![\"Jessica](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/5093430_4_articleinlinemobile_image1.jpeg\" "\\"Jessica")
Jessica Anne Rose with her Grandad O\u2019Brien who played hurling for Glen Rovers.<\/p>\nIt hits me as we pass St Joseph\u2019s Church and both instinctively bless ourselves one- handed. Today, my 89-year-old grandad is driving me to work, and I\u2019m quite embarrassed about it.<\/p>\n
My income as a freelance journalist is not always guaranteed, so in favour of working in a career I love, I\u2019ve placed car ownership on hold. Grandad doesn\u2019t mind, though, and laughs when I call him 20 minutes after I\u2019ve arrived to make sure he got home okay.<\/p>\n
Grandad O\u2019Brien has never really gotten old, in my eyes. He launches himself at life with the determination of a young man still out on the pitch. When doctors told him to quit smoking, he went cold turkey after over 50 years of the habit. He was back driving three weeks after a knee replacement, and every day walks two laps of the Tank Field dressed smartly in his jumper and button-down.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m blessed to still have both my grandads, and to be able to maintain a relationship with them despite our inevitable differences.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an exceptionally odd feeling to become an adult and realise that so much has changed that you have no choice but to help yourself. You can\u2019t really ask for help when it comes to things like the job market, and trying to compare my milestones to that of my grandads\u2019 at my age is spiral-inducing, as they were both married fathers.<\/p>\n
\n It would be very easy for them to be dubious about the path I\u2019ve chosen. Both place a great deal of worth on both education and job security – as do I, but I didn\u2019t inherit their sporting talents or business knowledge.\n <\/p>\n
Grandad O\u2019Brien hurled for Glen Rovers when he was at school at North Mon. Thanks to his prowess, the school arranged for him to stay on until his final year so he could still play for them. If it wasn\u2019t for sport, he wouldn\u2019t have been able to pass his Leaving Cert in the 1950s.<\/p>\n
Jessica Anne Rose with her Grandad O\u2019Brien who played hurling for Glen Rovers.<\/p>\n
One Christmas, he proudly presented me with a bracelet that once belonged to my late grandmother that I still don\u2019t believe I am deserving enough to own. It contains five medals, dating from 1958 to 1962. They range from his county wins to a Munster Colleges win to a Harty Cup win.<\/p>\n
Grandad O\u2019Brien played (always wearing his cap) as a goalkeeper for Glen Rovers, and his hard-won achievements now hung off my wrist, as it once did on my grandmother\u2019s. The act seemed to come so easy to him, despite setting myself and the rest of the room off into tears.<\/p>\n
Grandad O\u2019Brien is a stoic man who prefers to get on with whatever is thrown his way – but this cannot ever be mistaken as heartlessness. He has always loved so deeply. With an occasional slagging, yes, but that is out of love, too.<\/p>\n
He and my late grandmother put their five boys through private school, later helping four through college, as he worked at the Coca-Cola factory until its closure. He was a car salesman after that, and accompanied dad to the dealership for an eloquent haggle when he bought his current car.<\/p>\n
Though education has always been of great importance to him, Grandad O\u2019Brien often checks in warily to see if I\u2019m \u201cthinking of adding another few letters to my name\u201d through college. He sees the value in it, but is happier to see me out working, and honestly, so am I.<\/p>\n
Next year he will be 90, and I imagine he will just shrug when it comes, perhaps suggesting a few pints.<\/p>\n
On the other side of the coin, a running joke on my mom\u2019s side of the family is that Grandad Larkin\u2019s \u201cbladder is very close to his eye\u201d, and I assume that\u2019s where I got my sentimentalism from. With mom\u2019s help, he has tracked and scrapbooked his ancestors back to the 1800s. He tells stories that are so fantastically emotional that he cries, despite them being complete fiction. He shares my anxious squirrel brain, bursting into song at random intervals and speaking every thought out loud as it enters his head.<\/p>\n
I visit him and my gran every Friday, as I have done since I was a baby, as I intend to do for whatever time we have together.<\/p>\n
Grandad Larkin\u2019s interests have also always been in sports – he played Gaelic football at club level with Douglas GAA, working his way up to win two Munster Minor Football Championships from 1960-1961. Before finding himself in a sports journalism career, he won an All Ireland Minor medal in 1961, marking the first time Cork took home the title.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the reason Grandad Larkin has come to accept my long haul effort at a journalism career is because he sees part of his younger self in the way I work. He started off as a typesetter for the Cork Examiner, as it was then, individually inputting each letter to be printed for the next day\u2019s paper. He worked his way up as a sports journalist, reporting on school matches, and eventually became an Hon. Uachtar\u00e1in of Douglas GAA club.<\/p>\n
At a glance, we look like two people with nothing in common, but we both possess an ability to comfortably sit in silence, and incidentally, ask each other increasingly direct questions out of the blue over cups of tea.<\/p>\n
\n He keeps his week\u2019s worth of newspapers for me to look through, going out of his way to pick up the Farming Crossword for me each Thursday, and always greets me in the exact same way. In return, I fill him in on the details of my cousins\u2019 budding love lives.\n <\/p>\n
Last Christmas, I bought both my grandads a \u2018directed memoir\u2019 that had prompts for them to write about their lives. Grandad O\u2019Brien has lived through every Irish President. Grandad Larkin has seen the world change a million times and put itself back together again, but still looks to me and my cousins with pride, even if he doesn\u2019t fully understand us.<\/p>\n
Of course, I want to make both of them proud, not just because of the legacies they\u2019ve created, but because of the examples of good men they are. It\u2019s a strange balance of compromising, overruling, adapting, accepting.<\/p>\n
It all comes down to the mutual respect we have for each other, noting that what was easy for them is not the same for me now, and ultimately wanting me to build a legacy for myself that I am proud of.<\/p>\n
So I sit in the car and tell Grandad O\u2019Brien that the place I work in used to be a convent. He remembers it, and just like that, a connection is formed. There is some invisible string that combs through the years and generations between me and my grandads. They are my left and right brain.<\/p>\n
Their relentlessness in pursuing what they wanted despite hardship was passed down to me. I may not understand a word of sports jargon, and they may not know what my poems are about, but I understand that every single time either of them takes me aside to tell me about something, it is a means of affection. An unspoken \u2018what is important to you is important to me\u2019, forever reversing. Hands outstretched across the years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It hits me as we pass St Joseph\u2019s Church and both instinctively bless ourselves one- handed. Today, my…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":468159,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60,387],"class_list":["post-468158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468158\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/468159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}