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

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Listowel Military Tattoo, Turf and The Field at the Gaiety

Listowel Military Tattoo 2015


It’s here; the longed for weekend is upon us.

The flags are out.

The traffic management plan is in place.

The bunting is strung.

The shop windows are decorated.

Bring it on!

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 Here are a few photos from previous years to whet your appetite. I hope to have lots of photos from this year’s event  next week.



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Turf to the Rescue


Another TDB poster from 1943, the push was really on to deal with the fuel shortage. At Mass, people were encouraged to cut turf by the local priests. County Councils, the Army, the TDB, all were involved in cutting as much turf as possible.

(source: Bord na Mona Heartland)

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OConnell’s Avenue last week




Beasley’s light engineering works

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 These Ballybunion Beach shops are set to get a facelift






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Kerry Association in Dublin at the opening of The Field




Our own Keelin Kissane and friends from the Kerry Association met someone famous when they went to  The Gaiety for the opening night of John B. Keane’s The Field.

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Listowel Emmetts Rising Stars

Conor Cox and Jack McGuire of Listowel were honored recently for their exploits on the football playing field with UCC.

Presentation Convent For Sale,Turf and Rockchapel chapel

Sundown in Ballybunion

(photo: Ballybunion Prints)

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Turf in times of war


This poster dates from 1946 and was aimed at Industry. It warned them to make sure they had enough turf supplies for their needs. The sentence about full development of our turf resources, was the coming of the ACT which changed the TDB into Bord na Móna and led to the First Development Programme after the War.

(source: Bord na Mona Heartland)

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As it was then, as it is now



Listowel’s Presentation Convent is on the market again. Maybe there is a sentimental Listowel emigrant with deep pockets out there who would love to restore it to its former glory. It would make a lovely boutique hotel with its own wedding chapel.


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Out and about with my camera



Fine weather last week had us all out enjoying the sunshine.


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Rockchapel


Many of us pass through this North Cork Village on our way to Cork. I stopped last week and took a few photos of their lovely chapel.


A bench in her native church is a fitting memorial to an emigrant, Sr. Nora Curtin.


In a little cabinet at the back o the church they had a display of photographs of sons and daughters of the parish who had entered the religious life.


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Julie is coming to Writers’ Week



This is Julie Nugent. She will be coming to Listowel Writers’ Week 2015: May 27 to May 30. Julie will be picking up the Irish Post prize for her short story After the Party.

Mario Goetze, God’s Acre, Turf cutting and a trip down Memory Lane

We knew him when he was only a lad.

This is a photo of Shane Murray(Ireland) and Mario Goetze(Germany) taken in Listowel in 2008.

This is the same Mario now aged 20 in his Borussia Dortmund colours. He is in the news because he practically single handedly beat the great Real Madrid on Weds. last.



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Last Wednesday night in St. John’s we were treated to a rare glimpse into Listowel in times past, as seen through the lenses of John Lynch and Jack McKenna.

John McKenna played some apt tunes on the the piano as we watched footage never before seen in a public setting in Listowel.

Jack McKenna has been recording life in his native town since the 1940s. He recorded the FCA in the Square as they drilled in preparation for invasion in the 1940s. He recorded Seamus Wilmot’s funeral, Dick Pierse’s wonder horse, the Feale under ice and a frosty Sunday morning in the Square in the 1950s. 

These are just some of the gems we watched on Weds. night.

The feeling was one of attending an old black and white silent movie, but one set in a familiar location. It was a privilege to watch these old movies in the company of the film makers.

I took a few photos of attendees on the night

Claire and Bernie Carmody

Liz and Marie McAulliffe

Jim Sheahan and John Lynch
Sue and Jack McKenna with Sue Taylor
Veronica Corridan and friend

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Dick Carmody took a great interest in the posts about An Teampall Bán. He shares this poem with us which he wrote earlier this year . The poem is about God’s Acre, a burial ground of unmarked graves in Ballybeggan, Tralee. This graveyard dates back to The Famine and times of other tragic sufferings.

God’s
Acre

God’s
Acre bids me enter through the well trodden stile of crafted limestone

Man’s
handiwork separating the living from the dead, the busy from the rested

Therein
repose the remains of the unmentioned, unlisted and oft forgotten

In
distant times of want, denial and inhumanity they came here for final rest

Alone
they sometimes sought it out, cold refuge against an even colder neglect

Last
faltering steps taken to meet their Maker in the soft embrace of Mother Earth

Or in
make-shift carts a final journey shared from workhouse or roadside refuge

Drawn
over limestone paths by souls rehearsing their own inevitable last journey.

In
our own time of plenty and opportunity we still seek out this relic from the
past

Stepping
inside from a world speeding by, we each find our own personal recess

Arriving
to repose the burdens of our living with the memories of those deceased

The
Stations, the Grotto, the Altar and the Cross all give us comfort on our way

Departing
we are relieved, comforted and renewed by this sanctuary to our dead

God
surely chose his Acre wisely, its great value not being of our choice
or making.

Dick
Carmody                                    January,
2013

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Lovely photo of men cutting turf on a raised bank, one sleánsman and one catcher  carrying on an age old tradition.

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I took this photo a few years ago at the unveiling of the John B. sculpture in the Garden of Europe. Billy Keane is surrounded by a bevy of local beauties.

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This was the only photo I could find on the internet of Miriam O’Callaghan accepting the inaurgual Mary Cummins award for outstanding achievement by an Irish woman working in the media. It was presented at the First Women in the Media event held in Ballybunion last weekend. The event was a great success by all accounts.

The Bog2Beach challenge was a great success as well. If I come across any photos in my research or if someone would like to send me some of photos of either event I’d love to share them.

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Yesterday I went to Kerry Parents and Friends Garden Fete. Here is alittle video I made and I’ll post some photos during the week.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFLWmhd5kBY&feature=youtu.be

St. Michael’s footballers 1955

This photograph was sent to me by Niamh Ashe, daughter of the late John. I did my best to enhance it but you will need to zoom in for a better look at some familiar faces.

57 years have brought a few changes!

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This picture was taken at Barna. It looks like a fairly ingenious but precarious method of loading a turf lorry.

The photo was taken in the late 1940s. It’s not of great
quality as it was part of a series of photos taken by B na M engineers covering
all BnM operations between 1947 and 1953. The photos were taken to record the
work going on at the time and were for internal use. They were used to discuss
means of improving work practices, like loading turf.  

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bord-na-Móna-Heartland

In response to my appeal last week, Tom Fitzgerald brought me an old Lyre journal with some stories from the  Bord na Mona works there. Below is one of the articles.

Travellers Footing the Turf in BNM Lyreacrompane

A “floor” of turf consisted of 32,000 sods which had to be
lifted and placed 2 on 2, four rows high with one on top – a total of 9
altogether. This method of footing was
different from the local practice of placing the sods roughly in a pyramid
shape. This method required a certain
degree of skill and dexterity, and was required to ensure that the slean turf
would dry. The machine turf was more
compressed in its manufacture and therefore easier to “save”. This lent itself to the horizontal
“foot”. The time required to “foot” a
floor of turf varied according to whom you speak to and like the fish that got
away, improves with each telling.

     The work was
often carried out by the whole family with children joining parents after
school. Not all “floors” were equal, some being dryer or on better ground than
others. Regardless, the job required
that 484 foots be made per hour. This
involved handling over 60 sods per minute or one per second.

     The work was
back breaking and the black turf would rip the less weather-beaten hands, but
payment was by the “floor” so it was up to each worker to set his or her own
pace.

     Footing the turf
was labour intensive and an unusual aspect was the influx of travellers each
year to avail of the plentiful work. A
verse written by John Joe Sheehy sums up the relationship that existed between
this migrant workforce and local people. 

     The tinkers are footing

     The times they are great

     They’re camped by the river on Paddy’s
estate

     And old Charlie remarked as he pawed at
the grate

     The “bate” of the Lyre people

     Cannot be found.

    The neighbours so friendly

   Invite us to call

   The devil a refusal we meet with at
all    

   And be sure t’wont be long

  ‘Till you’ll come the next time

   As sure as my name is bold Charlie O’Brien

  A bit of tobacco or even a fag

  Or an old boiled potato to stuff in my bag

  Or a sup of sweet milk you don’t need for
the calf

 And Charlie moves on

 With his step and half.

Perhaps even more back breaking than turf cutting was work
on the Collector. This machine was a
long conveyor belt stretching across the full width of the turf bank. It was then driven forward as 9 men lifted
the sod “foots” and threw them into the connector. The belts continuously conveyed the turf
until it fell off to make one long reek about 7 feet long and 9 feet wide
beside the loco tracks.

    Later the reeks
were “slated”. This was done by
overlapping the outside sods in the manner that is tiled. The turf was then filled into the loco and
brought to the “tip” where it was tipped into waiting lorries.

     One of the biggest
sources of discontent with the  “Bord”
was the speed of the Collector. The
machine was the focal point of many a disagreement and the many accounts of
workers taking direct action to slow the all engulfing monster.

This man is throwing sods of turf into a collector. Below is a picture of an automatic collector, which has taken all the drudgery out of taking the sods off the bog.

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This picture is from Leonard Cohen’s concert in Kilmainham last week. Cohen wrote on his blog

” There is no better audience than an Irish audience.”

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Meanwhile in Galway the flags are still out.

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Great news story from The Irish Examiner

Sminky Shorts creator signs with talent agency as TV show beckons

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

A talent agency to the stars has signed the Irish comedic genius behind the hilarious Sminky Shorts internet cartoon sensation.

London-based United Agents represents Ricky Gervais, Richard Attenborough, Sophie Dahl, David Dimbleby, Clive James, and Kate Humble. 

The agency has now added Jason Sullivan to its stable of clients after his animation series was featured in the Irish Examiner.

The agency spotted the article in August and approached Jason a week later. Following a series of meetings, Jason confirmed last night he has agreed to sign up with them.

The 27-year-old from Kanturk in Co Cork, who produces the quirky and irreverent Sminky Short animations under the pseudonym Andrew James, said the fact the agency also represents the global online cartoon smash hit Simon’s Cat — which has an audience of some 250m people — clinched the deal for him. 

I had resisted putting in a link before in case people thought that this was more of a viral thing but now that he has hit the big time here goes: this is my favourite but I love them all.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biArkwUaURA

Gwan ya boya!  Ceann Toirc abú!

Con Houlihan,turf cutting and Bord na Mona

One of the pleasing things that happened after the great Con Houlihan died was that many journalists were moved to pen excellent essays mourning his passing.  One of these was a front page paen in The Sunday World by Roy Curtis. I’m going to indulge myself here and quote it in full.

‘He was a humble intellectual, an emperor of the written word who never ceased being a man of the people’

PASSION: Con was a man of big appetites PASSION: Con was a man of big appetites

HE WAS a wordsmith, a gentle and wise colossus, a son of the soil, a great hook-nosed and dishevelled Kerry sage, the most brilliant eyewitness to life’s ebb and flow.

He was a poet, a drinker, a lover of sport, people, nature, art, travel, bars and life. He was an artist who sketched the most vivid, moving portraits: His imagination was his brush, the 26 letters of the alphabet his paint, the newspaper his canvas. He leaves behind sufficient masterpieces to fill every nook and cranny of the Louvre.

He was an insomniac, a man with too much yearning to trouble himself with sleep, an individual whose curious mind could not be sated by the 24 hours in a day. He was shy, his shovel-sized paw covering his mouth as he decanted great nuggets of wisdom in that musical, lilting, difficult-to-decipher Kerry cadence.

He was a humble intellectual, a diffident genius, an emperor of the written word who never ceased being a man of the people. He was a man who made unlikely connections: Among them brandy and milk, his medicine of choice as he wandered on his own daily Homeric odyssey.

He was a daily communicant at pubs that hung like a necklace around the Liffey: Mulligan’s, Cassidy’s, The Palace Bar,Tommy Wright’s, The Regal Inn…

He flicked in his writings from sport to nature, from the claustrophobic chaos of an All-Ireland final’s closing moments to the tranquil idyll of swans residing on the Grand Canal by his beloved Portobello, with effortless grace. He was a font of knowledge and learning; an oasis of insight, sincerity and intelligence in a world increasingly parched of perception, understanding and decency.

He was a perfectionist, a slave to proper grammar, a man who viewed a misplaced comma or semi-colon as an act of vandalism against the English language. He was the back page of the Evening Press, a storyteller whose tales from faraway lands and dispatches from locations exotic and humdrum were at once lessons in geography and history, in sport and in life, in the character of man.

COLOSSUS: Houlihan

COLOSSUS: Houlihan

He was Ireland’s Charles Dickens. He was the behemoth of Burgh Quay and later, the seanachaí of the Sunday World.

He was a bare-footed rugby player, a wild-haired soul unconcerned with sartorial norms, a giant who would adorn his enormous frame with a bedraggled collection of wine jumpers, half-closed anoraks, ill-fitting trousers and unlikely black trainers. He had the look of a man who lived his life in a wind-tunnel.

He was a humungous whale who didn’t have it in him to harm plankton; he was political and passionate; he peered beneath the surface – deeper than almost anybody alive – to where the good in a man resided. He lived on a diet of black pudding, spuds and common sense. He was a teacher.His writings on the Dublin/Kerry rivalry of the 1970s should be on the Leaving Cert English course.

He was for many years my hero and for many more after that my friend. Con Houlihan’s passing leaves a crater in the earth, a great hunger in the lives of those of us who fed for decades at the trough of his erudition.

He was the man who stole my 21st birthday. On the eve of that October day in 1989, he had advised me he would be buying me drink the next day. At nine in the morning! By three o’clock the next afternoon I was asleep, fully-clothed on the sofa of my parents’ house.

There was no talk of recommended units of alcohol in those innocent days, but, had there been, I would probably have consumed my quota until my 30th birthday. I keeled over; Con, his lips barely wet, went on to Inchicore for another few pre-match pints before taking his familiar spot by the Camac river to watch Saint Pats. Later that night he would script another word-perfect portrayal of the

day.

If my father almost disowned me that afternoon, he positively swooned when, on RTE radio, Con praised my writing. Dad kept the recording for the remainder of his life. Because what Con Houlihan said mattered. He was trusted and loved. He was timeless: had he been of concrete and mortar, he would have been a listed building; something precious,that would stand forever, untouched, protected.

His appetites were voracious: For knowledge, for sport, for drink, for life. Though he had been unwell for some time, we thought him indestructible as he sailed towards his 10th decade.

But yesterday, finally, he left us. What remains is imperishable: a legacy of writing that demands – whatever the literary snobs say – inclusion alongside Joyce or Yeats, Casey or Kavanagh. To have read him was an education, to have known him a privilege, to have

drank with him was a liver-thumping thrill.

Our sympathies to Harriet, a lady of infinite patience and kindness. All that is left is to raise a cognac glass filled with brandy and milk to the supreme wordsmith, the sovereign of storytellers, the greatest of Kerry and Irishmen.

Roy Curtis

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The great Con Houlihan was laid to rest in his beloved Castle Island on Friday. One of the “gifts” that was brought to the altar to represent him was a sod of turf. Con loved the bogs of his native county and spent many happy hours working at the turf. He also worked for Bord na Mona for a year or two.

…….

Todd Andrews was one of the first to realize the value of Ireland’s peat bogs. The Turf Development Board was set up in 1933 and in 1946 Bord na Mona came into being. People associate Bord na Mona with the blanket bogs of the midlands but for many years BNM ran a turf cutting operation in Lyreacrompane.

The kind of bog with which we are familiar in this part of the county is a cutaway bog. People owned these bogs and others bought turbary rights from them. The sods of turf were cut vertically with a sleán and were laid on the bank to dry. The sods were turned regularly until they were dry and then they were piled into little stooks and eventually brought home and made into a rick or stored in a turf shed to dry further.

This method of harvesting turf is hugely labour intensive. It is still practiced by many private individuals in North Kerry. Turf is still the preferred fuel for heating in many local households.

It was not long before BNM brought in machinery to do the cutting or milling of the peat. Milling cuts the peat from the top of the bog.

This man is bringing home his turf on an ass with two creels or panniers tied across his back. The donkey was a very suitable beast for bog work since he was relatively light and could be brought into even the most soggy bog.

In the 1950s your turf was brought home to you in a lorry.

This man, an employee of BNM is loading sods of turf into a collector. The man had to keep ahead of the machine and had to keep bending and throwing in a back breaking routine.

This photograph is from Lyreacrompane where women were employed to feed the collector. The machine was known as “The Iron Ganger” as it dictated the pace of the work.

Tracks were laid across the bog and the turf loaded into wagons which were pulled by the engine to the centre for loading on to trucks.

During the war there was no coal imported and loads of turf were brought to the Phoenix Park to provide fuel for the city of Dublin. We must remember that the trains ran on steam as well.

All of these photos and many more are here

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bord-na-Móna-Heartland/180733458639655

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The Races are coming

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Military History

http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/reels/bmh/BMH.WS1580.pdf

This testimony is the statement of a Dr. Enright who attend to Con Dee after he was shot and wounded at Gortagleanna

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