Some Aspects of Listowel in Summer 2020

Some Images from Town

The Square through the gate of the Intreo office.

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Brendan Mahony is working hard. His shop  is open for business.

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I wonder how soon is soon.

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Danny's and Bailey and Co.  are closed but Danny is available online.

Don't be without a tasty fish for tea.

Morkan's will be open in Phase 2.

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Church Street

Woulfe's and Perfect Pairs will take your order on line and both shops are open for a few hours for collection.

After a few weeks of closure, Eason is open.

These two kind caring signs are at The Hair Lounge.

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Early Morning walker

I met John Pierse taking an early morning constitutional on Sunday May 31 2020. John is always really the most interesting man you could run into to on Listowel's streets. He has a brain full of various interesting facts.

On Sunday he told me that in the years between 1841 nd 1851, 18000 people died in North Kerry. John is the acknowledged expert on The Famine in North Kerry.

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Church Street Mural

Charlie Nolan has recorded and edited a lovely video of the unveiling of this mural by Olive Stack and paid for by the Church Street Traders. The unveiling took place on Nov. 15 1998. It's a lovely souvenir but sad to see so many of the old stock of the town now no longer with us. The mural is a lovely addition to our streetscape. Church Street traders can be proud of their legacy.

Mural unveiling

Listowel Town Park, A Listowel chaplain in WW2 and a Church Street landmark gets a touch up

A Great Tit

Photo credit: Graham Davies

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Childers' Park

Pedestrian entrance to Listowel Town Park with Dandy Lodge in the background

The newly enlarged entrance from Bridge Road

Sign flattened by the elements

1916 commemorative garden

Dandy Lodge

Listowel Community Centre

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Listowel Parish commemorates The Holocaust

This is Fr. Michael Morrison who was born in Listowel in 1908. He was a chaplain who attended at the liberation of Bergen Belsen concentration camp at the end of WW2.
His story is here

 BBC Archive; World War 2 People's War

Photo: Kerry's Eye

At Sunday mass in Listowel on January 28 2018, Holocaust Memorial Day, Fr. Morrison's grandnephew, Finbarr Walshe of Tralee presented an icon to Listowel parish. The family believe that the icon was made by inmates in the concentration camp.

The Bergen-Belsen camp was built to hold 10,000 people, but on the day it was liberated 60,000 were crammed into appalling conditions. An estimated 50,000 people died there between 1941 and 1945.

Following the war, Fr Morrison served as a parish priest in Australia, before eventually returning home to Ireland, where he died in 1973.

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Plasterwork getting a Facelift

A little touching up to the famous plasterwork was in progress as I passed by on Church St. in January 2018.

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The Success of Sive in 1959

Some more newspaper cuttings from the Sive 1959 archive. Thank you, David O'Sullivan.

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Listowel in 1968

Newsbeat came to town to see if it was snobbery that was keeping local girls from applying for lucrative jobs in a new local factory. The interviewer was the late Bill O'Herlihy.

Newsbeat in Listowel