The Sunday they opened the creamery for Dev in Listowel

This is another extract from my book on Kerry's political dynasties which includes a nice anecdote about the lengths the Fianna Fáil organisation went to in 1956 to entertain Eamon de Valera during a visit to Listowel.

(From Heirs to the Kingdom: Kerry's Political Dynasties, O'Brien Press, 2011)

Even five decades after his grandfather was first elected a TD, the 2009 local election campaign of Listowel town councillor, Jimmy Moloney brought home to him the importance of his family name on the doorsteps. Daniel ‘Danny Jim’ Moloney was elected to the Dáil for Fianna Fáil in Kerry North at the 1957 general election, topping the poll and becoming the only TD ever from that party to hail from Listowel, the second largest town in the constituency. His success made him one of just three Fianna Fáil TDs who served simultaneously in Kerry North with Thomas McEllistrim Snr, the others being Stephen Fuller (1937-43), sole survivor of the Ballyseedy atrocity during the Civil War[i] and Eamonn Kissane (1937-51).  

Dan Moloney's campaign leaflet
from 1956 (courtesy Cllr
Jimmy Moloney, Listowel)

Moloney had contested the 1956 by-election in Kerry North, which saw Kathleen O’Connor replace her father, Johnny Connor but his stay in the Dáil was for one term only. At the 1961 general election, Kerry North was changed from a four-seater to a three-seat constituency, which contributed in no small part to Moloney’s defeat. He went on to serve in the Seanad on the Industrial and Commercial Panel until his death in 1963, on the day on which John F. Kennedy began his visit to Ireland.

His daughter, Kay Caball, was elected as a member of Tralee Urban District Council in 1979 and his grand-son, Jimmy Moloney was elected to Listowel Town Council in 2009 establishing yet another family dynasty in the county. Kay Caball was one of the TD’s two children who remembers the hustle and bustle of politics in Listowel in the 1950s. She recounts that like Timothy ‘Chub’ O’Connor TD[ii] sought to do for his native Killorglin in Kerry South, Dan Moloney always prioritised industry and employment for his area. She had moved to Tralee by the 1970s where she says her election to Tralee UDC had more to do with being involved in Fianna Fáil in the town than seeking election simply because she was her father’s daughter.  

Kay now lives in Limerick, where she is involved in Fianna Fáil as chairperson of the party in Limerick East. One of the abiding memories of her father’s time in politics was a visit from Éamon de Valera who called to the family home in the 1950s for lunch:

“I remember that when de Valera was Taoiseach, he came to the house for lunch on a Sunday and even though it was a Sunday, we got the local creamery opened up so that we could get fresh cream for the Taoiseach. And my abiding memory is of all the women fussing around in the kitchen getting things ready while all the men sat around the table with Dev. Women didn’t sit down with the men in those days.”

Caball’s nephew, Jimmy Moloney, the deputy mayor of Listowel in 2010/2011, acknowledges that even so long after his grandfather’s political career had ended, the former TD’s track record in Listowel was the most important factor in his election, especially in terms of achieving support from older voters who would have remembered Danny Jim:

“The name was definitely an asset. It helped the older vote come out, the people who would have known my grandfather. I remember one fellow on the campaign in 2009, he asked me to come around into the back garden and I thought it was going to be some problem about a wall or something. He had the old plaque from the Imperial Stag factory in the town, which is now closed, and it had on it that it was officially opened by Dan Moloney TD. So his name was a big help in my election.”

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[i] Stephen Fuller was the sole survivor of what became known as the Ballyseedy Massacre, one of the most horrific incidents of the Civil War. In response to attacks in other parts of Kerry by anti-Treaty Republicans, Free State soldiers marched a group of Republican prisoners from Ballymullen Barracks in Tralee to Ballyseedy, a few miles outside the town in the early hours of 7 March 1923. There they tied nine prisoners to a land-mine which was detonated. Only Fuller, who was blown to safety by the force of the blast survived.

[ii] Timothy ‘Chub’ O’Connor was a Fianna Fáil TD for Kerry from 1961 to 1981. He stood unsuccessfully as a candidate for the European Parliament in Munster in 1979 and lost his Dáil seat to Labour’s Michael Moynihan in 1981. O’Connor was a county councillor for the Killorglin Electoral Area from 1955 to 1979. He was succeeded for one term on the Council by his son, Teddy in 1979, who served for one term.