Page 20 - COBH EDITION 15th MARCH DIGITAL VERSION

‘Even Hitler couldn’t kill Moyra and now she’s 100 years old’ -
Trevor Laffan
My mother-in-law is celebrating her birthday at the weekend
and she’s having a party in a local hotel in Cobh. She has
been organising it for the last few months and she’s invited
around three hundred guests. She’s making a bid deal of it
and so she should, because she will be 100 years old.

She’s no ordinary centenarian either. Her eyesight and hear-
ing may not be as good as they once were, but her mind is as
sharp as a razor. She has an opinion on everything, and she
has no problem letting you know what she thinks, whether
you like it or not.

Moyra Swords lives on her own in the family home and she
won’t have it any other way. There is always someone staying with her at night and her home
help comes a couple of times a day. Then the family take turns to call so that she is rarely left
on her own. If she’s left unattended for too long, she has a tendency to get up to mischief.

Last year a stair lift was installed. She was having some mobility issues, and this made it
easier for her to get up and down the stairs. She flatly refuses to have a bed brought down-
stairs. She was told not to use the lift on her own and to wait until someone was with her in
case she fell out of it and came tumbling down on her head.

She didn’t know how to operate it anyway so there was no great problem, but of course she
figured it out for herself. One day, one of her daughters left the house after giving Moyra her
tea and was just getting into her car to go home when she realised she had forgotten some-
thing. She returned to the house only to find her mother half way up the stairs in the lift.

She was very sheepish, like a child who had just escaped from her cot or a deer caught in the
headlights. She promised not to reoffend but just to be sure, the lift was disabled, and she
has no idea how to get it going again. At least, that’s what she’s telling her family.

Now, she is planning her party and she knows exactly what she wants and when she gets in-
volved in a project like this, she can be very demanding. She’s not blessed with patience and
tends to be like a dog with a bone. As soon as her invitation cards were printed, she had her
daughters pestered to get them sent out as far back as the start of January.

She wasn’t happy until she went to the hotel herself to check out the venue, even though she
couldn’t see that much of it, but she wouldn’t rest until she vetted it personally. She had it all
worked out in her head how the event was going to pan out, including her “entrance”. There’s
a touch of a diva about her.

She’s providing a sit-down meal for everyone, but she lost the run of herself with the invites
and now she’s starting to panic that there may not be enough seating for everyone.
Moyra is originally from Kilmore Quay in County Wexford and loves to go back there for visits
and she’s planning to spend a week there in July to coincide with the local sea food festival.
She has fantastic recall and can still remember stories from her childhood and the names of
all the old neighbours and friends.
She’s well able to travel and has been to visit relatives in Australia several times in recent
years. She also has some family in Scotland, and she was asking me recently how much a
flight to Edinburgh would cost. She loves to travel.