Roy Thompson & Brooks Williams: The Ballymore Acoustic Gigs.
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Public Meeting in the Town Hall to launch and discuss the results of the recent Kilcullen Community Survey. Tuesday January 31, 8pm. This is a most important report for the future of our town and everybody is urged to attend.
The bainisteoir for the Kilcullen GAA in the fourth series of RTE's 'Celebrity Bainisteoir' is TV and radio presenter Brenda Donohue.
She arrived at the clubhouse this evening and got stuck into her first training session with the team.
Kilcullen has been drawn against Derry for its first game in the knock-out competition.
The name of the celebrity who will manage Kilcullen GAA for the new series of the TV programme 'Celebrity Bainisteoir' will be revealed this evening at the clubhouse.
The event kicks off at 5.30pm, and the team's first training session with their new manager will take place immediately afterwards.
Everybody is welcome to the event.
This fourth series will feature eight brand new celebrities, eight new mentors and eight new GAA club teams ready to battle it out for the title Celebrity Bainisteoir 2011.
The participating non-sporting personalities come face-to-face with the real meaning of club, community and parish in the series.
The first of the hour-long programmes of the series goes out on 18 September, at 6.30pm.
Recently ordained by Archbishop Timothy Dalton of New York at a ceremony in St Patrick's Cathedral, Father Columba Jordan's celebratory mass in Ireland is planned for Saturday, July 23 at St Joseph’s Church in Dublin. The following day he will celebrate mass in Kilcullen.
Fr Columba, christened Brian, is now 33 and has been a member of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal since 2001. He is the son of Robert and Maedbh Jordan who used to live in Kilcullen.
He ascribes his religious vocation to reading the writings of St Faustina Kowalska, the visionary Polish nun who instituted the Divine Mercy devotion. Then 17, he says he had been 'dabbling' in various New Age religions at the time, though he can recollect having had 'ideas' about the priesthood from the time he was five. The turnaround came at a Divine Mercy conference which his father Robert had helped to organise.
After a stint at NUI Maynooth studying Information Technology, and playing the guitar in his spare time, he finally decided to try the religious life 'for a year' after attending Pope John Paul II’s 2000 World Youth Day festival in Rome.
He joined the New-York based Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and has served in a number of the order's ministries, including being a member of its Mission Team. His musical interests were also put to use in his leading of the community's choir.
His next posting, now as a priest, will be to the second of the Friars of the Renewal houses here, in Derry. Their first one in Ireland was opened in Limerick.
Fr Columba's parents—Robert is a teacher in Sandymount, Maedhbh manages the Dietetics Department in Naas Hospital—have operated, as a hobby, an Irish photograph postcards website for some time, with all the proceeds from photograph sales being donated to the Renewal Friars.
They are available from Irish Picture Cards.com; phone 01-4925276; or email: sales@IrishPictureCards.com.
The Diary has been informed of the death of Dec Berney. He was only a month short of his 88th birthday.
Dec was brought to Kilcullen Parish Church this evening. Burial in Two Mile House Cemetery will take place after 11 o'clock mass tomorrow, Wednesday.
To his relations and friends we extend our condolences.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.
Aine Byrne, daughter of the late Des Byrne and Josephine Byrne, married her longtime sweetheart David Casey yesterday. The bride and groom are pictured with Josephine (right) and David's parents Derek and Kathleen.
The marriage ceremony was celebrated by Fr Andrew O'Sullivan, who served in Kilcullen for seven years. The wedding took place in St McCartan's Cathedral in Monaghan, with the reception afterwards at Castle Leslie.
Just a reminder that there's the annual Open Day at Dunshane Camphill this afternoon, 2-5pm.
Lots of fun for all, a great way to pass the (promised) sunny afternoon, and the opportunity to see what a terrific job the organisation is doing at what was its first facility in the Kilcullen area.
The others are the Bridge Community and the farm at Gormanstown.
Kilcullen now has a very local place for getting bedding plants and other gardening requirements.
The Garden Shop has set up business in the car park of the Cattle Mart. It is operated by Kevin Noud Landscaping from Kilrush.
We'll talk to Kevin about the new venture later, but with a warm weekend promised it might be worth a look.
A thoughtful piece here by local writer Hazel Gaynor, on what will the the early memories of today's digitally-raised children.
Fans of live blues and folk music will be glad to know that Kilcullen troubadour Roy Thompson has taken on the task of continuing the live gigs in Ballymore which were for years managed at Mick Murphy's bar by the late John Roddy.
Roy was for many years a part of that operation, handling the sound and from time to time filling in with his own inimitable style of song and guitar playing if a headline act got delayed.
"Since the untimely passing of the great Larry Roddy last November, there have been no regular gigs in Ballymore," he told the Diary. "With the blessing of the Roddy family I am now taking it on, and will be putting together a programme of gigs for the coming months and beyond. I have four gigs booked—between the end of August and late October—since I started last week, and commitments from other acts for later this year and early next year. So, it's onwards and upwards."
Gigs are hosted in a listening room with an ethos of quiet attentiveness. Just some among the many acts which have appeared in the past are Mick Hanly, Mary Coughlan, John Spillane, Ger Wolfe, Paul Brady, Freddie White, Paul Lamb and the Kingsnakes, Gareth Pearson, Bruce Mathiske, Buddy Mondlock, Jeffrey Foucault, Chuck Brodsky and Jim Page.
Roy has set up a Facebook page—Ballymore Acoustic Gigs—through which fans can keep an eye on what's upcoming.
Kilcullen no longer has direct Bus Eireann service to Dublin Airport, as part of a route change by the state transport company, writes Brian Byrne.
The No 4 Express Service, which provided eight airport services per day in each direction, now goes directly from Carlow to Dublin, with the first stop being Red Cow. Subsequent stops take it through Dublin and finally to the Airport.
The schedule change came in on June 12 and the change also affects services in Castledermot and Naas.
The three towns are still served by the Dublin-Cork Bus Eireann route via Clonmel, but it doesn't go to the airport.
JJ Kavanagh & Sons provide 19 services to Dublin Airport each day through Kilcullen.
There will be lots of excitement in Kilcullen GAA Clubhouse at teatime on Thursday 30 June.
That's because Kilcullen GAA have been selected for the fourth series of RTE's Celebrity Bainisteoir, and the celebrity Bainisteoir will be revealed at that time.
The CB will make a personal appearance during the reveal.
The Organising Committee of the Kilcullen River Festival 2011 is currently taking bookings from anyone who would like to take a trade stall at this years Festival in August.
If you would like to take a stall to promote your business or goods, please send an email to kilcullenriverfestival@gmail.com.
Last year's festival was a great success and the Committee is aiming to make this year's even better.
Last Thursday's reading evening of Original Sins at Barker & Jones Naas was a very enjoyable event with over 40 people turning up to listen to new Irish writing read by its authors, who included Kilcullen writer Ilona Blunden.
Playwright and novelist John MacKenna gave a warm welcome and introduced the readers. The three Kildare-based writers featured in the book, Valerie Ryan, Jeanne Beary and Ilona, read extracts from their short stories. Several other writers featured in the book travelled up from Kilkenny and Carlow to read extracts and support the event.
Original Sins, edited by Suzanne Power and John MacKenna, is a collection of short stories and poetry by 22 new authors and is available to buy in Barker & Jones Naas at €10.
Pictured at the event are Ilona, Orla Hennessy (Kilkenny), and Valerie Ryan (Naas).
Camphill Dunshane are holding an open day on Sunday June 26th from 2pm to 5pm, writes Caroline McCabe. We would like to invite members of the local community to join us for a day of fun, with Face Painting, Sheep Race, Wheelbarrow Race, Treasure Hunt, Games, Raffles, Food from different parts of the world and of course Ice Cream.
Camphill Communities of Ireland is part of an international charitable trust working with people with intellectual disabilities and other kinds of special needs.
In Camphill our residents share their home, spiritual and working lives with those who are motivated to meet others as individuals needing support and recognition for what they are, and not as carer and cared for in the conventional sense. Most of the people providing support to those with disabilities are volunteers, coming locally or from abroad. Camphill is a way of life, where each person according to ability contributes what they can towards the well-being of the other.
You can find us by driving out the Kilcullen Road from Naas, take the turn for Dunlavin on the left, turn immediately left again (100yards), pass GAA field on your right and keep driving to bottom of road. At T-Junction, turn right and we are the 3rd entrance on the left. There is a big stone engraved with Camphill Dunshane outside the entrance.
Fr Paddy Ryan cut the ribbon to open the new Community Playground today.
Brannoxtown NS has been granted planning permission for four new classrooms and it is hoped work can begin before the end of the year.
The classrooms will replace the prefab buildings which have long been part of the school.
Funding for the classrooms was provided for 18 months ago.
Here's a very clever use of spare window space to show off a product in the environment it is meant to be. Really good use of photography here by The Dresser Store.
The Diary has learned of the death of Mick Hannon, Halverstown, Kilcullen.
Currently reposing at his residence, Mick's removal will take place on Friday morning at 10.30, arriving at St Joseph's Church, Gormanstown, for Requiem Mass at 11 o'clock.
Burial will take place immediately afterwards in the adjoining cemetery.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.
Billy Redmond's Annual Bazaar in aid of his fundraising walk for the Irish Wheelchair Association will be held from 9-16 July.
The location of the Bazaar is beside Brennan's Hardware, and items will include furniture, bric-a-brac, books, bicycles, TVs and other useful goods.
Billy is now open for donations of goods for the Bazaar, and can be contacted anytime on 087 6311177 to arrange collection.
The final details for next Sunday's Cruinniú Chríost parish gathering have now been sorted, with the event beginning at 2pm.
The main gathering point will as usual be in the Town Square at 2pm, with participants being asked to walk to the square if they can as parking will be scarce.
The procession from the square up through the town to the playground behind Scoil Bhride will begin at 2.30pm, and all groups will be given a number prior to the walk so that the procession will have an order.
Mass at Scoil Bhride is scheduled for 3pm, and afterwards there will be entertainment and a family picnic for which participants are asked to bring their own supplies.
Parking is available for older people at Kilcullen Community Centre and disabled parking will be available in the grounds of Scoil Bhride itself.
All those taking part are asked to bring a picnic rug and sun protection.
Kildare County Council are appealing to the public and the business community to conserve water and to minimise usage.
The lower than average rainfall in recent months has led to a reduction in the volume of raw water available for treatment from the reservoir at Poulaphouca, which is the main source of supply for County Kildare.
While there is no immediate need to cut back on the water supply, restrictions may however be unavoidable should the dry spell continue and should demand for water increase during the summer period.
Kildare County Council together with the Dublin Regional Authorities are monitoring the situation on a weekly basis and adequate notice will be given to all consumers should the introduction of restrictions to the public water supply be deemed necessary.
For advice on how to conserve water consumers should view the www.taptips.ie website.
No, it's not a return of the Triffids, invading Main Street, but the latest and quite unusual plant in Dave Clancy's Floral Designs shop, recently relocated near the Vincents.
It is Medinilla Magnifica, a plant from the Phillipines that will flower for between 3-5 months with minimal effort to keep it going. It can flower at any time of the year.
"It will definitely be a talking point in any home," says Dave, who believes he is the first florist in Ireland to offer it. "And it is very easy to look after—it doesn't like direct sunlight, needs moderately light watering, and that's it."
There's no romance in this stage saga of the 'wrens' of the Curragh, writes Brian Byrne, the notoriously exploited women who sold themselves to the dragoons of the military camp and lived literally in holes in the ground amongst the furze bushes on the plains.
There's no nice way of describing their situation and their lives either, so author Martin Malone's scripting of Rosanna Nightwalker—the Wren of The Curragh is strong and earthy in language, and the acting from the wren characters particularly is raw, rough, and dirty in a most competent way.
Bloody great, the whole thing. Just don't go to the Moat Theatre expecting salvation at the end. There wasn't any for the original wrens, and Malone wasn't going to gloss things for the sake of making his audience go home feeling at least a little comfortable.
There are several stories going on. There's Rosanna, come to The Curragh to find her 'true love', the sergeant who promised her the sun, moon and stars—except that she didn't realise they were the ones that would be unseen above her roof of clouds over the furze in rain, hail and snow.
There are the wrens who take her in. Bridget, too old to attract business and who instead cooks and washes for her comrades, and who tends to the newcomer's wounds after a beating by the local priest. Violet, who has a good heart, Peggy who is tough and troublesome.
Two rangers in charge of policing the plains—Kennedy, venal and prepared to retire only if his junior James Greaney makes it worth his while. Tasked periodically with chasing the wrens from the area, each has their own agenda. James is doomed to love and worse.
Fr Charles Taylor is the boozy and puritanical man of God who could be a caricature except that there have been far too many real versions of him down the decades even into our own memory. 'Never...set...foot...in...Newbridge again—never sully its air with your filthy breath', he pants in between trashing Rosanna with a crop, causing her much more than mere physical pain.
Through it all, there's the narrator, journalist Richard Tone, on assignment from 'Mr Dickens' to write about the plight of the wrens. Sympathetic he might be, but he's unable to shrug off enough objectivity to see the true story. Which means not only does he fail to avert tragedy, but unwittingly helps it along.
And the initial cause of Rosanna's plight, the dragoon sergeant Johnny McGuire. Not much of a man, but she doesn't see what her new friends have known for a long time, until he tells her to 'do what the other women do' when she asks where she's to go now? That was subsequent to her telling him she had lost 'their' baby and he answered 'all's well that ends well'.
All the characters in this piece of theatre are on a downward spiral, trapped in a whirlpool inexorably pulling them towards oblivion. 'I'm a cause you have no hope of winning', Rosanna tells the reporter Tone. The audience is equally being drawn in—we all come to realise that there's no redemption coming. Although there are twists in the plot that keep us wondering to the end.
And when we applaud at the conclusion, there's a certain sense of relief. At least for us, there are homes to go to which aren't holes surrounded by frozen furze. 'I do hate the snow and the way the cold makes your snot go hard', Bridget grumbles at one point.
Martin Malone has walked the Curragh and has conversed with the ghosts of a community which in its day numbered many scores of women 'just trying to earn a bit of money to keep body and soul together'. He has already told their story in a radio play and a novel.
As used very effectively in the production, the chorus from Danny Slevin and Vinny Baker's song 'The Wrens of the Curragh' places their position in haunting perspective—'For a penny I'll give you my body, for tuppence I'll give you my soul'.
Director Barbara Sheridan's touch with this not easy theme is as deft and uncompromising as we would expect from her decades of association in theatre in the Moat. Her cast give well, and will be giving even better by the time the run ends on Saturday next.
The set design and dressing is a tour de force in its own right, in three sections which facilitated a seamless telling of the various stories set in several locations beyond the central camp in the furze.
It isn't often that we get a world stage premiere in County Kildare. But I'd be very surprised, indeed disappointed, if this one doesn't travel. And travel far.
A standing ovation to all concerned. I thoroughly recommend that anyone who likes good drama go and see it before it closes. And as we next drive across The Curragh, let us spare a thought for the wrens. With their story finally told so well in microcosm, perhaps their ghosts can rest.
Pictured at last weekend's talk on the Sallins-Tullow branch railway line, as part of the Brannockstown Summer Festival, are Eamonn Sinnot, Jim Collins, Steve Schwer, speaker Liam Kenny, and Pastor Robert Dunlop.
There will be a full report on the talk later.
The new 'can do' feeling generated across Ireland by the recent visits of Queen Elizabeth II and President Barak Obama ('of the Moneygall Obamas) has prompted a Kilcullen resident to make it a 'call to arms' to local people to get a proposed Childcare Centre in place.
A long-running effort to get the Centre built fell apart last year because of alleged legal delays over a lease, and a €600,000 funding facility was lost. But since then a new committee has taken up the baton and the project is in train again.
"There is no doubt that whatever the reservations some have of aspects of both visits, they lifted the nation’s mood," local community campaigner Orla O'Neill says. "Perhaps Brendan Gleeson best summed it up when he said, 'It’s been a rough few years for this country, but I’m fed up of looking at the ground. It’s time to stand up, look around and breathe the air again'."
Orla says there is any number of opportunities for Kilcullen people to make a difference in their community, as shown by the opening of the new Kilcullen Community Playground after years of effort by a group of 'Yes, We Can' people.
"To borrow from Brendan Gleeson’s terminology — bloody sure it was hard work, but bloody sure it was worth it," she says. "And during this period, when we have dwelt on recent Irish history, we might do well to remember the promise, on our behalf, of the leaders of 1916 — to cherish ‘all of the nation’s children equally’, a central principle of this Community Childcare Centre."
The Community Childcare Centre needs more people to help them raise the €40,000 required to make the Childcare Centre a reality. "If you’re looking for value for money, this is it — when the community raises €40,000, it will be matched by €500,000 in Government/EU money and will provide a Centre worth €600,000 to Kilcullen."
Every effort is valuable, even if you can’t attend meetings, you might offer to bagpack, take a table at the Table Quiz, bake a cake ... it all adds up. If you want to take part in this 'Is Feidir Linn' project, call Iseult at 086 8518361 or go to their website at www.kilcullencommunityplaygroup.com and say, Is Féidir Liom!
Here's a down to earth story of gardening as told by your Editor's cousin Marella Fyffe.
There should be a special competition ...
Unislim classes are running in The Imall Hall, Dunlavin, at 6pm on Thursday evenings, writes Eilis Keogh.
The class costs €10 and it is €20 to join or €50 for six classes with NO joining fee!
Returning Unislim members who have their card will only pay €10 (no rejoining fee).
Unislim welcomes both women and men.
A visiting sister from Belarus will give a presentation at 9.30 mass on Tuesday on her order's work with psychiatric patients, children without parental support and people suffering from drug and alcohol dependence.
From the Convent of St Elisabeth the New Martyr, the sister will also be fundraising for the work of the convent. A stall with religious items produced by the sisters will include icons, crucifixes and other church items, as well as souvenirs and CDs.
Further information on the convent is available online at www.obitel-minsk.by
Hubert Beaumont clearly loves his home with a real passion, writes Brian Byrne. If he didn't, the sheer effort of keeping Harristown House going would surely have long since driven him to sail a canoe into the sunset on the Liffey that flows by it.
"I farm to keep the house," he admitted to an entranced group of local people today, your Editor included, as he showed us through the Georgian small mansion which in one form or another has graced the outskirts of Kilcullen since the latter half of the 18th century.
The tour was part of Brannockstown Summer Festival 2011, and by unanimous conclusion of the larger than expected group it will go down as a festival highlight.
It can't be easy to bring a crowd of strangers through your family home, but Hubert conducted the tour not just with easy grace, but also with a great degree of gentle humour. His recalling of the history of the house, built by the La Touche family and in the ownership of the Beaumonts since 1946, was both engaging and very personal when he spoke of his extended family and some of his own experiences in keeping it going.
We'll do something on the tour in more detail later, but if you haven't gotten to the Brannockstown Summer Festival 2011 yet, do at least visit the Art & Photography Exhibition in the Baptist Hall, in the grounds of the Baptist Church built by the family who first constructed the home which the Beaumonts have since preserved for posterity at no small cost, both financially and to their privacy.
You have already missed the highlight. But Hubert promised it will happen again next year. It isn't too soon to make a forward diary entry.
Views from the opening of the Art & Photographic Exhibition at Brannockstown Summer Festival 2011. Pictures Brian Byrne/Kilcullen Diary.
