Listowel People Today and in Yesteryear

Photo: Chris Grayson

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Glamourous was Hannon's

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Listowel People on their way to Mass on March 17 2018

 On St. Patrick's Day 2018 I stood at the gate of St. Mary's, Listowel and snapped some good folk as they went to mass on our national feast day.

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Vincent Carmody Remembers Growing up in Listowel in the 1950s

The name Lars Larsson was first mentioned to me in a conversation that I had with Dotie Cronin, who was an elderly neighbour of ours, and an old time family friend.

The Cronin family originally lived in a thatched cottage in Upper William Street. When the house was demolished in the late 1800s, James Cronin, a stonemason, built a slated cottage at the lower end of Charles Street.

As I grew up in the late 1940’s and ‘50s, I became aware of the two elderly Cronin sisters, Kathy and Dotie,  their back yard, which entered into the laneway at the back of our house, was home to fowl of many descriptions, with each species, hens, ducks, bantams, and even two geese, having little sheds of their own. Every morning, the back gate would be thrown open and the fowl would be allowed scatter to the four winds, ranging out through the various fields, belonging to Chutes, Shanahan and Broderick’s , at the rear of the street. Broderick’s field skirted the Limerick/Tralee railway track, with countryside on the far side, stretching up to Knockane and Raymond’s of Dromin Hill in the far distance.

This railway track defined in our young eyes whether one was a townie or from the country. The Cronin birds, then perhaps, would have been the last of the free rangers in our urban setting. By early evening when the fowl would have returned, like the hunter home from the hills, Dotie, the enumerator, would do a head count. If any failed to return, she, in consternation, would arrive in our back door, calling out to my mother, ‘Those wayward bitches of hens don’t know how fine a home they have in Cronin’s, would Vincent have a look for them’. Most times, the stragglers would be rounded up and a relieved Dotie would present me with a couple of fresh hen eggs.

(more tomorrow)

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Daffodil Day in Listowel in 2018

Friday March 23 2018 was Daffodil Day this year and as usual the Listowel folk were out in force raising funds for this good cause.

I had two young men with me as they began their Kerry Easter holiday.

This is an old photo of an earlier Daffodil Day organising committee. It is sad to see to see so many lovely Listowel folk who are gone from us but good to see so many others still going strong and still involved in helping the community.