Kanturk and brought her home. She left her daughter with Con and his parents. Her return might have offered a temporary refuge, but it did not amount to an uncomplicated reconciliation with her father. He soon complained about her staying with him, and eventually reported that Con had come with his mother and taken Breedge home. His earlier act of rescue therefore did not settle the question of where she could live or who would decide her future.

The dispute over whether Breedge should return to England or remain in Kanturk makes Con’s authority within the marriage explicit. In a letter to Rosaleen, Breedge’s father supported Con’s preference and argued that, as head of the household, Con should make the decision and Breedge should help him. The passage does not establish which destination they ultimately chose. It does show the terms on which her father evaluated the choice: not primarily through Breedge’s stated wish to return to London, but through a model of household hierarchy that placed decision-making with her husband.

Con’s trajectory links the memoir’s recurring pressures of work, money and family authority. His musical ambition, building labor and mobile business are successive attempts to find a viable life, but the cost of each change is shared unevenly. Breedge’s savings finance the van; her labor helps sustain it; and after its destruction she must seek shelter from a father who then endorses her husband’s power to decide. The account neither reduces Con to the failed business nor presents his dreams as sufficient justification for their consequences. Instead, it places his hopes alongside the concrete burdens carried by his wife, leaving their unresolved choice between England and Kanturk as a measure of how little control the memoir shows her to have over the household’s direction.