My mother-in-law kept showing up with her whole family for free BBQ at our house — when they came empty-handed again on the 4th, I served them a lesson instead.
We live at Tullamane, which is eleven acres and a farmhouse about four miles outside Ashglen.
Dermot and I have been married seven years. Etta is ten and Ruari is six. We keep sheep, badly, and Dermot works four days a week at the co-op in town, and I do the books for three other farms from a desk in the back room.
And since about 2019, my mother-in-law has treated this property as a venue.
Solange Halloran is sixty-six. She has two daughters — Nessa, forty-one, and Roisin, thirty-eight — and between them there are six grandchildren, and when they come, they all come.
Eleven adults and children minimum. Sometimes fourteen.
They came nine times last year. I know that because of the spreadsheet, and I’ll get to the spreadsheet.
And in seven years they have brought, in total: two bottles of wine, one bag of ice, and a box of crackers that Roisin brought in 2022 and then opened herself.
That’s it. That is the complete list.
Everything else — the meat, the buns, the salads, the drinks, the ice, the gas, the paper plates, the bin bags, the extra loo roll — comes out of this house.
I am not stingy. I want that established, because when you tell this story people assume you are.
I love feeding people. I have fed the entire silage crew for four Septembers running and enjoyed every minute of it.
What I object to is not the cost. It is the arrangement.
Because here is what actually happens when Solange Halloran arrives at Tullamane.
She walks in without knocking, which is fine, it’s a farmhouse.
Then she moves things.
She moves the kitchen table. Every time. It is a nine-foot oak table and she cannot lift it, so what she does is get one of her daughters and the two of them shove it about three feet toward the window “so there’s more room.”
She rearranges my dresser. She has taken plates off the top shelf and put different plates up there.
