Category: Listowel Page 1 of 50

Jerry Kiernan Commemorated

On June 27, 2022

Photo credit; Éamon ÓMurchú in The Silent Valley, Co. Down

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Jerry Kiernan Plaque

Jimmy Moloney, Mayor of Kerry unveiled a plaque to Jerry Kiernan. The late Jerry was probably Listowel’s greatest athlete.

Jerry Kiernan’s sons with Jimmy Moloney, Mayor of Kerry

Family and friends who attended the unveiling.

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Morning has Broken

by David Kissane

Memories of the summer of 1972 concluded

Breakout

There were a few breakout occasions in those last days in St Michael’s College. There was one Saturday, never talked about “publicly” since, which brings a smile to the eyes even now. Especially now. A week before the curtain came down on our classes. A history lecture was announced for Leaving Cert students and it meant a trip to Tralee. A bus was organised and the craic was good. Freedom was in the air. We arrives a bit early for the afternoon lecture and someone suggested that a visit to a pub to get a sandwich might be an idea. A sub-group of us headed that way. Others went a more reliable direction.

A sandwich was the extent of food service in most pubs in those days. Unfortunately Perri crisps were the only item on the lunch menu that Saturday and someone said that his mother took Guinness for nourishment. A nod was as good as a drink so glasses of Guinness were ordered nervously. The barman considered all of us to be of reasonable age. Which most of us were in those days. It is reported that a clear liquid like Poitín was produced at some stage but history does not record that fact.

Suffice it to say that we were a little late for the lecture. It was a very good lecture though, on early modern Irish history, and history took on a new and stirring atmosphere that afternoon. Under the influence of alcohol on tender brains. The Nine Years’ War was never fought so clearly and the Great O’Neill became greater. When the lecture was over and questions were solicited, the standard of questioning by some of our group was exceptional. What did the wives do while the men were away fighting the English? What would an Irish leader say to rev up his men before a battle? Did Queen Elizabeth really fancy Grace O’Malley? And Henry the Eight…well we went to town on him!

In the end, the lecturer praised our corner (at the back of the room) on the quality of our interest in history and the depth of our knowledge. He said history was safe in our hands. We nodded and embraced the applause.

Some of us took notes on the lecture. They were written in a script not known up to then. Like thorny wire that had been over-run by a mad bull.

The sting in the tail came when the pub gang missed the bus home – in those days, five o’clock was five o’clock – and it was very late that night when I staggered in home.

My father had a look at me the following noon and commented that another great battle had been lost in Irish history. I appreciated his analysis.

On the following Monday, our history teacher likewise praised our interest in the lecture and wryly added, with a trademark wink, “And I’d say Kissane and friends learned a bit more than history on Saturday last!”

I recalled with gratitude that comment when I attended his funeral thirty years later. Rest in peace Mr Molyneaux Junior.

Earlier, during the Lent of that year, there was the trip out to the annual retreat to the Redemptorists in Limerick. Always a good occasion for discussions and evaluation, the few days were a welcome break from class routine and we never felt that religion was being forced on us. Well it was 1972. A visit downtown one evening, perhaps without permission by a group of us, caused a bit of a stir but was handled positively by the brothers, who engaged with us and our moderate rebellistic intentions.

But again we missed the bus home and had to thumb the coast road on a wet and cold March afternoon. Light in the soul but heavy in the body.

Endgame

No awards night in 1972. No graduation ceremony. We ended classes on the Friday before the exams began and there was a guarded feeling of “yahoo!”. After all, the big test was yet to come. But as a group of us walked freely down Church St for the first time with no classes around the corner, I recall Neil Brosnan singing “Mammy Blue” and there was a lyrical quality in our gait. We were sailing to Byzantium with a new version of ourselves and when the Convent girls passed us going the other direction – how come the Convent girls always seemed to be going in the other direction! – a vague and exciting hope was dripping from the Listowel air.

Then the isolation of the few days before the first exam and the worry of have we done enough and where are my maths notes and I’ve forgotten all my Keats quotes and steel guitar strings pinged nervously in our backbones and huge butterflies grew in our stomachs and soon the exams were over and then an explosion out the gate and down into town.

A few of the previous year’s Leaving Certs had adopted the fashion of getting their hair permed. I decided to go for it after a lot of “willIwontImaybeIwill” indecision. Eventually I made up my mind to have the perm done that last day of second level education. My then flowing locks (where are they now!) had gone wild in the daily cycle to the school bus and back. It’s amazing the amount of flies and midges that could get stuck in long hair. The only challenge was it had to be done in a hairdresser’s – ie, a women’s hairdressing salon. No barber would do that sort of thing. In fact, barbers didn’t like fellas who let their hair grow. For obvious reasons.

I excused myself from the gang and headed into a hairdresser’s in Church Street to have the hair-curling experience. Opened the door and four women turned towards me from their perming and locked me in their gaze. A variety of curlers on their heads. Their eyes went right through my resolve. I felt like Moses at a disco. “What can I do for you?” the hairdresser asks, with a wink at her customers. “Ah, I have the wrong shop!” I blurted and made a hasty retreat back to the boys outside Flavin’s Bookshop, making some excuse to them about no bookings available. Hallo real life. Gulp.

I was going to retain the fuzz for that summer of ’72 and for some summers afterwards. With the help of hairspray it learned to lie down for short periods but more often than not, it retained a spirit of its own and ran free around the ears. And beyond. Upwards and outwards. It was a hairy time indeed to be alive in 1972.

We went in somewhere for a bite to eat and didn’t seem to hang around town too long. For a classmate, Mike Bambury and myself, it was down to Kennelly’s travel and book tickets for the boat from Dún Laoire to Holyhead for two days later. No other students were doing anything like that and it was a magic feeling. I had a sister in Birmingham who would put us up for the summer. I had already spent two summers working there so the confidence cup was brimming and the teaspach was high.

Bridge Between Two Worlds

And so the very next day the two of us started thumbing a lift in Listowel, right outside St Michael’s College, our Cape Canaveral of take-off. We looked in the gate, past the apple trees then in their June bloom and up the window of the classroom most of us would never see again. Funny old feeling it was. We didn’t realise it fully then, but in that moment, looking in at the College, we were standing on a bridge between two of our worlds. The world behind us, of being a student and the world ahead of being an alumnus. There were already bridges crossed, and many more to come. Sometimes these bridges are hidden from us as we cross them and don’t reveal themselves for years. Crossing from the early morning cycle down the hill and the yellow bus and walks up Church Street and Roly Chute’s shop and the old wooden desks and the sport and the ambling lunchtimes and the return home and the chat on the bus and the walk up the hill and the homework and the notes.

In that moment of tranquility we were subsumed inwards to the echoing stairs, to the ring of the hand-bell that was rung between classes, to the buzzing classroom, to the teachers who had kept the faith of believing in the art of teaching life through subjects and sport and activities. The five years spent in the college concertina-ed together in one packaged ball of memories. The fusion of the dark days when we went to school with burdens with the days of illumination and progress. The search-for-identity days and the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnell days. And the nights in between. All flowing together now and ready for the next stage over the Moon River we crossed at that moment. The mundane and routine were to become exotic and special.

I don’t know if we said goodbye or thanks to any of our teachers in the weeks before, on the final day of either class or exams. If we didn’t, we quietly thanked them now in our minds for being educational ambassadors to us.

While we were trying to resolve the paradox of these rushing feelings that June day, one of the teachers came walking past, enjoying his summer holidays and asked us where we were off to. “Birmingham!” we declared in unison. He checked if we were serious and when the truth dawned, he said “Fair play to ye. Good luck lads!” and walked on down past the sports field and the graveyard.

We thought of our class-mates who had walked out the gates of the College for the last time that June of 1972 who visualised their own pathways ahead. We had a hierarchy of individual needs and expectations as all students finishing their second level classes this week of June 2022 have: a secure career, to walk on the Great Wall of China, to own a house, to build a business, to own a castle, to create something fulfilling, to win an All Ireland medal, to find love…

We would be tumbled and humbled and rebuilt many time in the years ahead but for the first time in our lives, the town and the College seemed like a small place.

It was that day we left the Listowel and the St Michael’s that we had known for five years. Forever.

Thumbs Away

Thumbs out and we got a lift quickly and were in Limerick in a few hours. God be with the days of thumbing lifts! The stories and the characters and the legends.

Into Limerick and searched the streets knocked on a bed and breakfast door and got a double room to save money and on with the bell-bottoms and orange shirts. Combed the fuzzy hair as best we could and out on the town with a couple of girls whom we had met in the Gaeltacht the previous summer and a rocking night was had by all.

Train to Dublin the next day with fuzz inside the heads as well as outside and the “boat” to Holyhead that night.

And then came the summer of our lives. Morning had broken indeed all of fifty years ago.

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A Few More from Writers’ Week 2022

This is the team who kept the show on the road at LWW 2022

Claire Keegan won the big prize at this year’s festival. Her lovely little book, Small Things Like These won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.

Gabriel Fitzmaurice accepted his Lifetime Achievement Award from Evan Mc Auliffe on behalf of the sponsor, Lyrath Estate

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Then and Now on William Street

Moloney McCarthy Accountants

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Summertime

By listowelconnection

On June 24, 2022

In Listowel, Personal, Poem

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Mr. Jiggs

This is Mr, Jiggs happily grazing in his field in Kanturk. He didn’t win any competitions ( He didn’t enter any). He is included in the blog today because it’s summer, a slow news day and he is an auld pet.

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More St. Michael’s Memories from 1972

Morning has Broken by David Kissane

What a different world it was in May 1972! The carnivals were in full swing and some of our class went to Finuge Carnival to have a fling before the exam. Some even got lucky! They said. And others pushed it to the limit and took one of the many buses that shunted to the dance in Shanagolden on Saturday May 20th. Some craic on that bus on the way there. Bigger craic on the way home. Even a few students headed for the “Gay Bachelor Festival” in Ballybunion during the Leaving Cert to help alleviate the stress of revision. Yeah right.

And there was the 13th of May fair in Listowel. An ancient event no doubt inspired by the festival of Bealtaine. The fire-festival of Baal. Horse dung and life all over Market Street. Women who still wore scarves, even shawls and men who wore caps and spit on their palms and bought and sold. Visits to the Bargain Stores and Cavendish’s. Echoes of Kavanagh’s “shops and stalls and markets and the Oriental streets”. Child of Prague statues and duffel coats and a glass of Guinness in Stack’s Hotel. Chats in The Sheebeen.

The balladian beauty of a fair day. The exotic came to town.

We watched it all on our way down to the school bus in the evening.

Listowel Writers’ Week was also coming to life in that year and John B Keane and Bryan MacMahon were to the forefront in the town where big crowds were gathering for the novel festival. Some day, I said to myself…but I recall spending a half-day-off down by the river rather than attending any of the festival’s talks, in the belief that you need something to write about before you can write about it!

And what about the clothes we fellas wore both at school and after. No uniforms. Boots if we could afford them under bright-coloured bell-bottom trousers and orange-coloured shirts with massive collars. Ties straight from Woodstock akin to the wildflower gardens of today. Peace man! Polo-necks and tank tops were a speciality. The polo-necks were a divil in a sweaty ballroom. The heat rushed up to the neck and had nowhere to escape. Thank god for the Hai Karate anti-perspirant. Strong as a horse it was but a right hoor for attracting doctor bees if you laid down in a meadow of a Sunday afternoon. Then there was the hair! Long and wide and directionless. Like furze bushes on a windy night. Side-locks that would sweep out the stall for you.

Outside the Walls

While study was more in our minds than most other things in the latter months of our second level education, we were glued to our one-channel TVs for major news events. The deaths of 13 people in Derry on Bloody Sunday on January 30th was a riveting event and was discussed in our class at length. A suggestion by one student that we should organise a protest fell on deaf ears. Too avant-garde for the majority. Mr Rochford organised a class debate sometime later and the event gave us the opportunity to hone our argumentative edges. A rare and educational avenue which put riches in our store.

The debates on Ireland joining the European Economic Community was a little prolonged for any dramatic focus by our heat-seeking mental faculties, but it did broaden our horizons, although 6,ooo plus people in North Kerry wanted to change the future by voting against joining Europe in the referendum that May. Interesting. Raidió na Gaeltachta was launched that year and, being a possible topic for an essay, was devoured with gratitude. Apollo 16 landed on the moon (no big surprise) in April. Black September terrorists. The Vietnam War reached an emotional peak for much of the world, and for us as we sat down to our Leaving Cert exams, when the Associated Press photographer Nick Ut takes his Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a naked 9-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc running down a road after being burned by the chemical napalm. The Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty was signed between the US and Russia – it is not forgotten by our age-group what a real threat nuclear war had been up to then.

A world of hope and fear. Was it ever otherwise.

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P.J. Kenny and Street Leagues

This photograph is from 1927. It shows the Greenville team, winners of the McGrath Cup. Street leagues go back a long way in Listowel.

Mr. P.J. Kenny’s name is synonymous with the organising of street leagues in more recent times. P.J. continued his involvement with the leagues in Scoil Realta na Maidine, even after his retirement from teaching.

On Monday last, June 20 2022 the school honoured his huge commitment with the presentation of an engraved vase and a special cake.

The teams that contest the leagues nowadays represent The Boro, The Ashes, The Gleann and The Country.

The 2022 senior league was won by The Boro

Ogie Scanlon was the winner of the Brendan Guiney Cup. The cup was presented by the late Brendan’s sister, Rose, and brother, Jim.

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A Poem

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Writers Week, Horses and More

By listowelconnection

On June 23, 2022

In Listowel, Schools

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Listowel Writers’ Week Opening Night 2022

Catherine Moylan was an excellent M.C. for Writers’ Week Opening Night. She told stories, entertained, thanked and presented. Opening Night can easily slide into a long list of names and presentations. Not so on June 1 2022.

Dominic West brought a bit of Hollywood glamour to the occasion. He wasn’t in Listowel as a big star though. He was here as one of our own. We were left in no doubt that he was hugely honoured to open a festival once headed up by his father in law.

There was a great variety in the entertainment offerings on the night. We had traditional music and dance from Celtic Steps.

At the other end of the scale was this mellow voiced local singer

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More from 1970s St. Michael’s

Morning has Broken by David Kissane continued;

Visitors

It was rare enough in our Leaving Cert Year to have classroom visitors but one notable visitor was Bishop Eamonn Casey. He was a man with an huge presence and a confidence and twinkle in his eye which was hugely influential. He didn’t stand at the top of the class: he came down the middle and sat on our desk, with a “push in there a bit, lads!” to Michael Carmody and myself. He rolled up his sleeves and I remember his hairy arms swimming in animated gestures as he enthralled us with his wisdom.

“Take stock every now and again, lads!” he advised as he closed his mighty fist enthusiastically. We would have followed him to the end of the world at that moment and we would be into our adulthood before we heard of his affair with a woman and its subsequent domino effect. Many of us still remember him as an outstanding human being. The paradox of Irish life. The paradox of life.

Another visitor that final year was the examiner from the primary teacher-training college to evaluate our singing abilities. We had been receiving voice-training from a kindly nun at the Convent (we treasured those visits to the Convent!) for some of us it was asking the impossible. In fairness to her, she never told any of us that we couldn’t sing. On the day of the test, in I went to the little room at the top of the stairs while a few students waited outside for their turn. “Now sing “The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls”’ the prim examiner requested. The walls were thin and my voice was thinner and I started in a key that was above the door and I could hear the boyos tittering outside and I forgot the second line and I made up my own words with a hint of rap to the age-old Thomas Moore song and it was like trying to take a goldfish for a walk and the examiner sympathetically asked me to “please stop”! If he had only asked me to sing my version of “Morning Has Broken” or “Without You” by Neillson or “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash! All big at the time.

The test confirmed that I would never top the charts! But many of my classmates did pass the test on their way to careers in primary teaching. I would have to stick with my always-number-one-choice of secondary teaching where I could sing whatever I liked in and out of class.

Sport

The sporting pages of my dreams were wiped bare those last months in St Michael’s. The last action for me as a footballer was for the College senior team earlier in the spring. Honoured to be appointed captain for the first Munster Colleges competition. It was also the last action. We lost by a point in Tarbert GAA pitch to a Clare side. Possibly Kilrush CBS. Annoyed as I had scored two goals for the first time of my life in a competitive game. I was no Páidí Ó Sé who was to star for the college later. Most of the team I had soldiered with for the previous two years, bringing two county medals, had gone their destined ways: Jerry Kiernan, Jimmy Deenihan, Mick O’Connell, Tim Kennelly, Tommy Flaherty and more were not easily replaced. Good teams were to follow, though. Johnny O’Flaherty and John Molyneaux were to create winning sides again after we had been scattered to the four winds.

Worse was to gallop like a wild horse towards me six weeks before the Leaving Cert. It happened on a Saturday evening when I was flattened in a junior football game. I got a good feel for the Moyvane GAA field that evening, especially when my face was left smelling the grass after a clash with a man older in years and stronger physique. Broken collar bone bent ribs and I discovered what it was like to have no power in my preferred right hand. A drive to hospital in Tralee in Johnny Bunyan’s (soon to star for Kerry hurlers and footballers) car and a lift home after midnight from Seán Hilliard and the Leaving Cert on the horizon. After a few days I realised I would be well able to write ok but sport was finished for the summer. A comeback after three weeks in a lunchtime fun soccer match in St Michael’s, still wearing the “sling”, did not help at all and delayed the healing process. Didn’t know it at the time, but there was to be no active sport for two years.

Didn’t change the history of sport but a massive gap had been bulldozed in something I enjoyed. I did feel side-lined on those dreamy late May evenings when I would look due south down the hill to the Ballydonoghue GAA field, two miles away to the right of Lisselton Cross. Moss Joe Gilbert’s Field where our generation had played the game on Sundays and every buzzing evening if we could. My injury ostracised my chances of playing and my parents wouldn’t allow me leave the house anyway. I could see the players moving to and fro around the field from my hill doorway with the sweet-scented air of early summer in my brain from the dancing wild flowers in our fields nearby. Even still the regret haunts, but of course it is allowed to do so. The awful regret that those precious evenings of early summer could not be fully enjoyed. Bryan MacMahon, a past pupil of St Michael’s himself, wrote in his novel “Hero Town” of “the dynamism inherent in the torture of spring: spirit ok, body not ok”. The recollection of that feeling would drive me wild every other May month of my life to ensure that May was fully embraced.

The Kerry Colleges athletics championships were held in the Town Park (Cows’ Lawn) in Listowel (our training ground) on a Sunday in mid-May and had no Jerry Kiernan for the first time in years. The impetus behind a star athlete had been lost and only John Hartnett from our Leaving Cert class won an individual medal (in the triple jump). John was also top of our class in all the term exams. (We were always placed 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc in those exams.) St Michael’s did make a mark in the younger age-groups on that green and sunny Sunday and won the best school award in the junior category with J Stack collecting the best athlete trophy while a certain B Keane was prominent also.

I heard about the performances on Monday but it was a case of “non, je ne regrette rien” as the study train had to be inhabited and embraced.

A sporting birth in 1972 escaped the notice of our class. It was the first Kerry Community Games athletics finals and no one suspected then that it would rock the country in the years to come. It brought athletics to the parishes where clubs did not exist in the years following and when the history of sport in Ireland is completed, Joe Connnolly’s Community Games must surely have a chapter of note.

Many of the children of the class of 1972 would benefit from the movement that originated in Kerry when we were stuck in the books that month of May.

One teacher who wasn’t a class teacher with our group but who made a big impact in sport was Brian O’Brien. Always a character, he lit up athletics and football trips and was noted for borrowing our sandwiches as he never seemed to bring his own!

Just as I complete this section on sport, the news comes through that one of our class-mates and sporting colleagues, Eamonn Carroll has passed away. Eamonn was a flyer in the sprints and often lent me his spikes for the middle distance when I had no pair of my own. He was a flying half-forward in football also and he helped us to a couple of county championship medals in Inter Cert and Fifth Year. He always had a smile on his face. When we lose a class-mate, we remember. Rest in peace, Eamonn.

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I Love this one

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Charity Fundraiser

The Corinthian Challenge has a Listowel Connection.

Fiona Dowling from The Six Crosses, who now lives and works in Kildare has been chosen as one of 14 riders to compete in this year’s Corinthian Challenge.

The Corinthian Challenge is a series of three races, the first of which will be run on July 17th at The Curragh. The next two races are at Gowran Park and Leopardstown. The purpose of the challenge is to raise money for the Injured Jockeys Fund, a cause close to the heart of all who are connected with this dangerous sport.

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Then and Now

By listowelconnection

On June 22, 2022

In Listowel, Personal, Poem

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Today’s Tumbling Paddy

Do you remember this image from last week. It was the Tumbling Paddy, used for gathering the mown hay into heaps for making into wynnds. Things have moved on and no one uses a Tumbling Paddy anymore.

I was at home in Kanturk last week and they were haymaking.

This is the modern equivalent of the Tumbling Paddy.

These are today’s wynnds. Progress!

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Covid hasn’t gone away

Our poor little girleen got Covid.

Thank God it was a mild dose. A big fright and a short few hours in the hospital saw her soon back to her old self again.

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David Kissane’s Memories of St. Michael’s Continued

The new NCPE (National College of Physical Education) in Limerick was in the thoughts of the sports students in St Michael’s that year but the balance of interest was in teaching, especially primary teaching. While Mrs Murphy and Mr Eggliston (affectionately called “Iggy”) had worked hard to make science popular at Junior Cert level, the uptake of the science subjects by our final year was low and the classical background of the school held sway in our peer year. We did study physics for a while in 5th year as fair play to the school for testing the future waters in that trial. It gave us an insight into the magic of neutrons, the photoelectric threshold and transmutation. The silent secrets of the world around us. When a little digging took place today in old books, the red Leaving Cert Physics by the Christian Brothers was unearthed with a hand-written photo-statted Christmas exam paper still sleeping inside. Comments written on the inside covers by fellow students and Convent girls’ names inscribed in little hearts while Mr Eggliston was busy at the blackboard. I had totally forgotten that we studied physics for a few months – fifty years is a long time – but the formulas and facts and diagrams came flooding back as if they had been close friends all along. The book was closed in LC1 in 1971 and never opened again till today.

While different students left St Michael’s with different attitudes to teachers – friends, frenemies or just no comment – all our teachers had a genuine interest in hoisting the proper sails for the oceans ahead.

Pushpenny

Subcultures often define a society. The game of “Pushpenny” was huge in St Michael’s and persisted right up to the final days of the class of 1972. It consisted of a game between two students, played out on the wooden desks with a coin (usually one of the new decimal coins, although the old thrupenny bits were ideal) as a flat football, another bigger coin by each of the two players and a piece of ruler to strike the bigger coins which would in turn strike the “football” and send it flying to the “goal” which was usually a book. There were corners, frees, line balls and penalties, with screamers, banana shots and diagonal bullets. Every lunchtime, or part thereof, was accentuated by Pushpenny games, with leagues, cup-finals and home-and-away fixtures. My desk-mate, Mike Carmody from Lyreacrompane was an expert. Being a Leeds Utd supporter, he was on a high after that first week in May 1972 when Leeds had beaten Arsenal in the FA Cup Final 1-0 in front of a 100,000 people at Wembley. Alan Clarke goal. The only time that Leeds have won before or since. My Man Utd were having a shaky time so all I could do was redeem their fortunes with Pushpenny goals. Now and again, if a teacher was delayed on the way to class, or if a teacher arrived early for class and had a chat with another outside the door, a whole spate of games would break out on every desk. When the teacher arrived, there was a scramble to hide coins and accoutrements and replace with the necessary books and copies. Once or twice, a teacher might confiscate the coins and pocket the lot (obviously to be later donated to charity) but generally a blind eye was turned as the games were quiet and harmless.

Injuries were rare but once I did a metaphorical sliding tackle on the desk with my striking hand and managed to get an inch-long splinter of the desk lodged under my nail. My Lyreacrompane/Leeds opponent went pale and partially fainted. I scored the resultant penalty before he recovered. Man Utd 1, Leeds 0.

A few days before we finished classes, it was announced that Fr long was retiring as president of the college after being in charge since 1954. A gathering of the whole school was organised and Mr Paddy Rochford gave a speech in which he revealed the career of Fr Long. “Danny” had guided the college over the boom in student numbers that had occurred after the introduction of free education in 1967 (our first year) and the introduction of science subjects and French to replace or complement the strictly traditional classical subjects. Fr Danny introduced the black gown for the teachers of our year, giving them a fearful appearance on occasion. The gowns did have a practical value in keeping chalk off their clothes but on occasion some teachers were known to discard the heavy archaic apparel when “Danny” went across the road to his president’s house for his meals.

Towards the last week of class that magical May, a blackboard was commandeered to act as a stadium for lunchtime games and there was a world cup of Pushpenny with a knockout system and a big lead-up to a grand final. A significant incident around the final has grasped a place in the memory. The whole class was assembled in a circle around the two finalists and the town boys had returned early from lunch to witness the end of an era of Pushpenny. At a vital moment of the action, Fr Danny Long opened the door. Gasps. This usually meant trouble and a charge of unstudent-like behaviour and repercussions could follow. We could hear our hearts beating and our eyes looked down. Danny became a legend when he simply said “Carry on!” and walked out, closing the door behind him. In our minds we would respect him forever for that action. To feel valued in our curious pastime was a privilege written in no book and summarised the atmosphere in St Michael’s College in 1972.

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Question Answered

In reply to the people who were wondering who “The Twelve Apostles” who, 50 years ago set up Kerry were;

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Poem for you

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More from Opening Night Writers’ Week 2022

By listowelconnection

On June 20, 2022

In Listowel, Listowel Writers Week, Personal

Listowel Arms Home, Listowel Town Square in June 2022

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More People at Opening Night, Writers’ Week 2022

These two lovely ladies were out in support of their friend, Catherine

Because it was so long since we had been out at an in -person event, Catherine Moylan, on Opening Night asked us to introduce ourselves to the people sitting next to us. I was sitting beside these lovely ladies who , like myself, have worked at the chalk face.

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My Trip to Cork

The Cork branch of my family are very sport orientated. On my recent trip, for the first time since she was a teenager, I watched Anne play a tennis match She was taking part in an open competition in Sundays Well.

Sunday’s Well is a bit more posh and aware of its history than her own club, Lakewood. Lakewood is the old John A Woods Sports and leisure Club. No boating here but soccer and pitch and putt as well as tennis.

Anne and her partner, Kevin won their match, beating the top seeds. I took the photo after their tough match when Anne was not looking her most rested!

Poor Cora sustained an ankle injury at her soccer academy and is hobbling in a boot for a while.

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From Pres. Yearbook 1991

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You Have to Laugh

This lady bought a robotic lawnmower. It is scheduled to mow the lawn at a given time every day, hail, rain or shine. She took pity on it on the first wet day.

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Memories, Memories

David Kissane Remembers happy days in St. Michael’s.

David Kissane pictured recently after he had won a silver medal in the British Masters 3K walk in Derby.

Thoughts of one of the Class of ’72 in St Michael’s, Listowel

By David Kissane

It all happened on the way to the toilet. An outdoor toilet. Well it was 1972 in an out-of-the-way place on a North Kerry hill. It was one of those early May mornings. Crisp air on my face as I went out the back door. A look up at the hill to the north to say hallo to the spring of my life. So far. A promising sky. Hedges of fuchsia with baby blossoms between the hill and me. Blackbirds and thrushes and robins making their music all around. A cow lowing in Neleen Brennan’s field to the left with Ballybunion clearly outlined against the shining Atlantic Ocean to the west. Down the hill to the south, the world and St Michael’s College were waiting.

My mother had turned on the radio as I went out the door and the words of Cat Stevens wafted out of our Pye radio into the Lacca air after me:

“Morning has broken

Like the first morning

Blackbird has spoken

Like the first bird

Praise for the singing

Praise for the morning

Praise for the springing

Fresh from the word…”

And fifty years later on, this very week I am still awed by the song. I didn’t know at the time that it was a hymn published in 1931 and adorned later by a traditional Scottish air. That May morning it chased me out and tackled the brain and heart. It was to become for me the anthem of 1972. The year of our Leaving Cert in St Michael’s College, Listowel.

Come walk in my shoes for a few paragraphs and recall your own last days of Leaving Cert. See what your journey back will do for you.

Later that morning I would cycle down the steep hill past Neleen Brennan’s house that once housed a World War 1 soldier who was blown to pieces in an orchard in France after only a fortnight of the war, past Ned Kennelly’s on my right and then down the lethal Fahas bends, where I had once lost control of a bike and spent a week picking furze bush thorns out of bodily nooks and crannies, past Roger Kissane’s house, turn left at the “bridge” over a small stream that drained a hillside and over to Gunn’s Cross and right turn down Gunn’s Hill, past my old primary school on the left, 1815 steeple and graveyard on the right and on to Lisselton Cross. Two morning miles that I had covered out and back for five years of my second-level schooling. Then on board the yellow school bus after a short chatty wait in Jeremiah Behan’s shop door and off then the long route to Listowel, Convent girls, College boys and Vocational School boys and girls coming on board at various stops. Gerard Neville from Inch would join me in the seat as he had done for years. Down the narrow road to Dromerin and Jerry Riordan and neighbours would join the bus near his parents’ shop. Over the River Gale then and eventually to our destinations.

Walk up town to the college. Check out the Convent girls going the opposite way. Say hallo to the Tech students on the left. See who was coming out of Roly Chute’s shop on the corner. Chat and news from the newsicians. Turn right into the college lawn with the budding apple trees in front of the three-storey building. One storey underground. In the door. Up the marble stairs. Sit down. Open books. Leaving Cert a month away. The year of our lives.

More tomorrow….

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