A busy night lies ahead for Culture Night
Tonight is Culture Night and there are a number of events taking place locally, with King House featuring strongly in proceedings. (Indeed, the important part King House plays in the culture of the country is evident by the inclusion of it’s Grand Piano in the promotional video on the homepage of the main Culture Night website).
In addition to the events in and around King House, there are also events taking place in neighbouring towns and villages with more information here
Another event of note this weekend is a meeting on Saturday evening to build a team of passionate volunteers for the Team Hope Christmas Shoebox Appeal which this year, will be based in Boyle. This team will help promote the Christmas Shoebox Appeal and arrange for the collection, checking, cartoning and loading of all Christmas Shoeboxes coming from County Roscommon this Autumn. The meeting is in the Spool Factory from 3.30pm – 5.30pm and it would be great to see a number of local people help out in this worthy cause. If interested, then come along on the evening to find out more.
The need for evening food venues
Autumn has moved in and winter is just around the corner and with it comes time for planning for next year. Come summer ’22, a lot will have changed in Boyle, with more public realm enhancements having commenced and some other exciting developments hopefully coming to fruition, that will copper fasten the economic life of our town and compliment our status as a tourism destination.
And as planning commences for next year, it is vitally important that consideration is given to having a wider choice of evening venues serving food all week, especially during the summer season. Our lunch time trade is well serviced at present but it is most disappointing to see families walking around town in the evening looking for some where to eat and most places closed or no venue serving the type of food they require. By 2022, we will hopefully be ‘Living with Covid’ and getting on with our lives and the tourism business will be in full swing. So now is the time for our various food providers in Boyle to plan for this and have longer opening hours to suit customer needs.
Identifying adequate outdoor dining areas, without the need to take up the ‘valuable’ car parking spaces might also form part of the forward planning exercise, but then again the opportunity to develop such spaces on the Crescent was lost when the public realm enhancement for that area was rejected. Maybe some form of outdoor dining space(s) could be developed on the lower side of town as part of the major enhancement project for Bridge Street and Shop Street which will start later this year or early next year.
The forgotten man of Boyle history
Yesterday Thursday 16th September was the 83rd anniversary of the death of an infamous son of Boyle – Jasper Tully. Jasper was born in 1938. His father George had founded the Roscommon Herald newspaper in 1859 while his grandfather Charles had earlier founded the Roscommon Journal in 1828. On his father, and subsequently his mother’s death, Jasper took over the running of the newspaper and his strong nationalist views saw him imprisoned with Parnell in Kilmainham Gaol – the first of many occasions he was incarcerated. Those who remember Jasper recalled that “The Chief”, as he was known, was a difficult yet highly influential man. He was elected an MP for Leitrim South in 1892 and became a Whip in the Irish Parliamentary Party. He stood for Roscommon North in 1917 but was not elected. He used the then ‘power of the pen’ and his newspaper to his benefit and wrote some colorful (and damaging) stories about those who crossed his path! He was married to Mary E. Monson who owned the Royal Hotel. She was the person who donated the Christ the King statue to the Sisters of Mercy, the same statue that gave it’s name to the junction on the Carrick Road. The Tully’s marriage was neither peaceful or happy and they realistically lived separate lives. One of the many stories that was told of Jasper related to a letter, addressed to Mrs Tully, arriving to the hotel some time after his wife’s death. Jasper, it was said, crossed out the address and reposted it with the wording “Not known at this address – try hell”!
Jasper, the forgotten man of Boyle history, is buried with his family in Assylinn Graveyard, halfway up the hill on the left hand side.
The effect Amazon will have on the small rural shop
It was reported during the week that Amazon are building a ‘Mega’ Warehouse in Ireland that will mean faster and cheaper online shopping, but what effect will this have for the small rural shop? Experts say it will be very damaging for these shops as same day delivery could be available from the Amazon’s Irish warehouse to various locations nationwide, once it opens.
During the early days of the pandemic, shoppers who never did so before had little option but to order goods online and use the likes of Amazon, and here in Boyle, any business who wanted to succeed, spent money on developing a website so they could have an online presence. But for many – that’s where it stopped. Having the website is half the battle – advertising and promoting your wares and keeping your website updated is the other half. Unfortunately for the majority of businesses in Boyle, they have not continued to promote their businesses on social media or via direct marketing and chances are, traffic to their websites is very low. Going forward, a mix of in shop and online is where the market is moving and when Amazon start to make their presence felt in Ireland, it will only be the savvy business who are constantly promoting themselves and what they have to offer online, that will succeed.
New opening hours in Lough Key Forest and Activity Park
And finally…!
Three old golfers are walking down the fairway, or in their case riding down the fairway,
“Sixty is the worst age to be,” said the 60-year-old,
“You always feel like you have to pee. And most of the time nothing
happens.”
“Ah, that’s nothing,” said the 70-year-old. “When you’re 70, you don’t
have a bowel movement anymore. You take laxatives, eat bran, you sit on the toilet all day and nothing happens.”
“Actually,” said the 80-year-old, “Eighty is the worst age of all.”
“Do you have trouble peeing too?” asked the 60-year-old.
“No, I pee every morning at 6.00 am. I pee like a racehorse; no problem at all.”
“Do you have trouble having a bowel movement?” asked the 70-year 0ld.
“No, I have one every morning at 6.30 am.”
Puzzled with this the 60-year-old said, “Let’s get this straight. You
pee every morning at 6.00 am and poop every morning at 6.30 am. So what’s so tough about being 80?”
“…I don’t wake up until seven.”
