Boxing club ready to move from an era

After several years of negotiation and legal work, Kilcullen Boxing Club are now in a position to move into a new state of the art club premises on the Community Centre Complex, writes Brian Byrne.

They will leave behind a building which club members built themselves back in the early 1960s, and which may have been the first building in Ireland named after President John F Kennedy, the JFK Hall.

"President Kennedy was killed just before we were due to open the hall," club stalwart Pat Lynch recalls. "It seemed the right thing to do, to name it in his memory."

Of course, when the club does move, it will be leaving behind a lot of memories too. Not just of boxing activities and boxers, but also of a social centre in Kilcullen.

"We ran discos in the hall twice a week, on Fridays and Sundays," remembers Tony Aspell. "There would be up to 400 people on good nights. It brought a lot of business into the town at a time when it was needed."

The land for the hall was provided by the late Joe O'Connell, in a deal worth £200. With the move to the Community Centre the property reverts to the O'Connell family again, in the person of Brendan.

Building the hall was very much a hands-on matter for the club members of the time. "We all became block layers, plumbers and carpenters," Pat Lynch says, recalling some of those involved: the Aspell and Howard families, the Orfords, Hughie Doherty, Donal O'Donovan, among others. "Christy O'Brien from Calverstown did the roofing. Artie Aspell did a good deal of the plumbing and inside plastering."

Funding the operation was rather an ad hoc affair, with Brennans Hardware willing to run a tab on the materials as needed. "I remember we were stuck for money to do the sewerage, and Ken Urquhart gave us £200 for it," Pat Lynch says. "We got an interest-free loan of £100 from the Kilcullen Non-Stop Draw, and the IABA gave us a grant of £100."



In typical Kilcullen fashion, a dance had been organised on a date to open it, but the day before there was still no connection to the town's main sewerage system.

"We spent all night before digging a trench out to the main road, laying the sewerage pipes," Pat remembers with a chuckle. "It had to be done before the traffic started in the morning, and Mrs Landers kept us going through the night with tea and sandwiches. In the morning we had it done, and we all went off to our day jobs. Though I'd say none of us did much work that day."

Soon after the building was opened, the club realised that they hadn't made provision for a stage. So they quickly added on a 'temporary' structure at the end, sheathed in corrugated sheets. "Fifty years on, it's still there, without us ever going to get planning permission for a proper extension," Pat says. "The wiring for the stage was done by an ESB electrician working at the time on the wiring of the Kent Rubber factory, and he did it for nothing."

Dave O'Brien is the current club chairman, and Ber Dunne is secretary. At the moment the membership is mainly juveniles with no senior boxers in the game for the town at the moment.

Jim Berney, Paddy Aspell and Pat Lynch are the remaining trustees of the original club that built the JFK Hall.

(This article was published in the current edition of the Kildare Nationalist.)