Hugh O’Neill is older than the Irish State.
When he was born on September 7th, 1921, there were “still British soldiers on Grafton Street”, as he puts it, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty had not been signed.
He will be 105 on Monday. Birthdays, he says half in jest, are “old hat when you have had so many of them”.
“People always say to me: ‘What’s the secret to your long life?’ and I always give them the same answer: ‘I haven’t a clue. It’s the luck of the game.’”
According to Gerontology Wiki, an unofficial list of Ireland’s oldest people (there is no official list), O’Neill is the State’s third-oldest man, just behind Paddy Claffey from Co Offaly and John Albert Allen from Sligo, who were also born in 1921.
There’s no official list of Ireland’s oldest drivers, either, but there can’t be many older than O’Neill. He still drives his 2005 Citroën C5 to the shops and to his Mount Merrion Friendship Club in south Dublin every week.
“I’m a better driver than I was when I was in my 20s,” he says. “In your 20s, there wasn’t as much traffic. You weren’t as conscious of your surroundings.
“I’m a really meticulous driver. I drive at 25 miles per hour. I’m this guy that people behind me are honking at to get out of my way.
“I’d like to have a sign printed on the back of my car: ‘I don’t give a damn, honk away.’”
O’Neill lives on his own in Mount Merrion, reads The Irish Times on his phone and only uses his glasses for reading.
Hugh O’Neill (105)
He has the usual aches and pains that come with a person of his vintage, but age has not diminished his sense of humour.
“I have such a quantity of accoutrements inside me that if I live long enough, I’ll be a robot,” he says.
O’Neill’s wife Diane, who was born in England and to whom he was married for 58 years, died in 2009. She was evacuated as a child during the Blitz and ended up living in Ireland. He still misses her.
“I’ve been on my own since then,” he says. “It’s not to be recommended, I can tell you. It’s not so much living on your own, but it’s the loss of someone you are still in love with.”
He is grateful to the Mount Merrion Friendship Club for the social outlet, but notes, in a group for the elderly, that he’s the oldest “by a long shot”.
Hugh O’Neill
O’Neill has lived a healthy lifestyle. He is a moderate drinker and quit smoking when he was 25, but others, he points out, have also lived healthy lives and not lived as long.
He thinks growing up on a farm in Lisronagh, south Tipperary, where the food was healthy and there was plenty of exercise, has been a factor.
“We always ran barefoot as a kid,” he says.
“I had an idyllic childhood.”
When his father died, he carried on farming before opting for a desk job at the age of 29. He eventually became one of the first public relations practitioners in Ireland, before retiring at 50 in 1971.
He then bought the Kiltimon fruit farm near Ashford in Co Wicklow, which he had for more than 30 years. At peak times 300 people would come through the gates to pick their own.
The biggest change in his lifetime in Ireland has been increased wealth. He grew up in an era when many more people were poor and poverty was more extreme.
“I remember young fellows hanging around the streets without the price of a packet of cigarettes wearing nearly ragged clothes,” he says.
“In general, the lives of the ‘have-nots’ have improved. There are very few people destitute and hanging around looking for jobs now, and there are all sorts of health payments and all that sort of thing,” he says.
“For the well-off, the ordinary wealthy people, your doctor, your solicitor, your accountant, your well-off shopkeeper, life has not changed for them as much. They all had a good life.”