St. Patrick’s Day is Nearly Here
The weeks are flying by, the days are getting longer and in little over one week it will be St. Patrick’s Day. This year’s parade in Boyle will commence at the usual time of 3.30pm. Before our parade, one can enjoy others in Carrick-on-Shannon 12.30pm, Cootehall 12.30pm (Sunday) and Kingsland at 4.30pm (Sunday). Pleases make a special effort to participate in the Parade(s) or decorate your business/shop for the weekend.
Moone Boy Goes From Strength To Strength
If you were a fan of D’unbelievables many years ago, would you ever have thought that the day would come when you would see a programme on Sky TV featuring Pat Short living on Castle Island in Lough Key? Neither would you have believed that Pat Mustard from Fr. Ted would appear in a series based in Boyle! But they have and the show they are in – Moone Boy gets better by the week. The publicity Boyle is receiving is massive. Only this week Daly’s Bar in Boyle say they had Moone Boy fans in wondering was Chris about! The spin off has really not begun in full yet and when it does, we need to be ready to grasp it as chances like this don’t come too often.
The Clews Hall
While renovating their new home recently, Boyle Men’s Shed unearthed the name plate of the former “Clews Memorial School” on the Crescent dated 1899. “The Clews” has a varied past and is remembered by the locals as a school, dance hall, snooker room and supermarket before becoming an electrical shop and now Visionary Photography. The Clews Hall was allegedly named after a rent collector for the old Rockingham Estate. It once housed the Boyle Parochial School before it moved to Knocknashee. It was then a Dance Hall for a number of years. In the 70’s when Spar burned down on Main Street, the supermarket moved to the premises for a time. No doubt the progressive people associated with the Mens Shed will put the name plate on the wall of the building, similar to what the Carty brothers did with the old school name plate on their garage wall in Mocmoyne.
A Strange Sight In Boyle
One of the strangest sights in Boyle has to be seeing the former National Irish Bank on Bridge Street open 7 days a week including Sundays! To many it is still “The Bank on the Corner” but in reality it is now home to Allsports Turf Accountants. It is a pivotal building in an important location in town and looks so much better now than it did in it’s drab grey colour of old.
All Aboard the (Shuttle) Bus
A recent meeting of business people and interested parties in Boyle rubber stamped plans for a shuttle bus from Rockingham to the town. While there were concerns by some that the bus could be counter productive and bring people out of the town, the reality is that it will be of great benefit to Boyle – but only if we have the town looking well for the visitors and put in place activities and tours to keep them entertained. There is no use just dropping them off in Boyle – we need to have, organised town tours on the hour, joint tickets for King House and Boyle Abbey and a list of shops, restaurants and pubs made available on their journey into Boyle. In this regard it was great to see yesterday what the organisers have planned with a rotating video on the bus, a volunteer guide in the Park and a handout with 10 things to do in Boyle. Great work by all concerned and lets be generous in our support of this iniative
Sunday Nights in The Royal
The “Old Photographs of Boyle” section on this website has generated unbelievable interest with viewer numbers doubling on Saturdays when the photographs are uploaded. If it’s one thing we Irish love, it’s reminiscing. And reminiscing it was that generated a conversation recently on Sunday nights in the early eighties in the Royal Hotel and the crowds that converged upstairs to the “Lough Key Lounge” to hear a band called Tumbleweed blast out tunes like the Sultans of Swing! Tumbleweed was made up of Brendan O’Dowd (uncle of Chris), Michael (George) Mullaney, Frank Wallpole and J O’Connor. They played The Royal most Sunday nights and it was the “in place” to be. One of the miracles of all times was how the dance floor in the Lough Key room upstairs in the Royal, which seemed suspect back then, remained intact up until the closure of the landmark Boyle premises in recent years.
And Finally…..
(For the week that’s in it)
A woman was trying hard to get the ketchup to come out of the jar. During her struggle the door bell rang so she asked her four-year old daughter to answer the door.
“Who is it” the mother asked the child
“It’s the Priest and the man from the Missions,” the child said to her mother.
Then she added, “Sorry Father, Mammy can’t come to the door to talk to you right now. She’s hitting the bottle.”
