105-year-old attributes long life to “the good Lord himself”

When Margaret Coleman was just three weeks old, the first event of the 1916 Easter Rising took place when Padraig Pearse stood outside the GPO in Dublin and read out the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.

105 years later, Margaret is hale and hearty and says she attributes her long life to “the Good Lord Himself.” While she doesn’t remember anything about the Easter Rising she does remember the Black and Tans “going around in trucks” during the War of Independence from 1919 to 1921 when she was very young.

Although she was born Margaret Corcoran in the Roscommon townsland of Buck Hill, Fairymount, halfway between Castlerea and Ballaghadereen, Margaret left Ireland in her teens to begin training as a nurse in England.

“When I went to England I didn’t have a very high opinion of the English, but I ended up having a very good life over there, and I found them to be very fair and honest,” she says.

After retiring at 65 years old, Margaret decided to return to Ireland and she ended up living in Athlone when her cousin, the late Br Frank McGovern, asked her and her husband to come to Athlone to help him in his work with people suffering from addictions at the Marist Rehabilitation Centre.

“That’s how we ended up buying a house in Athlone and I’m here ever since,” she says, adding that she settled very quickly into the local community and has great friends and neighbours.

As she quietly celebrated her birthday in her Athlone home on Tuesday of last week, the sprightly 105-year old recalled how she met her husband, John Henry Coleman, who was the local postman.

“I came home from England in 1949 for a visit because my mother, Ann (née Carroll) had rheumatoid arthritis, and everyone who came to our house got a cup of tea, and maybe a slice of bread and butter, so the postman came and we set eyes on each other and he ended up giving up his job and following me back to England, so it must have been love,” she laughingly admits.

The couple got married in 1954 and bought a house in Mottingham, on the outskirts of London, where they reared three children, Sean, Mary and a third son, Gerard, whom they eventually adopted having fostered him for a number of years.

Margaret’s husband had an office job during his first few years in England “which he hated” she says, and then he got a job as a postman and he loved his work and was “very good and kind to the people” he met and got to know on his daily rounds.

Margaret is the last surviving member of her family (their Dad was Pat Corcoran from County Sligo) having been predeceased by her six sisters and three brothers, and she still wonders to this day how they were all taken and she was left. “Maybe it’s hard to kill a bad thing,” she jokes. “I must have been left here for some reason, even if I don’t know what it is.”

A lifelong lover of reading, she says she still loves to read and her eyesight is good. “I do wear glasses to read, and I mostly read religious books now, because faith is very important to me and always was.”

As someone who has witnessed immense changes in society over the course of her long life, it saddens Margaret Coleman to see how Ireland has changed to a much more liberal way of life, and says she is strongly opposed to the legalisation of abortion and same-sex marriage.

“Whatever happened to our country?” she wonders, adding that she says “four or five Rosaries a day, and prays for everybody.” Having grown up in a house where faith was a very important part of daily life, Margaret says she managed to retain a very strong faith throughout her life and would be “lost” without it.

“I was in the Legion of Mary for years and we always went to the First Fridays, so I have been faithful to the church for my whole life and I think it has stood to me,” she says.

Among the many things she can vividly recall from her long life is the bombing of England during World War II.

“I was nursing the troops, and when I was working in Essex Hospital the Germans dropped a bomb on the hospital and the whole top floor had to evacuated….it was a very scary time for everyone who lived through it.”

Margaret’s husband passed away in 2015, after 61 years of marriage, and when asked if they managed to remain in love after more than six decades together, she quickly asks this reporter “Are you married yourself? If you are then you know the story, we were good friends, and we tolerated each other,” she mischievously adds.

Margaret has two grandsons, Sean, who is the only child of her daughter, Mary (Johnson) and her late husband, and Éanna, who is the only child of Margaret’s son, Sean and his wife, Máire,

While enjoying what she describes as “reasonably good health” at the moment, and expressing delight at having acquired a walking aid in recent weeks, Margaret Coleman says she doesn’t go outdoors much at this stage.

She had lots of phonecalls and well wishes for her 105th birthday and says that, although she doesn’t drink alcohol, she did drink “a big glass of Baileys” for her birthday and got “the best sleep in years” after it!

As for what she thinks of the coronavirus pandemic, she says it is “a chastisement for the world” and she doesn’t care what other people think of her views.

“I am not a bit afraid of it, and I didn’t take the vaccine because I don’t think it would make any difference to me at this stage.”