About the Author
My name is William (Billy) Kavanagh, though my friends know me as Kavo. I was born and raised in Dublin, and rather than trying to paint a story of that childhood, I have attached an excerpt from my new book, 'Through the Glass Darkly,' a tongue in cheek book of life growing up in Ireland. The book will be published at the end of the year. Today I reside in Scottsdale Arizona with my beautiful wife Christine and our twin boys, Nick and Alex.
I was born in Ireland in 1960 and was raised in a typical working-class Dublin neighborhood called Ballyfermot, which is located about six miles outside the city. Growing up there in the sixties and seventies, it’s only boast to fame would be the numerous pubs and bookie offices that filled the shop fronts on the main road. One couldn’t but help notice the lack of any facilities to entertain or accommodate the large number of young children that lived there. This was Catholic Ireland and therefore contraception was illegal, and because of that ecclesiastical obliviaty, Mothers birthed child after child every nine months as regular as clockwork. Having such a population of unsupervised children living there caused all kind of social problems, from school overcrowding to poor medical and dental services. Those very sullied vagabonds, our parents called their children, went about causing all kinds of problems on the streets when they resorted to vandalism, thuggery, fighting and theft for entertainment. Their actions put enormous pressure on their parents who were totally overwhelmed and unprepared to raise their large families made up of very young and very hungry children. Fathers were the sole breadwinners back then, so mothers were expected to stay home to tend house and raise the kids, however, most of the women were so worn out, tired and malnourished from their endless bouts of child birth, that they had little energy to observe and monitor what their kids got up to once they were released from school. The endless rows of unimaginative semi-detached homes that overpowered the landscape, only helped feed the general malaise of the adults there as they tried to provide for those big families. The two parishes that make up this garden of Eden had over fifty thousand people living there. Unemployment was a national epidemic, and Ballyfermot traditionally had the highest joblessness rate in the country, as well as one of the highest crimes rates also. It wasn’t that the people didn’t want to work, they did; the problem was that there were no jobs to be had. Idleness is the fuel on which the funeral pyre of crime is smoldered. Ballyfermot sole redeeming quality was the people who lived there and called it home; they were the embodiment of all things Dublin, from their tough demeanors and sarcastic tongues, to their ability to survive the stagnant existence afforded to all of us there back then. They were the most paradoxical people you will ever encounter on God’s green earth, and anyone not familiar with the culture of a true Dubliner will never fully understand or appreciate these people and their ways.
Excerpt from, 'Through the Glass Darkly.' ©William Kavanagh 2019