Athy's Library in the 1950s

When I was a young pupil attending the Christian Brother’s secondary school in St. John’s Lane a welcome evening break in the ever constant routine of studying and working on school homework was a weekly visit to the local library. It was an evening visit as the library in the 1950’s was not opened during the day. The Librarian at that time was the well known and well liked Kevin Meaney who lived in St. Patrick’s Avenue. Kevin’s day job was clerk to the town engineer, Mossie Sullivan but it is as the town librarian that he is best remembered after the passage of so many years. The library was located in the Town Hall in a small room next to the Ballroom and when I measured it last week, I found it to be seventeen feet by twenty feet. It was accessed by a stairs with a doorway onto the street directly opposite Mrs. Gibbon’s house. The fact that library users had to exit from that doorway directly onto the street gives some inkling of the scarcity of vehicular traffic in those days. Kevin Meaney and his brothers Danny and Dermot all of whom lived in St. Patrick’s Avenue had a great affection for Athy. Danny who worked in a local factory was a keen photographer and he amassed during his lifetime an important archive of photographs and videos of Athy town and its people. I can recall attending a showing of videos by Danny in Mulhall’s public house next to White’s Castle a short while after I returned to Athy in 1982. Danny’s photographic record of Athy’s past was and hopefully remains a rich vein of Athy’s cultural history and a wonderful insight into the lives of the local people, many of whom have passed from memory. Danny’s brother Kevin was a local historian in the sense that he knew of the towns past and shared his knowledge with others. Unfortunately, like so many others he did not commit his recollections to paper. My weekly visit to the library was in search of Zane Grey novels but somewhere in between, for whatever reason I cannot now remember, Kevin once spoke to me of Patrick O’Kelly’s book on the 1798 Rebellion. O’Kelly, was a local young man who in the revolutionary years was one of the leaders of the United Irishmen in this area. His accounts of events in Athy and the surrounding area during the 1798 Rebellion and the Emmet Rebellion five years later was first published in 1842. The book was never available in the library but Kevin having alerted me to its very existence prompted a successful search for a copy many years later. I have often wondered was it that contact with Kevin Meaney, the librarian, all those years ago which would later put me on the history trail. The importance of local libraries cannot be over emphasised for it is there that young people start on a life’s journey through the written world. That small library of the 1950’s was a pre-cursor to the magnificent local library which is today housed in the former Dominican Church which was constructed in the early years of the 1960’s. Athy in the past was a town with a literary background which recalls a time when it was home to printing works operated by a John Richardson and later in the 1830’s a printing and publishing concern owned by W.H. Talbot. Successful members of the Talbot family were involved in printing and publishing in Athy over subsequent years. Indeed, Thomas French published the Athy Literary Magazine, a weekly magazine which ended with its 25th edition in February 1838. As the effects of the Great Famine eased in 1849, Athy boasted of two rival local newspapers, The Kildare and the Wicklow Chronicle and the Irish Eastern County Herald. Sadly the press war between the two newspapers only lasted a few weeks as the Kildare and Wicklow Chronicle ceased publication after four or five issues. The first library in Athy opened in the Town Hall in 1927 in the same room where I found it thirty years later. In those days reading material was heavily censored not only by the Ireland’s state censor but also by a library committee comprising the Parish Priest, three Catholic Curates, the Church of Ireland Rector and the Presbyterian Minister as well as five members of the Urban District Council. The first librarian was Mr. B. Bramley of Emily Square who opened the library one evening a week from 7.00pm – 9.00pm but soon thereafter, the opening times were increased to two days a week. I have written in the past of how a library is a cultural investment for the future and how our highly praised local library in providing a variety of community activities, as well as book lending is serving us well.