A Diary anniversary

A flash pictures selection of just a tiny fraction of people and events reported on down the years.

Beginning of a new year, always a time for reflection, writes Brian Byrne. This year, January marks the 20th anniversary of the inauguration of the Kilcullen Diary. Of course, that means only 19 years completed. So, on reflection, it would seem a poor idea not to complete the two decades by keeping it going until at least this time next year.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying thanks to the readers, contributors and advertisers for the support in this still-strange to me experiment that has flown much further and for longer than I or anyone else envisaged.

I ran a few numbers for curiosity. Since January 22 2005, there have been more than 21,500 posted stories — news, promotions, features, profiles ... and occasional opinion, though I always tried to keep that in the back row. Among these, looking at just a few categories, the Diary acknowledged the passing of more than 700 Kilcullen-resident or connected people, many of whom would be direct friends to us in our community. There were more than 500 'People' stories including profiles. Kilcullen Community Action matters were the stuff of over 1,300 posts, and there were at least 1,450 fundraising related items, encompassing probably every community and social group in the town.

There have been, so far, 1,291 stories with tags of Environment, Biodiversity, and Climate Action. Nearly 1,800 were about Business matters, and some 554 were on Health. Over 200 Planning-related stories were posted, and among nearly 1,000 tagged Sport more than half related to GAA matters. A lot more has been reported under many other categories. An awful lot more ...

As for visitors, there's one simple number that is understandable. The Diary gets more than 1,100 accesses a day on average. At any given time, between 6pc and 10pc of those are Kilcullen people abroad, the balance are all local to our village grown bigger.

Over those almost two decades it has been a lot of fun. Still is. So let's give it another whirl for 2025, and see where it takes us.

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