Odds & Ends

A daring armed robbery

was carried out at Lyreacrompane Post Office, a few miles from here (Listowel) at 10 o’clock this morning as a result of which £15 was taken. Shortly after the money had been lodged in the office for the payment of the old age pensions, a man armed with a shotgun and having a muffler around the lower part of his face, entered the building and ordered Mr. Con O’Donoghue, post master, and three old age pensioners who were present at the time to put up their hands and hand over the cash, remarking: “This is a general thing today.” After taking possession of the money the raider, who is believed to be a stranger to the district, was seen to take a cross-country route. (Irish Times, Nov 17 1934) At that time the Post Office was situated next to Pat and Breda Carmody’s home in Knockaclare.

A totally different world

“Different… different… a totally different world. I didn’t know it in the 1950s when I started writing seriously but I was recording faithfully a life that would disappear forever. The characters are true to their time and place. I was one of them. They’re all gone now…”

“They” are his (Keane’s) beloved, staunchly independent people from places like Lyreacrompane, the Ivy Bridge, Renagown, Dirha West and Boithrin Dubh “Out the road”, who prided themselves on their music, their turf, their cattle, even their cabbage, in that “mystical past”.

“And the saddest thing of all is that so many passed on without leaving anything behind them; people with marvellous stores of stories and songs and anecdotes… It all went down with them… It was the reason I became a playwright. I don’t have any doubt about it.” (John B Keane)

In Lyreacrompane Keane found “a very tranquil loveliness, dominated by varying shades of brown which gave it a muted quality, except for the hundreds of streams which churtled all day and all night, wilder than the more placid waters of the Feale back in Listowel to which they contributed.” Most important of all for Keane was the language spoken there: an eloquent mixture, half Irish, half English.

“Commonplace language seemed to be outlawed there. Every phrase was coloured and filled with subtleties. The language I encountered in the Stacks Mountains had an extraordinary influence on my early plays and on my own speech thereafter. For all its raciness, it is still a very measured language”. (Irish Times April 4 1996)

1962 wages

Dáil Éireann - 10 July, 1962 - Wages of Road Workers. Mr. Dan Spring asked the Minister for Local Government the present rates of wages paid to road workers by each county council.

Mr. Blaney: As the reply is in the form of a tabular statement, I propose, with your permission, a Cheann Comhairle, to circulate it with the Official Report. (In the case of Kerry the weekly wage was £7.)

Although all the big

Festival events ended last night there is a busy week ahead for Geraldine FitzGerald from Boston, the Rose of Tralee. Tonight she will be guest at a dance in Listowel and will be conveyed in a cavalcade to the ballroom. On Sunday she will be guest at a dance being run in Kilgarvan by the Kenmare NACA. On next Wednesday night the Rose and her attendants will be guests at a dance in Brosna, the next parish to Lyreacrompane in North Kerry, where another of her grandparents on her father’s side came from. (September 6 1963)

Tommy and Eileen Moran take to the floor at the Dan Paddy Andy Festival

Mary Mangan browsing Journal Number 9.