Sixty years of coming home
“I left a fairly civilised Ireland for what turned out to be a very uncivilised part of Canada,” he recalls, “in the mining areas of northern Saskatchewan, I literally went underground.”
Which doesn’t sound very nice, and certainly wasn’t a very safe environment. But he says he liked it. “There was a lot of privation, but I actually enjoyed working underground, breaking hard rock. I became very proficient at the work.”
He was working the mines in summers only. And for a reason — to pay his way through medical school in Edmonton, Alberta. “There was no such thing as taking a summer holiday when I had to earn enough money to see me through my next year of studies.”
It’s the kind of commitment which takes character, and Joe McKenna ascribes that character to his upbringing in Kilcullen. His father Pat and mother Elizabeth, were strongly religious. “There wasn’t a night went by that the family didn’t say the Rosary together.”
He also looks back at his time in the Kilcullen Boxing Club as a key element in his formation. His father trained the young boxers, and Joe turned out to be pretty handy at ‘the manly art of self-defence’. “He taught us never to be aggressive, but to be able to defend ourselves with whatever skills were necessary.”
The young Joe learned enough of that to reach a couple of national finals in the mecca of amateur boxing, the National Stadium in South Circular Road in Dublin. “I never actually won a final. We would be driven up to the contests, and sometimes I’d have fought three bouts in an evening, and would sleep all the way home.”
Home for his annual visit to Kilcullen, Joe recalls other childhood memories. “I was a bit of a hunter-gatherer when I was small. I’d set snares in Nolans Field and bring home rabbits, and catch eels by setting night-lines in the river. My mother must have hated those eels, but she always told me I was doing a good job. And there was the very occasional trout caught on the line, which maybe made up for it.”
Looking over the bridge at the remains of the weir also tugs at the memory. “The weir was intact then, and Jim Collins’s father had a raft which he used to clear debris along it. We were warned never to go on the raft, but we used to with Jim. One day my brother fell in, and we had to walk up the town with his clothes sodden wet, wondering how we’d tell our mother. But Mrs Dowling spotted us on the way and brought us in, and dried his clothes before we went on home.”
Joe originally thought he was going to be a priest, and through contacts of his Aunt Bridie secured a place at the Jesuit pre-seminary secondary school of Mungret College near Limerick. “I went through it, and got a great education, especially in the classics, Latin and French. But I never heard the call to be a priest, so I headed for Canada instead, having decided on medicine.”
He liked particularly what he describes as Canada being a country ‘where you could compete on your ability, and not on who you knew’. “In Ireland at that time, medicine was a closed shop, with the profession kept in generations of families.”
After he qualified, Joe specialised in thoracic surgery for many years, building up a very successful practice in Toronto, where he still lives. Along the way he rediscovered the strong spiritual ethic of his childhood upbringing, and is a very committed practising Catholic after being healed from years of chronic back pain when visiting a charismatic community.
“Looking back on my days in the mines, I was saved many times from serious injury. That was my guardian angel looking out for me. Because God has a plan for all of us. And after the cathartic effect of the sacrament of reconciliation, I discovered the spiritual component in treating disease.”
Ten years ago he wrote an article suggesting that for all its horribleness, the disease of cancer could be considered a gift as much as a catastrophe. “I made a good case for it. Because, if you die suddenly, say out on the golf course from a heart attack, you don’t get the chance to say ‘God, I’m sorry’. With a cancer, you get a chance to come to terms with the ultimate reality.”
Joe comes back to Kilcullen every year. He says he gets renewed when he does. “It’s a time of prayer and meditation, as well as renewing friendships and healing. I don’t often acknowledge that I need healing, but we all do. Here at home, other people reach out to you.”
This article was first published in the Kildare Nationalist.
