This blog is a personal take on Listowel, Co. Kerry. I am writing for anyone anywhere with a Listowel connection but especially for sons and daughters of Listowel who find themselves far from home. Contact me at listowelconnection@gmail.com
Cora felt that a trip to Ballybunion would be wasted without a bit of a dip. Her mother assures me she was well away from those dangerous looking waves. The camera foreshortened the distance.
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Listowel’s Presentation Sisters
Once upon a time the sisters used to be buried in a cemetery in the convent grounds. A nun’s funeral was a solemn ritual, full of ceremony and singing, her sisters chants accompanying their departed loved one into eternity. Now the local convent building and grounds, including the graveyard, is no longer sacred ground and the remains of the sisters are now interred in St. Michael’s Cemetery.
Many of the names on these simple stones are names of great women I knew as friends and work colleagues. They sacrificed much and their legacy will benefit Listowel and beyond for years to come.
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Retirement marked with a Tony O’Callaghan plaque
When Jim Cogan retired from St. Michael’s he was presented with a beautiful piece of Tony O’Callaghan’s artwork adorned with symbols of family, Jim’s work life and his interests. It is a treasure.
In the photograph with Jim are Bill Walshe and Fr. Seamus Linnane on behalf of the Board of Management and John Mulvihill, principal, St. Michael’s.
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Beautiful Signwriting
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A Fact
Both Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day, April 23 1616
When I was writing about the origins of our knitting group, I mentioned that our first home was in Off The Square café. Someone asked me where on earth was that. Well, here it is. It has had several changes of business. Probably the longest was Paul Slemon’s shoe shop. It has also been Oscar Wildes’ and Lizzie’s Little Kitchen before it’s present tenant, a piazza shop.
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Brian Donnelly, former US Representative and Ambassador, dies at 76.
(March 2, 1946 – February 28, 2023)
A descendant of Irish immigrants, Mr. Donnelly was the man behind the famous “Donnelly Visa” which in the late 1980s and 1990s liberated thousands of undocumented Irish in the US from the fear of arrest and deportation.
Brian Donnelly, as a congressman from Massachusetts, shepherded the visa scheme bearing his name that delivered 26,000 visas to the Irish at a time when Ireland could not provide many of its young people with jobs.
Listowel’s Paul O’Sullivan leading out a bevy of beautiful Roses in the U.S.’s biggest St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York in March 2023
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Celtic Crosses
A Celtic Cross headstone in St. Michael’s graveyard, Listowel.
You may remember I told you that the cross with the circle was a merger of pagan and Christian symbolism dating back to the coming of Christianity to Ireland in the ninth century A.D.
That is a widely held explanation for the cross. However it would appear that the symbolism may go back to even earlier times.
Mike King, an expert on things Celtic, posted on Facebook that in a Minneapolis museum there is an Egyptian textile dating back to the fifth century decorated with a cross surrounded by a wreath. The interpretation of this is victory over death, the wreath symbolising victory and the cross death.
This is the Kildalton Cross on the island of Islay in Scotland. It was carved in the 8th century and is considered the finest existing example of a celtic cross in Scotland.
Anti-government forces in the Irish Civil War attacked the Listowel and Ballybunion Railway several times in early 1923. Damage to the rolling stock and stations of the 9-mile monorail between the two Kerry towns, and the impracticalities of operating such a unique line in the newly consolidated Irish rail system, forced its permanent closure in October 1924.
Passengers and mail on the LBR had been targeted by Irish republican forces during the Irish War of Independence, 1919-1921. In January 1923, during the civil war, armed men forced the Ballybunion stationmaster to open the line’s office, goods store, and waiting room, which they doused with petrol and paraffin oil and set on fire. Within an hour a similar attack occurred at the Lisselton station, about halfway between the two terminuses.
Such destruction is generally attributed to the IRA forces opposed to the Irish Free State. These “irregulars” also cut down about 1,700 yards of telegraph wire and six poles between Listowel and Ballybunion, matching attacks along other Irish rail routes.
Nicknamed the Lartigue after inventor Charles Lartigue, the monorail was “suspended indefinitely” in early February 1923 due to the sabotage. Nearly 40 employees lost their jobs, impacting about 100 family members and ancillary businesses.
With the train out of service, a char-a-banc and motor car service began operating between the two towns, but it also came under attack in March.Once the civil war ended later that spring, the Lartigue was repaired in time for the busy summer season at Ballybunion, a seaside resort. By mid-July, the Freeman’s Journal reported the Lartigue “has already, particularly on Sundays, been taxed to almost its fullest capacity in the conveyance of visitors.”
Like the Lartigue, however, the national newspaper also would have its run ended in 1924.
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Then and Now
2007 and 2023
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Friends Reunited
Mary Sheehy met this lady twenty years ago on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. They met last week by chance in The Flying Saucer café, Listowel.
There I am in the midst of the lovely 6th class girls in Presentation Primary School, Listowel on World Book Day 2023. The girls were dressed as their favourite characters. I came as myself.
I was a VIP guest as part of their Creative Schools’ Cluster project.
I was welcomed to the school by my friend Mrs. Anne Brosnan and the class I spoke to is now being taught by someone I taught back in the day, Miss Julieanne Galvin.
Behind us on the interactive whiteboard is our good friend, Jimmy Hickey. I told the girls about Jimmy’s exploits in The National Concert Hall. They don’t read Listowel Connection so it was news to them. Jimmy is their dancing teacher.
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Alice Curtayne
It’s not all male writers in Kerry Writers’ Museum. This female Kerry writer is there too. She is a little known but very learned journalist and writer, deserving of a wider audience.
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A Little bit of the USA in Cork
When I’m on foot I notice things that were there all the time but I never spotted before.
This happened to me lately when I was walking on Western Road in Cork and I came upon this sign.
Maybe it is my imagination but doesn’t that white car look a bit American as well.
Yesterday I shared with you Kathleen Reynolds’ great uncle’s first hand account of a spectator at that match.
Photo from the internet
Here is an extract from Kathy’s email;
The game was attended by 34,500 including my father’s uncle, Mike Fitzmaurice, who had left Moybella South, Lisselton around 1910 for Waterbury, Connecticut.
Notes (Irish Independent & Wikipedia)
The Artane Boys’ Band also travelled to New York to play before the match.
Michael O’Hehir broadcast a radio commentary from New York. O’Hehir noticed that broadcasting delays would bring the radio link down five minutes before the final had ended. He later recalled his plea:'”If there’s anybody along the way there listening in, just give us five minutes more, and I kept begging for five minutes more” The link stayed open.
Kerry — D O’Keeffe; D Lyne (capt), J Keohane, P Brosnan; J Lyne, W Casey, E Walsh; E Dowling, E O’Connor; E O’Sullivan, D Kavanagh, B Garvey; F O’Keeffe, T O’Connor, O Kennedy.
Subs: W O’Donnell for Dowling, M Finucane for Walsh, T Brosnan for O’Donnell, G Teehan for Kennedy
Score 2-11 to 2-7
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There was a North Kerry man on the team.
The last surviving member of that Kerry team, Ballydonoghue man , Mick Finucane passed away in 2016;
Here is a fine tribute to Mick by his friend, Brendan Hegarty, published in 2016 at the time of his death.
Brendan Hegarty 2016
Tribute to Mick Finucane
To not have engaged with Mick is to not have lived and anyone he touched is the better for it. Non-drinker and non-smoker but socialiser extraordinaire. I was having a chat of an evening with him and one of the nuggets I picked up was that from 16 years of age, his weight never budged from 12 stone. Now I don’t know a lot about boxing but he could pack some punch and they say he was also gifted of a sturdy lowish centre of gravity, canvassing a good few laddos in his day, though never raised a hand outside the ring nor never had the bad word.
A few of his comrades in London would have recalled in later years how he brightened up many a dark day in hard times and his role as a public relations man was no accident as he was the type that nobody could refuse. He even had Tony O’Reilly arranging taxis for him from the airport on arrival. I’d often say that North Kerry were talkers and South Kerry more grafters, so John Murphy chose wisely with Mick as his front man and boy could he tell yarns of those rather interesting times.
I also recall a fella disputing an umpiring decision Mick once made, well about 40 years ago to be more precise, he told Mick “he’d hit him only he was an old man” and to which those in the know might have commented that it was a wise decision, a lucky escape if there was ever one for the would be assailant and he didn’t even have to run away. As a friend of his my own father, Jackie got fierce mileage out of this one as Mick used affectionately refer to him as “Auld Hegarty”. I could tell hundreds of more good wans from Lisselton Cross and Urlee. The one thing that always puzzles me is how the Barra Road didn’t throw up more silverware, even in later years there was so many football houses, individual families where you have a handful of top class footballers, maybe soccer was part of it but I recall evenings that you’d have maybe 30 or 40 lads chasing a football. Finucane’s yard was littered with balls and you’d see Mick and the boys taking a kick in between chores, soloing in from milking the cows or a carefully gauged point between a telegraph pole and a shed, between feeding calves.
The stories he would tell himself would be the basis of many a subsequent literary work and I myself penned “What they think of Mick Finucane in Donegal’. It was after that chat with him that I went to the local and my smile had em asking what it was all about. When I told em I had just been chatting to the oldest holder of an AI medal they started on their mobiles, checking out the story, etc, doubting Thomses! Anyway we storied ’till the not so small hours after that as a few more congregated and we regaled his life and times.
By the way the ’47 final was played in The Polo Grounds because Croker was a building site. He would say after that an admirer commented that “she couldn’t understand a word he said but she loved the sound of his voice” so everything about him inspired of scope, more of scope that contradiction.
So all we can say is thanks for the music Mick, RIP.
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People I met in Town
I met Paud Pelican and Mary Hanlon at Listowel Credit Union
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A School in Mourning
I visited Scoil Réalta na Maidine to photograph their beautiful piece of Paddy Fitzgibbon’s artwork.
I was jolted back to harsh reality by the lovely shrine underneath.
On the week that Paddy Fitzgibbon passed away, the boy’s school lost someone dear, a beloved member of the school community, pupil,
Pádraig Beasley.
Padraig Beasley R.I.P. with his school principal Kieran Quirke and Padraig’s mother Maeve
Padraig’s family have strong links with the school. His mother, Maeve is a teacher there and his grandfather, Cathal is a past principal.
Padraig passed away on Jan 6 2023. Go dtuga Dia suaimhneas síoraí dó.
