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
Lovely Heaney Poem making an apprearance on Mothers’ Day
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Cora Update
Firstly, let me say a big thank you to everyone who enquired about Cora and her MCL injury.
She is doing well. The tear doesn’t need surgery. The hope is that with a dilligent adherence to her physiotherapy routine she will be back on her feet in 6 weeks.
I am very impressed with her two football teams who are including her in everything. While it’s hard to watch everyone else playing, it is heartwarming to be included even when you can’t make a contribution.
Here are Ciara and Cora on Saturday March 29th. The team won that one anyway.
They included Cora in the squad photo, far left, back row.
At the club award ceremony at the weekend, Cora got to celebrate last season’s success with her friends.
Lizzie’s with Fairytale of New York themed windows
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Seamus Heaney Poem
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A Delightfiul Christmas Present
This lovely gravity defying fieldmouse was carved for me from lime wood by a superb craftsman, Tony Woulfe.
Tony lives in Gorey, Co Wexford but he has family roots in Athea. He has a Listowel connection in that one of his many wooden creations was presented to the connections of a winning horse at Listowel Races.
As well as wood carving, Tony likes to write. He is a keen family historian and a great recorder of life as it was in his young days. We will hear more from him here in 2025.
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Christmas 2024 in Listowel
A few photos from our lovely town at Christmas 2024
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Memories of Christmas in Listowel in the 40s and early 50s
By Marie (Canty) Sham
Maria grew up in O’Connell’s Avenue Listowel. Here she looks back on a very happy Christmas time
I remember
Going to the wood to cut the holly which grew wild, and the moss to put on the crib.
Christmas Eve cleaning the house, the excitement of setting up the crib filling jam jars with sand and putting the candles in them, decorating them with crepe paper, putting up paper chains, my mother would have made a large Christmas pudding in a gallon and put it aside
The turkey or goose was bought at the local market and plucked by our neighbour Bill Boyle. He must have done it for everyone because the road would be covered in feathers. The innards were still warm when it was cleaned out, that was all on Christmas Eve so it was fresh.
We were not well off but we were lucky as my father was always working, we were not short of anything. At that time in Kerry there was a lot of unemployment.
The shops mam shopped in during the year gave a Christmas box. One shop would give tea, sugar and maybe a pot of jam. That shop was called Jet Stacks and it is not there now. The butcher Murphy’s would send Danny to deliver us maybe a large piece of lamb, of course it would be delivered by him on his bicycle with a basket in front
I can also remember a donkey and cart outside the shops with a tea chest and all the shopping would be put into it. These people would be from the country and would not come to town again until after Christmas.
There was a shop called Fitzgibbons and we would pay in whatever we could afford for toys or anything else. I paid in sixpence a week for a sewing box and I still had it when I got married. Mam paid every week for the Nativity figures for the crib. I have never seen anything so beautiful since.
The ham would be on the boil and the crib set up. The candles would be lit by the youngest member of the house, I think at 7 o’ clock .
Our clean clothes would be kept warm over the range ready for midnight mass.
Going out on the frosty night and seeing all the windows with lighted candles was wonderful.
Home after mass a warm fire in the range, a slice of the ham or maybe a fry! Our stockings would be hanging at the end of the bed. We did not get much; my dad was very good with his hands and would make things for us. He made a scooter once and a rocking horse.
My brother Neil wanted a mouth organ and it was like in the song Scarlet Ribbons, dad went to so many shops until he got one for him. I was too young to remember that but mam told that story.
Christmas morning I will never forget waking up to the smell of the turkey roasting.
Up quickly and look if Santa had come, our stockings might have an orange, we always got something. I remember getting roller skates; I also remember getting a fairisle jumper from Santa. The problem was I had seen my aunt knitting it. All the children would be out in the Avenue with their new toys to show off.
Before dinner our neighbour Paddy Galvin would come in to wish a Happy Christmas and mam would give him a bottle of stout. I think that was the only time he ever called in. We would have lemonade and stout in for Christmas.
Dinner was wonderful, our Mam was a great cook. There was Mam Dad, Nelie, Paddy, Doreen and myself. My brother Junie came along later, and after we would wrap up warm and visit the cribs; one in each church, hospital, convent and St Marys and bring home a bit of straw for our crib which I think was blessed.
More food when we got home
Bed and looking forward to St Stephens day and the Wren Boys, no cooking on that day we finished up the leftovers.
What wonderful times!
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Flavin’s Window
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Moments of Reflection
Mary Hanlon met me on Church Street and I accompanyied her to Woulfe’s to sign my book for her.
If you are stuck for a Christmas present, don’t forget my Moments of Reflection is available in Woulfe’s, Eason, Listowel Garden Centre, Garvey’s, Prifma and Kerry Writers’ Museum.
It is also in Watsons in Duagh, OMahonys in Tralee and The Friary Bookshop in Killarney, in Presents of Mind and The Kanturk Bookshop in Kanturk
On Radio Kerry at around 7.25 a.m. and after the news at 12.00 you can hear me read my Thought for the Day. Some of this week’s Thoughts are in Moments of Reflection.
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A Sean McCarthy Poem
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A Fact
We know about fingerprints, but did you know that each of us has a unique tongue print?
Today’s poem from Irish Stories of Love and Hope is often named by students as their favourite poem. The awful life changing, everything changing reality of death is so poignantly and simply told by Heaney that it resonates even with young people who have not yet experienced a death wrench.
I lost my father when I was seven and my only sister when I was 14. This poem never fails to break my heart.
Mid Term
Break
By Seamus Heaney
I sat all morning
in the college sick bay
Counting bells
knelling classes to a close.
At two o’clock our
neighbours drove me home.
In the porch I met
my father crying-
He had always
taken funerals in his stride-
And Big Jim Evans
saying it was hard blow.
The baby cooed and
laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in,
and I was embarrassed
by old men
standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they
were sorry for my trouble.
Whispers informed
strangers I was the eldest
Away at school, as
my mother held my hand
In hers and
coughed out angry tearless sighs
At ten o’clock the
ambulance arrived
With the corpse,
stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning `I
went upinto the room, Snowdrops
And candles
soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time
in six weeks. Paler now
Wearing a poppy
bruise on his left temple
He lay in the four
foot box as in his cot
No gaudy scars,
the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a
foot for every year.
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A Trip to The Christmas Shop
My young visitors love to visit Listowel Garden Christmas shop.
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More on Paddy Drury as remembered by Jerry Histon in the Shannonside Annual in the 1950s
Paddy was a great walker. I heard him say that he brought this from his mother who, he averred, once walked from Knockanure to Limerick and returned with a stone of yellow meal balanced on her head. This was during “the bad times”.
As I have said, without hearing Paddy tell the story, a lot of its local humour is lost. For instance, one day Paddy was seated in the snug of the public house in Listowel. The snug country pubs is usually called the office. A crony of Paddy’s passed in on the way to the bar. “Is it there you are, Paddy”. It is so and if you had minded your books like me you’d bein an office too.
Paddy and his friend Toss Aherna one-day making a grave for an old men from Knockanure who had all his long life been avaricious for land. Toss spaced out the site of the grave and said to Paddy “I suppose the usual 6′ x 3, Paddy”. “Ah” was Paddy’s retort “he was always very fond of the land. Suppose we give it another foot.”
When working for a farmer who had killed a boar to which the workmen were treated day after day for dinner, Paddy at last got exasperated and one-day for Grace said
May the Lord on high who rules the sky
look down upon us four,
and give this mate that we can ate,
and take away this boar!
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The Lidl cat
This feline seems to have found a new home at Lidl, Listowel
Marie O’Callaghan, Ena O’Leary, Patricia Houlihan, Gabriel Fitzmaurice.
Mary Madden, Nola Adams and Anne Prendiville
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Listowel Handball Alley as it looks nowadays
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A Corn Dolly
The late Seamus Heaney knew these corn dollies well. In his childhood he saw them being made in his native Mossbawn. He captures the memories and associations of these ancient amulets better than anyone else.
As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.
Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,
And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in
hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall—
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,
Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your
stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your
hand.
The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser—
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet
burnished by its passage, and still warm.
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Ladies’ Day Just got Better
This is the bus the kind folk on Listowel Race Committee is going to hire to take ladies to The Island on the Friday of the Races. I’m not sure if you can avail of it if you are not wearing high heels and if you would just like a lift.
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A Sermon and a story for you
While I was in Asdee church I picked up their August 2016 newsletter and I read this story. I’m cutting it short here but it is attributed in the newsletter to Tom Cox;
In 2013 a Brazilian millionaire announced that he was going to be like the Egyptian pharaohs and bury his treasure with him. His greatest treasure was his Bentley.
He was lambasted in the media for this ostentatious show of wealth and foolishness so he called a press conference at his house. The media turned up in big numbers to see if he would really carry out his promise. Diggers were at work in the garden digging a big car sized hole.
But Mr. Scarpa didn’t bury his beloved car.
Instead Mr. Scarpa delivered this message, “I didn’t bury my car, but everyone thought it was absurd when I said I would. What is more absurd is burying your organs, which can save many lives. Nothing is more valuable than life. Be a donor and tell your family.”
Now the story
Regular readers will know that my only sister died in 1964 of kidney failure. She had been ill for a year before she died and she was in and out of hospital frequently. Her best friend was a girl called Marion and they were thick as thieves. If kidney donation was an option, they would have given one another a kidney in a heartbeat. For that year while they were apart they wrote regular letters to one another and they invented a secret code to write private things about boys just in case the letters fell into the wrong hands. All very innocent girly stuff. They were only 15.
Marion kept all the letters and has treasured them all these years. Her friend’s death had a profound effect on her and she has never forgotten her.
Recently she took one of these letters to a tattoo parlour and the tattoo artist scanned my sister’s signature along with the coded message and Marion had it tattooed on her forearm.
Kerry Crusaders were out in force yesterday for the Dublin City Marathon.
Familiar faces in the crowd supporting super marathon fundraiser, Brenda Doody
Listowel sisters Tena and Rochelle Griffin, pictured before the start.
Tena was running on behalf of a charity that is very close to the hearts of her family:
The Ronald MacDonald House.
(All photos from Facebook)
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The Forge
by Seamus Heaney
All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.
I was reminded of this Heaney poem recently when I read a lovely account on Moyvane Village on Facebook of the last blacksmith/ farrier in the village.
The last blacksmith in the village was Maurice O’Connor who was known to locals as “Mossey Cooney”. His Forge was on the Glin Road and it was built around 1850. It was originally owned by McElligotts before Mossey’s father Con O’Connor took it over. Mossey’s uncle Tom also worked in the forge and he owned the famous greyhound Dainty Man who won the first Irish Derby in 1930.
“Three cheers for Tom Connor to give now we must,
That his hammer and anvil might never show rust.
And that we in the future around Newtownsandes
Will see more Coneen Brosnans and more Dainty Mans.”
Below are the photographs that accompanied the post
Gerard Roche with Áine Cronin and Mossy O’Connor
A Smithy in Moyvane….The Rugby World Cup Connection
If Ireland had won The Rugby World Cup, the trophy might have found its way to Kerry to reunite with its exact replica, the Sawtell Cup which has resided with the O’Connors in Moyvane for the past 85 years.
The Sawtell Cup was won by Dainty Man at the first Irish Derby in Clonmel in 1930. It was worth 100 guineas at the time. The cup was created by Carrington and Company in London who also created the original Webb Ellis Trophy in 1906. It is a Victorian version of an original cup fashioned in 1740 by renowned English designer and silversmith Paul de Lamerie.
The Cup is silver gilded in gold, 38 centimetres tall with two cast scroll handles. On one there perches the head of a satyr, on the other the head of a nymph. The terminals are a bearded mask, a lion mask and a vine. The pineapple on the top was for centuries a symbol of welcome, hospitality and celebration, and Dainty Man and his owners and trainer were treated to all three when they returned victorious to Moyvane in 1930.
On Saturday morning the local rugby youth were warming up prior to a match.
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Dowd’s Road, Listowel
This is the view looking down Dowd’s Road from the John B. Keane Road.
Dowd’s Road is named after the family who lived in this house, now unoccupied and falling into disrepair.
Once upon a time the railway ran along what is now the John B. Keane Road.
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As I roved out
Saturday, October 24 2015 was a beautiful Autumn day. I took a walk by the river Feale and I encountered these 2 filmmakers at work.
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We all love a selfie
Even the famous like to be photographed with the famous. Daniel O’Donnell was on the Late Late Show on Friday evening and he posted a photo of himself with fellow guest, Joe Schmidt on his Facebook account.
