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: Tolka Row

Remembering Tolka Row

By

On February 10, 2025

In Listowel, Personal, Poem

Market Street, February 2025

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A Charity Shop Find

One of the great joys of shopping in charity shops is finding treasures like this.

There are thousands of Irish books published each year. They are often short print runs and when they are gone they’re gone. Every now and again a great one turns up in a charity shop. This is one such.

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Cora, My Little Footballer

This is Cora Darby, my granddaughter. She loves football, both Gaelic and Soccer.

When her team, Lakewood Under 14s, played Ballyouster of Kildare in the National Cup, Cora was captain for the game.

Lakewood girls Under 14

They won. Now their next game is against a Drogheda club and they have home advantage. I’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile in Dublin…

Sean is in tennis action with his intervarsity team.

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Tolka Row

Tolka Row is an Irish television drama serial that aired on RTE One from 1964 to 1968, set in a fictional housing estate on the northsideof Dublin.[1] Based on Maura Laverty‘s play of the same name, Tolka Row was first broadcast on 3 January 1964 and aired weekly for five series until it ended on 31 May 1968.[2 Wikipedia

These two pictures were published in Ireland’s Own. The late Maura Laverty is also the same Maura who wrote Full and Plenty.

This scene from the soap depicts the the Nolans and their neighbours in the sitting room of the Nolan house. The Nolans and their neighbours, the Feeneys, were working- class Dublin families living in the North side of the city.

It was a very regrettable practice in the early days of Telefís Eireann, to wipe the videotape after an episode was broadcast and reuse the tape. So, only the final episode of the four year series is extant.

I loved the show and like me many others loved the glimpse inside a part of Ireland we never saw in real life. Before television, there was huge urban rural disconnect. Tolka Row and its successor, The Riordans, introduced city folk and country folk to one another. It was a great learning experience.

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If you have Money Problems

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Exciting Opportunity for “Mid- Career Artists’

St. John’s in February 2025

St. John’s Theatre, Listowel, Co. Kerry, and the Irish Arts Center, New York, are inviting applications for the County Exchange international residency for mid-career artists. 

Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Kerry County Arts Office, the County Exchange residency aims to connect artists from the experimental theatre, dance, and performance sectors in Ireland and New York. 

Seven selected artists (four from Ireland, three from New York) will spend two weeks in Listowel (19 May–2 June 2025) and one week in New York (January 2026, dates TBC). The residency provides accommodation, travel, a daily subsistence allowance, and a €1,000 fee. 

Interested applicants should submit a 100-word statement of purpose, contact details, a brief bio, and links to previous work by email to newyorklistowel@gmail.com by Monday, February 24th, 2025, at midnight.

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A Fact

The first Winter Olympic Games were held at Chamonix in 1924.

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Eircom; 1916 and WW1 and Tolka Row

By

On November 8, 2012

In Uncategorized

Remember this?

That was then, this is now.

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Clarification re Cows’ Lawn

The house that is now known as The Dandy Lodge was not Danaher’s cottage. Danaher’s Lodge stood in Cahirdown at the entrance to Foley’s Farm, part of which is now Listowel Golf Course.

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Irish Citizens Army Volunteers on the roof of Liberty Hall in 1916

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The
wills of 9,000 World War I Irish soldiers who fought in the British Army will
be posted online this week the Irish Sunday Times reports.

Many
of the wills are very short said Hazel Menton, an archivist who has worked on
the project for three years.

“The
information is limited, but it is this very lack of detail that reminds us of a
group of men who have been largely forgotten. “The men would simply write in
the space provided to whom they wished to leave their effects,” said Menton.

“As
many of the soldiers were very young, and they did not have wives or children,
they left everything to a parent, siblings or friends serving with them.”

“There
are 29 Boer War letters from men to their family and loved ones, and they are
different from the wills of soldiers in the First World War as they are newsy,
informative missives from a soldier to his mother, girlfriend or brothers,”
Menton said.

One
soldier wrote to his brother cutting his father out of his will because “he’ll
just drink it”.

Robert
Coffey of the National Archives said, “It is quite emotional. You are reading
letters and wills of men who passed away but who had written them thinking they
were going to come back.”

The
archive is part of the state effort to commemorate the thousands of Irish
soldiers who fought in the war.

Shane
MacThomais, a historian and resident author at the Glasnevin Trust, where First
World War and Second World War graves are located said: “All the
commemorations, from Armistice Day to the National Archives launch, serve to
paint a much clearer picture of the men who fought in these wars. The soldiers’
wills is another piece in the jigsaw.

“You
have to remember there was an element of shame for some of the men who fought
in the First World War. Some were ostracized by their families for joining [the
British Army], even if it was for financial reasons.

“Others
would have been enlisted automatically after serving in the Boer War in the 1890s



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This photograph was taken in Ireland. I do not know where or when but it is hard to believe that those 7 people lived in that tent.

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To end on a more upbeat note, do you remember this?


The cast of Tolka Row

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