Kilcullen News Update

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Councillor says apartment guidelines will 'squeeze people into boxes'

Kildare-Newbridge MD councillor Chris Pender has slammed the new Government guidelines for apartments as a policy of 'squeezing people into boxes' instead of providing homes they can live in, writes Brian Byrne. Saying they are a case of 'rolling back standards and hoping no one notices', the Social Democrats representative also criticised the changes as stripping the power of local authorities to look for better.

The new guidelines permit minimum Studio Apartment floor areas of 32 sq m and a 2-person 1-bed apartment of 45 sq m. A 3-bed apartment for five people should have a minimum of 90 sq m. Issuing the guidelines, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage James Browne said they will likely result in some cases in an average of €50,000 and up to €100,000 cost reduction per unit and will get apartment building moving.

The new standards reduce dual-aspect requirements, remove the need for 3-bed units in private schemes, allow half of all apartments to be built without balconies or terraces, and reduce the number of homes that must exceed the minimum size. Cllr Pender says it's an approach that has failed again and again. "In 2015, Alan Kelly reduced studio sizes to 40 square metres," he notes. "In 2018, Eoghan Murphy reduced them further to 37 square metres. Now, in 2025, we’re told 32 square metres will somehow solve the crisis. It won’t. It will fail — again. It’s about making homes smaller, faster, and more profitable and telling people to be grateful for it.”

The councillor said the move is a developer-friendly deregulation plan dressed up as a housing solution.

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Donnelly's Arm to feature in talk next week

There will be a Kilcullen interest next Wednesday, 16 July, at a County Carlow event in a nationwide tour by two performance artists in a 1960s Renault 4, writes Brian Byrne. Dan Donnelly's arm will feature in a talk at Muine Bheag Arts about 19th-century sport, medicine, media and grave-robbing.

The talk will be given by historian and writer Barry Kehoe between 1pm and 3pm at the Muine Bheag centre. In particular, he will discuss Dan Donnelly’s mummified arm, which was displayed in the Hideout in Kilcullen for four decades from 1953, and subsequently exhibited in New York, Boston, in the Ulster Folk Museum in Omagh, Co Tyrone, Limerick University, and Croke Park, Dublin. 

The free event is part of a summer-long series titled Tour de Force by artist Liliane Puthod and writer Ingrid Lyons. They are travelling around Ireland in Liliane's fully repaired 1960s Renault 4, hosting events, art installations, performances, talks and live broadcasts.

Meanwhile, if you're out and about in Kilcullen today, Wednesday the 9th, the car will be travelling through Kilcullen sometime from midday on. Give them a beep if you're in your own car, or a wave if on foot.

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A packed programme for GM Hopkins International Festival

The 37th Gerard Manley Hopkins International Festival will be opened by Kildare South TD and Agriculture Minister Martin Heydon on Friday, 18 July, writes Brian Byrne. Based in Newbridge College, the event will run until Thursday, 24 July.

The Festival celebrates the life and interests of the 19th-century poet, artist, and philosopher, GM Hopkins. A packed programme will include talks and lectures, a piano recital by Hans Pålsson, an art exhibition, a creative writing workshop, and a celebrity concert by legendary traditional Irish musicians Frankie Gavin and Noel Hill. A nightly festival club in O'Rourke's pub will feature performances from a number of highly talented local musicians.

The Artistic Director of the Festival is its founder, poet Desmond Egan, and the whole event is organised by the Gerard Manley Hopkins Society with support from Kildare County Council, Newbridge College, Newbridge Silver, and Poetry Ireland.

Further information and booking for events from the Conference Office between 9 am and 6pm at 085 2732568.

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Parish Lotto Draw results

The numbers drawn in the Kilcullen & Gormanstown Parish Lotto Draw held on 8 July 2025 were 12, 18, 19 and 27. There was no Jackpot winner and next week's main prize will again be €20,000. The value of the follow up draw stands at €15,200.

The winners of the €50 Open Draws were Kitty Reade (Promoter: The Parish Office), Mary McKenna (The Parish Office) and Pat, Seamus, Cian & John (Lena Farrell).

The winners of the Promoters Draw were Kay Dixon and May Coyne and the winner of the Draw for those in the Parish Centre on the night was Leah O'Sullivan.

The Parish thanks all who support the Lotto.

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Thank you, Kilcullen!

 

I wanted to express my deep appreciation to the Kilcullen community for all of the support you have given to me, my staff and my students during all of our research at Dún Ailinne, writes Dr Susan Johnston. 

When I started this project, I wasn’t sure how it was going to go. Bernard Wailes had always spoken well of Kilcullen, but that was a long time ago and time can do funny things. But you all welcomed us with open arms and have made this process not only easier and more rewarding, but so much more fun than I had hoped.

To the Thompson family, who have allowed me to come and wreck their lovely pasture for a month every summer, there aren’t enough ways to say thank you. To the people who have taken in my students, cared for them, fed them, nursed them, driven them around and generally looked after them so well, I am eternally grateful. We literally couldn’t have done this without you. 

To the people I have met who I now count among my friends, it has been a pleasure to get to know you all. Even though this phase of our research is finished, I will be back, and I look forward to spending time with you again. 

And finally, to all of you who have looked after this amazing site so well, who have tended it, promoted it, protected it, and have never let those outside Kilcullen forget how important it is to them, I give my humble respect. 

You are truly an extraordinary community, and it has been my great honour to be a small part of it for these last few years. Thank you all.

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Kilcullen swimmers take bronze in CG All Ireland

The Kilcullen Community Games Swimming Under 16 team won a bronze medal in the All Ireland Community Games Swimming Event on Saturday last, the 6th of July, in the Watershed in Kilkenny, writes Jean Mahon of the Kilcullen Community Games Committee.

The team consisted of Xavier Mahon, Tiarnan Donnelly, Daniel McNamara, Felix Mahon, Jack Higgins, and Conall Hoey (missing from the photo).

Well done to the boys, a great achievement.

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Kildare South TD calls for statutory right to home care

Image: Houses of the Oireachtas.

A statutory right to home care and the provision of the infrastructure and staff to provide this has been called for by Kildare South TD Mark Wall, writes Brian Byrne. In a Labour Party motion in the Dáil, he proposed a 'fair deal for care' that would mean "the end of privatisation of nursing home care in Ireland."

Deputy Wall noted that a right to home care has been promised by successive Governments since 2017 but there has not yet been any real progress on this. "Instead, the only option that older people and their families are faced with is nursing home care. The average length of stay in a nursing home is around three years. This reflects the level of decline that many older people experience due to privatisation, where shareholders are more concerned with profits than the care and well-being of older people."

The deputy said he had constituency cases in recent times which demonstrated a 'huge issue' of people waiting for housing adaptation grants from local authorities. "Yet they cannot move into their homes because those housing adaptation grants have not been sanctioned. Surely an intervention from the Minister of State would allow those people to go back to live in their own homes and allow that bed to be freed up for somebody else," he said.

A Government amendment to the motion, which committed inter alia to a review of inspection and monitoring of nursing homes, additional nursing home capacity, and a review of ownership structures, was described by the deputy as "not a Government listening or caring, but a Government promoting privatisation."  He said that over the last 20 years a small number of multinational corporations and foreign investment funds have taken a 'stranglehold' on the nursing home sector.

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Tickets on sale for 25th Shackleton Autumn School

The dates for this year's Shackleton Autumn School in Athy have been announced, and early bird tickets have gone on sale, writes Brian Byrne. It's the 25th year of the event commemorating the famous polar explorer.

The school will run over the weekend of Friday, 24 October, through Sunday, the 26th, in the Abbey Hotel, Athy.

The early tickets at €225 will be available for a limited time and can be bought at the Shackleton Museum website.

Please note the museum itself is currently closed for refurbishment.

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Roxanne brings home dance silverware

Young Kilcullen dancer Roxanne O'Neill won a slate of trophies at the Dance Sport Ireland All Ireland Championships hosted in the Dolmen Hotel in Carlow last Sunday. She came away as Junior Champion in the 5-Dance Latin and 5-Dance Ballroom categories, as well as taking the silverware for Under 14 5-Dance Latin and Ballroom and the Junior 3-Dance Latin and Ballroom events.

The five dances in the Latin segment are Cha-Cha, Samba, International Rumba, Paso Doble, and Jive. The standard dances in Ballroom are the White Waltz, Tango, Viennese Waltz, Foxtrot, and Quickstep.

Roxanne is a member of the Aaron and Niamh School of Dance, who hold Saturday morning classes at Kilcullen Community Centre. She is pictured here with her professional Latin and Ballroom teachers, Niamh Curtin and Arron Flynn.

It's Roxanne's first year competing at this level.

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Sports kit donations for Maintain Hope Kenya families

A reminder that used jerseys and shorts from any sports team or club in Kilcullen are being collected for delivery to Maintain Hope's families in Kenya, writes Brian Byrne. They will be brought by the 12 local volunteers going to Ngong later this month.

The clothing can be donated at Kilcullen GAA clubhouse during the Kids Academy session on Saturday next, 12 July, between 10am-12 noon.

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Big attendance at last Dun Ailinne Open Day

With around 150 people trekking to the top of Dun Ailinne yesterday afternoon, it was a really good turnout for what was the last Open Day on the hill for the foreseeable future, writes Brian Byrne. The annual summer excavations by groups of American archaeology students have been a fixture of Kilcullen life since 2016, but these have come to an end this year.

“It’s not that we have found everything; there are two or three lifetimes of work which could still be done on Dun Ailinne,” says Dr Susan Johnston from George Washington University, who, with her colleague Dr Suzanne Garrett, has been leading the investigations on the ancient site for almost two decades. "When we did the geophysics, we found there are hundreds of little circles and squiggles and things that you could investigate. But as far as the archaeology goes, I feel I'm at a stopping point; I've done this thing. The next stage is to write up the findings for publication in a formal way. The goal is to do that for next year.”

Dr Suzanne Garrett and Dr Susan Johnston.

The work over the years has confirmed the results of the excavations by Dr Bernard Wailes in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and also found significantly more areas of interest under the topsoil of Dun Ailinne. "In addition to those structures discovered by Bernard, we found three more that are slightly smaller, but with a similar pattern of getting more and more elaborate with time."

The use of technologies which weren’t available to Dr Wailes’s investigations, including magnetometry and carbon dating, has added to the bank of knowledge about the site. For instance, Susan Johnston now believes the active period of Dun Ailinne as a place of ritual may have been as short as around 200 years. But that doesn’t diminish its importance as one of the royal sites that are collectively on Ireland’s Tentative List in consideration for UNESCO World Heritage status. "The argument has always been, and I think there's merit to it, is that when Christianity comes in, this place gradually becomes less relevant in ritual terms. But it's still important in historical ways, and I think it's pertinent that they put the Christian monastery on a different hill, instead of plonking it here."

The fact that Dun Ailinne is continuously mentioned in documents from after the early medieval period is significant, she feels. "It's a place that is never really forgotten, a place of importance, and even when O'Donovan came through with his ordnance survey in the 19th century, he said that everybody knows this is Dun Ailinne. So even though it's not in continuous use, it's still known and is still important."

Vanessa and Claire.

Since 2016, Dun Ailinne has been a place for American archaeology students to get down and dirty for a month in the summer and see what field excavations in Ireland are like. This year, six of the cohort were from George Washington University and one from Gettysburg College. For Vanessa, majoring in archaeology and history, and Claire, majoring in anthropology, their first field experience has been both fascinating and enjoyable. "You get thrown into it completely," says Vanessa. "At first it's very heavy work, digging the sod and then you get down and doing more delicate work with the trowel and it's so exciting to see all the features come up." 

For Claire, having the practical experience has helped her to really understand things previously only covered in a classroom. "You have so much more a connection to it when you're actually doing it, and that's been great," she says. Both students say the Kilcullen sojourn — "it's such a cute town, with the river running through it," Claire says — will encourage them to continue in their fields. "I've had such a great experience here," says Vanessa, "and it has been really cool to get to see history up close and learn about it."

The tours of the 13-hectare site conducted by Susan Johnston yesterday reflected both her four decades as a teacher and the underlying humour of her personality, which has a refreshing irreverence. It was very much a two-way interaction as she answered questions and built up a picture of the site's probable role in community identity and hierarchy in a mobile cattle and agriculture economy. Although there's no evidence that Dun Ailinne was a place where kings were inaugurated, as at other royal sites, she suggested that it was used to 'anchor' people through annual or semi-annual rituals, and was still about important people. "The idea is that you're moving around, but you're still part of a community. And every year, perhaps at Bealtaine or whatever, people come back here and do various kinds of rituals. That's what gives them their sense of community, that they are all part of the same group."   

Almost like the place Dun Ailinne was for its own mobile community two thousand years ago, the annual arrival of Susan Johnston and her team to Kilcullen has been its own anchoring of connections since 2006. Now that the current investigations have come to an end, the archaeologists have mixed feelings. But a constant is their view of Kilcullen and its people, especially the Thompson family who own the Dun Ailline land and gave their permission readily for the excavations. "They have been so incredibly good all over the years," Susan Johnston says. "And this community is amazing, and I will miss that. I'll be coming back, but, you know, it won't be quite the same."

Explaining the finds on Dun Ailinne.

NOTE: Dun Ailinne is on a private working farm and not open to the public.

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