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St. Michael’s Centenary Gala Day
Mike Hannon has shared lots of photos recently of a gala day to mark 100 years of St. Michael’s in Listowel. A big day of fun and games, stalls and the army band rounded off a weekend of celebrating.
I have memories of that weekend too. On Saturday we had a mass with a raft of priests who were old boys of the college concelebrating. We had a gala dinner and then the big day on Sunday.
I was one of the volunteers manning the food and crafts stall. Health and safety regulations were more lax in those days. We sold eggs still warm from the hens’ bottoms. We had home made cakes and jams and all sorts of knitted and hand sewn goods, bric a brac and white elephants galore.
John OFlahery was in charge of our committee.
One of our number was the lovely Elsie Geale. Elsie was scrupulously honest and this caused a bit of the bother on the day before the fair.
We had collected egg boxes for weeks to box the promised (by the parents of the country boys) fresh eggs that had been pledged for the Sunday morning. Of course the egg boxes had the names and branding of the egg companies who had supplied them to the shops. No way would Elsie tolerate us selling our eggs in boxes that declared they came from somewhere else. So, at the height of our preparations, we had to cut rectangles of wallpaper and paste them over the names on the lids of all the boxes.
I think the competition was to guess the weight of the cake.
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I had Visitors
Aoife read about everything that’s on during Writers’ Week 2022. Then she chewed the brochure.
It’s decided. She is coming back on June 1 for the festival.
Aoife and her Mammy, Clíona
That smile says, “I have my daddy exactly where I want him, wrapped around my little finger.”
We took her to see the changes in The Square. In fairness she did not really remember how it used to look so she was happy enough with the new set up.
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From Pres Yearbook 2006
In 2006 the magazine committee decided to ask a former teacher, Aileen Hayes, now Scanlan, for her memories of her time in Pres.
Here is an extract from her article.
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Two Listowel Men
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