Listowel Town Park and Listowel Celtic in the 1990s

I recently took a walk through The Cows' Lawn on a Sunday Morning. It was a hive of activity.

Sunday morning rugby game

Is the pitch and putt course being extended to the other side of the path?

October tranquility

Ball Alley


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Meanwhile on the other side of town......

An old Lartigue Bridge

Derelict cottage on the Ballybunion Rd.

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Listowel Celtic with Henry Molyneaux. Can anyone name them for us?

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Kerry Crusaders are fielding a team of 90 in The Dublin City Marathon today. Best of luck to everyone involved.

Halloween and Christmas

It was once my pleasure to teach some girls who had recently come with their families from Poland to live in Listowel. They told me that they do not celebrate Halloween in Poland. It is the Feast of All Souls for them and on this national holiday everyone tries to make their way back to visit their family graves. Roads are often jammed with families traveling from the cities to visit country churchyards.

 We used to be like that in Ireland once but now it's all witches, pumpkins, sweets and the annual begging that we borrowed from American traditions, called Trick or Treat. Below are a few details from Listowel Halloween window displays.

If you are looking for someplace to take the children at Halloween I'd recommend The Kerry County Museum in Tralee. It's open from 9.30 to 5.00 and has some spooky Halloween goings on.

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Listowel Garden Centre is looking fabulous for Christmas 2013. It is a Winter Wonderland and every one involved in setting up the displays is to be applauded.

On Saturday, when we visited, Pamela and Katelyn were face painting. They were very busy and doing a smashing job.

Watching fish is so relaxing!

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In Carlow in 1934 petrol cost 6d.

Kerry Crusaders and the late Jerry Mulvihill and Dr. Michael O'Connor

This angler has perched his rod against one of the most beautiful backdrops imaginable.  (photo by Ballybunion Sea Angling)

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The Crusaders have a big contingent in training for the Dublin City Marathon this weekend. Here they are at a recent training session in Ballybunion. (photos: Kerry Crusaders)

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O'Connell Street Dublin 1960s

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Do you remember my tale of Liza Mulvihill from last week?

It prompted Jer. Kennelly to visit her and he made a little video of her singing. She is some woman for 98. Below is the link to Liza singing.

http://youtu.be/J5Domxsmqfg

Liza's brother, Jerry was a famous teacher of Irish dancing in the U.S. He passed away recently.

Jerry Mulvihill R.I.P.

Jerry Mulvihill  who emigrated to the United States in 1948 and moved to Kings Park in 1969 was 92 when he died August 2013.

Legendary Irish Dance Master and longtime Kings Park resident Jerry Mulvihill, has passed away. According to family friend, Debbie Lynch-webber, Jerry died peacefully in his sleep while in the company of family members.

Jerry was born in 1921 in Moyvane, County Kerry. He took his first steps in Irish dancing at the age of four from dance master, Joe Enright. He later took lessons from the famous Kerry dancer, Jerry Molyneaux. In 1948, At age 17 he won the Irish national championship in stepdancing. Jerry emigrated to the United States where he settled in New York City and then in 1969 to Kings Park, LI. . his brother persuaded him to stay in New York.

Jerry has taught youngsters of all ages including Donny Golden, who taught Jean Butler of Riverdance fame. Like other master stepdancers Jerry prefers "the old style. If you don't have that you have nothing." He also holds prizes from hundreds of national and international competitions. He has performed at hundreds of competitions, and before noted persons such as Robert Moses. Jerry estimates that he has taught thousands of students through the years, including his partner Debbie Lynch of Centereach.
Jerry can be accredited to teaching thousands of dancers throughout his years, many of them champions. A number of his pupils have gone on to become teachers themselves. Some well known teachers include Debbie Lynch-Webber, Kenny Verlin (RIP), Donny Golden, Cathy Spencer-Revis, Helaine Sanders, Peggy Moriarity-White, Patty Moriarty, Kerry Kelly, Brian Sexton, Lisa and Karen Petri, Donald Hunt, just to name a few.

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Michael O'Connor son of Dr. Michael O'Connor of 23 The Square designed this cover for the 1960 commemorative booklet for the sports field.

Our front cover design is the work of Dr. M. O’Connor, Dublin

Michael is a son of the late Dr. Michael O’Connor of Listowel ( who, up to the time of his death, was M.O.H. for the district). When we asked Michael for a few personal details for this brochure, he wrote, “I had the good fortune to be born in Listowel and that, I think, about covers everything – anything after that is anticlimax.”  Repeated requests for a photograph brought the reply, “I’ve always been rather allergic to cameras, not being photo-whatever- it-is.”

The castle incorporated in the design is the old Geraldine castle situated at the rear of  the house in The Square in which Michael was born. The design actually shows the gable of the house in which the artist was born. The bridge in the design is easily recognizable as that across The River Feale to the famous “Island” Racecourse.

Bromore Cliff Walk, Súgáning and Bushfires

Bromore Cliff Walk is THE place to be on beautiful Autumn Sunday.

There is a friendly horse to greet visitors. He delighted this little animal lover on Sunday last. It is not obvious in my photo but he is on the other side of the fence.

the cliffs

My little visitors looking a little wind blown.

The sea below



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These men are learning the art of Súgáning in Causeway Men's Shed. Causeway Men's Shed have lovely wooden products for sale in Atlantic Creations, Ballybunion.

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http://johnpridmore.yolasite.com/about-me.php

They are having a mission in Tarbert this week and this man is one of their missioners

John Pridmore is the man on the right.


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You have read recently of the dreadful bushfires raging in New South Wales. My friend Julie sent this account

"I thought that perhaps you might have heard about the terrible fires devastating NSW at the moment. As I look out my window I see that the sunlight is a golden orange colour and the sun, if one dares look at it, it an orange ball through a smoky sky. We have been enduring very dry and hot conditions since Thursday when very high winds caused bushfires to surge through the bush of the Blue Mountains and the Southern Highlands of NSW.  It is a very early start to ‘the fire season’ and NSW has had an appalling few days. Already more than 200 homes have been destroyed though, thank God, only one man has died, from a heart condition, as he tried to defend his home. Yesterday we found two burnt leaves in our backyard yet we are more than 100kms from an actual fire. The wind carries embers and this is the danger for many homes in the regions around the fires. In one fire alone more than 24000 hectares have been burnt out and at one point there were 95 separate fires of varying intensity burning in the state.

If only it would rain. We have had none for months. Most of our garden does not need watering but we have had to do a bit lately. Australia is certainly a country of beauty and terror as our famous poet Dorothea Mackellar wrote to an English friend:

My Country by Dorothea Mackellar (1885 - 1968)

The love of field and coppice, Of green and shaded lanes. Of ordered woods and gardens Is running in your veins, Strong love of grey-blue distance Brown streams and soft dim skies I know but cannot share it, My love is otherwise. I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror - The wide brown land for me! A stark white ring-barked forest All tragic to the moon, The sapphire-misted mountains, The hot gold hush of noon. Green tangle of the brushes, Where lithe lianas coil, And orchids deck the tree-tops And ferns the warm dark soil. Core of my heart, my country! Her pitiless blue sky, When sick at heart, around us, We see the cattle die- But then the grey clouds gather, And we can bless again The drumming of an army, The steady, soaking rain. Core of my heart, my country! Land of the Rainbow Gold, For flood and fire and famine, She pays us back threefold- Over the thirsty paddocks, Watch, after many days, The filmy veil of greenness That thickens as we gaze. An opal-hearted country, A wilful, lavish land - All you who have not loved her, You will not understand- Though earth holds many splendours, Wherever I may die, I know to what brown country My homing thoughts will fly                            <<<<<<<<

Mick MacConnell's Ballad, The Great Southern Trail and the parish mission

The Ballad of Lidl and Aldi....a development

The story below comes from  Irish Central. It is a column written by Cormac MacConnell. Did I predict this or did I predict this?

Great news and a well deserved break for everyone involved.

The Ballad of Lidl and Aldi


"Ah, lads and lassies, I have another yarn for ye this week, again connected with the family, but not a dark sad thing like the last one about the departure of beloved brother Sean.

This is a merry one connected with youngest brother Mickie, the songwriter-musician below in Kerry (“Only Our Rivers Run Free”), and it has to do with the reality that life goes on despite the mortal blips along the way. 

You see, Mickie came home from the Dublin funeral, sad like the rest of us, but he was due to play his gig in the fabled J.B. Keane pub the following evening. He put his guitar on his back and off he went.

He had a new comic song which he duly performed to a full house on the night, and it was and is a comic one indeed in the current Irish economic context. 

For those of you who were not born in Ireland, the current reality is that increasingly thrifty shoppers make a beeline for the chain of German discount stores operated throughout the land by the competing Lidl and Aldi chains. These have stolen a major slice of the retail market from Irish companies like Dunnes because they offer even better value on the basic domestic items. They very sharply compete against each other also.

Their negative side, reflected in Mickie’s comic song, is that if you go in to buy bread and butter and milk and items like that, you are likely to be trapped into buying many other items from the overflowing displays all around, especially hardware items like chainsaws and hedge trimmers and packs of screwdrivers and a host of other yokes you don’t at all need. I have a thousand screwdrivers  myself, and a chainsaw, that I don’t need at all.

That ground is wittily covered in Mickie’s song called the “Lidldi Aldi Song,” and it went down like a bomb when he sang it in John B’s pub. 

What he did not know that night was that there was a professional film crew in the house, and they were so blown away by the song that they filmed it, there and then, and somebody posted it up on YouTube inside the next few days (you can view it and hear it there at the Ballad of Lidl & Aldi, Mick McConnell) and, to make a long story short, it is heading for international viral status even as I write this with something like 110,000 hits last night. Amazing development. 

Even more amazing — and I have to be careful here — is that it came to the notice in England of the advertising agency that handles advertising campaigns worth about £12 million annually for one of the store chains. A spokesman for the agency contacted Mickie the other afternoon stating they would like to use the song to backbone a major Irish TV advertising campaign in the Spring. And would he be agreeable to that?

And Mickie was very agreeable. And, more delicately put by the agency spokesman, was there any chance that he could alter the lyrics so that all references to the opposition could be deleted? And, like a shot, our Mickie said that he could easily put in another “Diddly-di” into the chorus and effectively blot out the opposition. No problem at all.

There’s great craic in Listowel at the development.  John B’s flamboyant son Billy, the current host, promised he would throw a party at the end of this month if the hits exceeded 100,000. That figure has now been exceeded so the entire clan, again for a merry night out, will gather in John B’s for the October bank holiday weekend and, for sure, there will be a wryly grinning sibling spirit not far away too.

There are delicate negotiations ongoing as I write, but it is likely that the TV campaign will be at least partly located in the famous pub and there is high excitement about that too.  Lively times lie ahead for sure. 

Have a look at the song on YouTube and for sure you will chuckle at least once, especially if you were born and raised in the Emerald Isle. And that’s it for now. "

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Tourism and local amenity project still stymied

Councillor Jimmy Moloney, Mayor of Listowel standing on the line where the developed walking trail ends and the proposed extension begins.

Over 75 people attended a public meeting in Listowel on Saturday. The meeting was called to assess support for a proposal to extend the Great Southern Trail in North Kerry.

A 39 kilometre stretch of the Great Southern Trail has already been developed into a greenway from Rathkeale to the Kerry/Limerick border near Kilmorna.

Earlier this year, walkers who were attempting to travel a section of the old rail line between Limerick and Tralee, were blocked at the Kerry border by members of The North Kerry Abandoned Rail Line Action Group, who are opposed to the development of this route as a tourist walking and cycling trail.

A recent canvas saw members of the Great Southern Trail meet with landowners in order to hear their concerns about the proposed walkway.

Cathaoirleach Liam O Mahony says while the meeting was well attended, they are disappointed at the lack of representation by Kerry County Councillors and management.

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Listowel Parish Mission

The missioners, lovely approachable affable men most unlike misioners of old.

Convent band leading Saturday night's community parade.

Tree with labels naming Listowel families we prayed for.

One of the many lovely posters adorning the church

There was much emphasis on Family and Community

Mission stalls

Some things never change!