Local Notes bring Kilcullen of the 80s/90s alive
Local Notes have been, and still are, a staple element of regional newspapers, writes Brian Byrne. They document the minutiae of small communities, the items that mostly repeat themselves in one way or another all the time. Meetings, card game results, social organisation agendas and activities, and more. They are calendars of our community lives.
The thing is, Local Notes generally only live for the week the newspaper is lying on the dining room table, replaced in every further issue by much of the same, only different by date or people involved. Sometimes though, a Note can be elevated by a diligent reporter into a stronger position as a news feature, extracting more detail from the passing paragraph. Still, both only live on mostly in the dusty archives of the newspapers, or their digitised modern formats.
Or they can sometimes be found in the now very outdated concept of personal scrapbooks. A hobby that probably is a rarity now, if anyone does it at all in this everything online age. But, thanks to PJ Lydon, we have the loan of a collected set of Kilcullen Local Notes and some developed features which wonderfully document Kilcullen from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s out of the pages of the Leinster Leader and Kildare Nationalist.
We will extract individual stories in the upcoming weeks of 2022. Suffice to say now that the clippings cover, inter alia, the formation of Kilcullen Community Development — the predecessor of today's KCA — and activities which include the start of the campaign for a northern link to Kilcullen from the then imminent Bypass. Other stories document a resurgence, even the rescue of the Kilcullen Tennis Club (plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!), the tricky prospect of rebuilding the Town Hall into a viable entity, and dealing with the consequences of the demise of the Irish Rubber factory.
There are also the celebrations and commiserations, births, marriages and passings, and all the life milestones in between. If you have in interest in much of what laid the renewal foundations of the Kilcullen you live in today, stay tuned.
