Listowel Connection

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

Tag: Bromore Page 4 of 5

Sunset in Bromore, 60’s Listowel boys and New Orleans Irish in 1800’s

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On November 14, 2013

In Uncategorized

Boat in the Shannon Estuary, photographed from Bromore Cliffs by Mike Flahive in November 2013.

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Another one from Dan Doyle




Dan is third from left at the back.

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St. Michaels’ extension under construction…not sure of the year.

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Back to Listowel. Ontario. It would appear that we were twinned with that town and a delegation came to Listowel, Co. Kerry in 1967.  They dressed in traditional costumes as they were celebrating their town’s  centenary. There are photos in the Kennelly Archive. Tom Fitzgerald found them here

http://www.kennellyarchive.com/id/QVS007/

Anyone among you readers remember the event? The late John B. Keane and Michael Kennelly are recognisable in the photos.

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Then and Now

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Norwich council taking delivery of its first computer!!!!!

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This next story comes from a great website; Irish Central.

Mary
Helen Lagasse is an award winning author based in New Orleans.
She is currently researching her latest book on the Irish who died while
building the New Basin Canal. By the time the canal opened in 1838, 8,000 Irish laborers
had succumbed to cholera and yellow fever. She is appealing for anyone with
information about their ancestors who may have been involved in the
construction to get in touch with her. She can be reached at  mhl5sol@cox.net.   

In 1832,
in the Second Municipality, sometimes called the American Sector, an area
upriver from Canal St., the arduous task of digging the New Orleans Navigation Canal, later known as
the New Basin Canal, began.

“Paddies”
slipped into the swamp to dig with pick and shovel the mosquito-infested ditch
that would be the new 60-ft. wide 6.07 mile long shipping canal. There was no
dynamite, nothing but wheel-barrows with which they’d haul the sludge out of
the ditch on inclined planks. And there was no way for them to drain the
relentless seepage but with pumps invented by Archimedes in 287 B.C.

The
builders of the city’s New Basin Canal expressed a preference for Irish over
slave labor for the reason that a dead Irishman could be replaced in minutes at
no cost, while a dead slave resulted in the loss of more than one thousand
dollars.

Laboring
in hip-deep water, the Irish immigrant diggers, who had little resistance to
yellow fever, malaria, and cholera, died in inestimable numbers. Six years
after construction began, when the canal opened for traffic in 1838, hundreds
if not thousands of Irish laborers would never see their homes again. It was
the worst single disaster to befall the Irish in their 
entire history in New
Orleans.

                                               

This is
the preface and focal point of my work-in-progress, working title “Bridget
Fury,” a novel based on the building of New Basin Canal and of the tragic
consequences for the Irish immigrant laborers, many of who died from disease and
exhaustion and were buried in shallow graves alongside the fetid ditches.

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Listowel Ontario and the Listowel,Kerry connection



Maeve Moloney pointed me in the direction of Wikipaedia for this;

Settler John Binning arrived in 1857 and was the first to create a permanent residence in the area. The community was originally named Mapleton, but the name was changed when a post office was established. The new name was chosen by a government official and refers to Listowel, Ireland. The majority of early settlers were of Protestant Irish origin (Ulster Scots Planters, or English Planters). Incorporated in 1867 as a village and in 1875 as a town, Listowel is now part of the town of North Perth.[2]

Listowel has a large Irish festival, called Paddyfest, which is held over the two weeks surrounding St. Patrick’s Day. The festival was first started in 1977 from an idea put forth by Dave Murtha to honour the large numbers of persons of Irish ancestry present in the Listowel area and is largely maintained by the Kinsmen and Kinette clubs of Listowel.

The official spokesperson for Paddyfest is chosen yearly in the Paddyfest Ambassador Competition. Contestants must perform a speech, impromptu question and interview with the judges and receive the overall highest score to be awarded this position. A separate award of Talent is given out to the contestant with the highest score in the talent competition. Runner-up and Congeniality are also awards which are available. Although the Paddyfest Ambassador Competition changed its name and official status from being Miss Paddyfest when first created, a male has yet to win the title.

(Now wouldn’t it be interesting to find out who that Listowel man was.)

Bromore in Winter, Listowel shops then and now and more from Listowel, Ontario

By

On November 11, 2013

In Uncategorized

This is what Mike Flahive wrote about Bromore near Ballybunion in November.

Here in Bromore Bay the power of the Atlantic Ocean meets the 180 foot Bromore Cliffs. The storm waves rush into the dozen or so caves compressing the air before them and exploding back out again. There is a constant flow of seafoam floating on the updraft like snow.


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Some Shops Then and Now

2005
2013

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The following two photos were taken at a quiz in Pres. Listowel sometime around 2006

Happy days!

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Listowel, Canada, a Listowel Ireland connection





While Tom Fitzgerald was in Listowel Ontario, he chanced to meet this local counsellor.

His name is Warren Howard

AND

He was in Listowel Co. Kerry in 1971 as a member of a choir. He stayed in Mount Rivers and he sang in the church….I’m not sure if it was St. Mary’s or St. John’s.

Does anyone remember this choir’s visit? Better still, does anyone have a picture?

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Today November 11 2013 is Armistice Day in Britain, Veterans’ Day in the U.S.

Royal Irish Rifles at The Somme

Lest any of us forget the horrors our ancestors suffered, here is a link to a site with many many links to sites related to the Irish who fought in the two great wars in Europe.

http://thenewwildgeese.com/profiles/blogs/remembering-the-irish-who-fell-in-the-great-war

Siegfied Sassoon visited Cork and Limerick but there seems to be no account of him visiting Kerry

On April 16, 1917, Siegfried Sassoon, an
officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and arguably Britain’s greatest war poet,
was wounded by a German sniper while leading his company in an attack at
Fontaine-les-Croisilles. While recovering from his wounds in England, Sassoon’s
growing anger at the political mismanagement of the war compelled him to write
a scathing attack, which achieved public notoriety after being read aloud in
the House of Commons, “I am making this statement as an act of wilful
defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being
deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.”

Unwilling
to risk the adverse publicity that would accompany the court martial of a man
who had been decorated for undoubted acts of bravery, the under-secretary for
war declared that Sassoon was suffering from shell shock and had him sent to a
military psychiatric hospital at Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh. It was during
his incarceration at the hospital that Sassoon wrote “Survivors,” a poem
that displayed his contempt for the authorities who patched-up shattered men
only to return them to combat. It also reveals much about the tortured state of
his own mind:

No doubt
they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain


Have
caused their stammering, disconnected talk.


Of course
they’re ‘longing to go out again,’ — 


These
boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.


They’ll
soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed


Subjection
to the ghosts of friends who died, — 


Their
dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud


Of
glorious war that shatter’d all their pride …


Men who
went out to battle, grim and glad;


Children,
with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

The Cusack Family of Cloyne, Bromore and Jonathon Sexton

By

On November 5, 2013

In Uncategorized

In a very small Co. Cork village called Cloyne, there lives an extraordinary family. This family was famous for producing great hurlers, the outstanding star among these is Donal Óg who went on to gain admiration as an excellent hurling goalkeeper.

In the past week it is another of these Cloyne hurlers who has come to recognition by the national media. Like his brother before him, Conor can write almost as well as he can hurl. Both Donal and Conor have  a rare knack of turning a phrase that tugs at the heartstrings. They also both possess a compelling honesty and openness. They have been through the school of hard knocks and come out the stronger for it. I admire them both. I reserve a particular admiration for their strong religious parents who have stood by them and supported them with humour and encouragement in everything they have been through.

Conor’s interview with Miriam O’Callaghan is here

http://www.broadsheet.ie/2013/10/30/embrace-the-journey-start-the-journey/

And I’m going to post Donal’s article on the pope and Donal’s Mammy again:

The mother is delighted with the new pope. Great man. He gets
the bus. He pays his hotel bills. He cracks little jokes. He talks about love.
One Direction for the arthritis gang.
 
Very unpopey yet you couldn’t knit
yourself a better pope. He’s no George Clooney but at seventy-six, he’s just a
spring chicken. The life in your pope is as important as the pope in your life.
And!  There’s no faint smell of Nazi off him. No taint of child abuse
cover up. Ok. He was at the back of the bus gazing out the window when the
junta in Buenos Aires started disappearing some of his Jesuit colleagues but
look, when the Smart Boy Wanted sign goes up in the Vatican window you don’t
expect to find the perfect candidate.

The point is that when the mother and her old friends get down
on their hands and knees to clean the church across the road they’re pleased
with the new boss. When they are washing the floor and shining the brass and
polishing the wood and shifting their aching limbs about to do a job that
nobody thanks them for they are happy that the man with the hat gets the bus
from time to time. He’s humble. Humility is a good thing for the church to
have these days. Humility and love.

We don’t talk much about the pope or his business when I call to
the house of an evening.  We talk about what’s going on in our mad little
village and we talk about hurling. I was recently decommissioned from the Cork
senior hurling squad after more than a decade and a half of good times and
turbulence.  The disappointment at how it was ended. That’s what we talk
about.  And how the club will go. In our house the pope might get his
picture stuck to the fridge but Christy Ring was the only man we knew to be
infallible and hurling has always been the one true faith.

Still. I’d like to know someday about how the mother feels about
the fact that her son whom she loves won’t ever be allowed to get married in
the church that she cleans in the village she has always lived in.  The
pope who gets the bus and talks about love is against gay marriage. He’s never
been to Cloyne by bus or by car but he’s one of the last people on earth who
cares that I am gay. If I find somebody I love  the Pope  won’t be
letting me celebrate that relationship in the church which baptised me, gave me
my communion, confirmed me and which will probably seize my body for burial if
I let it. If I find somebody I love and we settle down and want to share our
home with a child who needs loving parents the pope will have an actual hissy
fit. Gay adoption, he says, is child abuse. That’s a pretty big steaming slice
of ignorance for any badged rep of Catholic Church Inc. to be offering to the
customers in this day and age.  

In
his new job the man from the Buenos Aires omnibus is in the perfect place to
learn a little bit about the realities of child abuse. By the time he is
finished reading all the reports in his in tray he may conclude that it would
be best to keep priests away from churches and places in the community. Then he
might go out (he has the outfits) and meet some real gay men and women and
educate himself beyond the stereotype.

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This is Bromore in November a very different place to the Bromore I visited a few short weeks ago.

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News from Jimmy Moloney from last nights Council meeting

Parking concessions for Christmas agreed tonight at Town Council meeting.
Monday 2nd – Friday 6th December 2013 Free Parking After 3pm Each Day
Monday 9th – Friday 13th December 2013 Free Parking After 3pm Each Day
Monday 16th – Friday 20th December 2013
Monday 23rd December 2013 Free Anytime 2 hr Parking
Christmas Eve 2013 Free Parking
Thursday 26th December 2013 Free Parking
Friday 27th December 2013 Free Parking
Monday 30th December 2013 Free Anytime 2 hr Parking
New Years Eve 2013 Free Anytime 2 hr Parking

The current arrangements for Saturdays, where there is free anytime 2 hour parking will continue to apply for December and 400 free parking spaces will still be provided in the town.

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Pastoral visit of Bishop Ray Browne of Kerry to Listowel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yt_GFtASKw&feature=youtu.be

Music by Listowel Folk Group…..video by Knockanurelocal.

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They have poor Jonathan Sexton worn out in Racing Metro. Then they recall him from Dublin and leave him to freeze on the bench for the entire match when they were in dire need of a good kicker. The mystery has been cleared up now. He sustained a niggling injury in the warm up so they decided to let him sit out the match. So he will be fresh and rearing to go for our Samoa match. Their loss, our gain.

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Bromore Cliff Walk, Súgáning and Bushfires

By

On October 23, 2013

In Uncategorized

Bromore Cliff Walk is THE place to be on beautiful Autumn Sunday.

There is a friendly horse to greet visitors. He delighted this little animal lover on Sunday last. It is not obvious in my photo but he is on the other side of the fence.

the cliffs
My little visitors looking a little wind blown.
The sea below

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These men are learning the art of Súgáning in Causeway Men’s Shed. Causeway Men’s Shed have lovely wooden products for sale in Atlantic Creations, Ballybunion.

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http://johnpridmore.yolasite.com/about-me.php

They are having a mission in Tarbert this week and this man is one of their missioners

John Pridmore is the man on the right.

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You have read recently of the dreadful bushfires raging in New South Wales. My friend Julie sent this account

“I thought that perhaps you might have heard about the terrible fires devastating NSW at the moment. As I look out my window I see that the sunlight is a golden orange colour and the sun, if one dares look at it, it an orange ball through a smoky sky. We have been enduring very dry and hot conditions since Thursday when very high winds caused bushfires to surge through the bush of the Blue Mountains and the Southern Highlands of NSW.  It is a very early start to ‘the fire season’ and NSW has had an appalling few days. Already more than 200 homes have been destroyed though, thank God, only one man has died, from a heart condition, as he tried to defend his home. Yesterday we found two burnt leaves in our backyard yet we are more than 100kms from an actual fire. The wind carries embers and this is the danger for many homes in the regions around the fires. In one fire alone more than 24000 hectares have been burnt out and at one point there were 95 separate fires of varying intensity burning in the state.

If only it would rain. We have had none for months. Most of our garden does not need watering but we have had to do a bit lately. Australia is certainly a country of beauty and terror as our famous poet Dorothea Mackellar wrote to an English friend:

My Countryby

Dorothea Mackellar

(1885 – 1968)Description: spacer

*     

The love of field
and coppice,

Of green and shaded lanes.

Of ordered woods and gardens

Is running in your veins,

Strong love of grey-blue distance

Brown streams and soft dim skies

I know but cannot share it,

My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel-sea,

Her beauty and her terror –

The wide brown land for me!

A stark white ring-barked forest

All tragic to the moon,

The sapphire-misted mountains,

The hot gold hush of noon.

Green tangle of the brushes,

Where lithe lianas coil,

And orchids deck the tree-tops

And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my
country!

Her pitiless blue sky,

When sick at heart, around us,

We see the cattle die-

But then the grey clouds gather,

And we can bless again

The drumming of an army,

The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!

Land of the Rainbow Gold,

For flood and fire and famine,

She pays us back threefold-

Over the thirsty paddocks,

Watch, after many days,

The filmy veil of greenness

That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,

A wilful, lavish land –

All you who have not loved her,

You will not understand-

Though earth holds many splendours,

Wherever I may die,

I know to what brown country

My homing thoughts will fly

   

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Bromore

By

On October 9, 2013

In Uncategorized

Regular visitors to this blog will be familiar with beautiful photographs of Bromore Cliffs. These photos are posted on Facebook by Mike Flahive. Recently I decided to visit this beauty spot for myself.

Mike Flahive

Mike’s herd of Kerry cows.

Brambles and blackberries were everywhere.

The walk is short and compact. It is well signposted. There are some spectacular coastal features to be seen. The day we chose was dull and overcast but I think that Bromore must be a piece of heaven on a clear day.

My friend, Marie getting up close and personal with Mike’s friendly horse.

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Old Dublin tram sign



Dublin Trams used symbols to indicate routes. This was to help the many Dubliners who could not read. (Broadsheet.ie)

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This is a scene from John B’s as featured in the new film, The Irish Pub.

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