A journey to Monaghan and Kells while visiting Derry / Remembering Eileen Tuohy

I was on a journey of remembrance last week as I travelled to and from Derry where I spent a few days within the walls of that ancient city. On the way northwards I stopped over in Monaghan town where I spent a few happy years more than fifty years ago. I went to Monaghan in November 1967 as the new Town Clerk on promotion from a similar position in Kells, Co. Meath. I was newly married and lived in a second storey flat overlooking the Diamond in Monaghan town. My two sons were born in the Beech Hill Nursing Home which has since closed and is now the site of a secondary school. It was in Monaghan that, with the help of a County Council loan, I bought my first house for the princely sum of £750. A three bedroomed end of terrace house, number 4 Dr. MacKenna Terrace was the Taaffe home for two years or more. Great memories were recalled as Breege and myself revisited sites and scenes of young lives spent amongst the wonderfully friendly Monaghan people. The town’s streetscape has not changed much even if new business names showed how the passage of time reveals the almost inevitable generational changes we have come to expect. Monaghan has a strong commercial heart evidenced by the lack of too many charity shops. It’s success is re-enforced when you find Dunnes Stores and an Easons book shop in the town. These two businesses follow success and help to ensure its continuity. The commercial strength of Monaghan town owes much to the local authority’s decision to provide parking throughout the town at very reasonable rates. Monaghan’s car parking rates of one euro for two hours is an encouragement to local shoppers and visitors alike to do business in the town centre. Other towns I have visited recently in County Cork allowed parking for two hours free of charge which is a parking regime first successfully trialled in Steyning West Sussex many years ago. The Monaghan parking rates I found were similarly imposed in Omagh and Strabane and confirmed the savvy northerners acceptance of the wisdom of not discouraging town centre shopping by imposing revenue gathering charges. The local council here in Athy informed us when parking charges were first introduced that they were intended to better regulate parking in the town and were not intended as a revenue collection exercise. Soon after they were implemented, the fee paying parking areas were extended widely throughout the town. This has damaged Athy’s commercial life. Monaghan has several easily accessible car parks in and around the centre of the town including all day parking for one euro in designated areas. Clearly, the town fathers recognised that encouraging footfall in the town’s centre was far more important than creating an income generating scheme to bolster local rates. As I travelled northwards from Monaghan, I found the rural villages of Bready, Magheramason and New Buildings all within a short distance of each other and near to Derry City flying Union Jacks and Ulster flags on every available electricity pole. The message was clear and for a visitor from the South somewhat discomforting. Derry itself was flag free insofar as I could see and the people there were very friendly and reassuring. I spent a few hours on a guided tour of the Bogside led by Paul Doherty whose father Pat was one of the thirteen men shot dead by members of the Parachute Regiment on Bloody Sunday, 3rd January 1972. The Bogside is festooned with murals which remind us of the difficulties faced by the locals during the Troubles. Listening to the guide, it was clear that decades of discrimination and gerrymandering which effectively disenfranchised the majority still shapes the minds and hearts of the local people. The following day I visited the much publicised Derry Girls Exhibition in the Tower Museum as my son Francis, one of the Monaghan youngster’s, was the Art Director on the T.V. series. In the same building was an extensive exhibition telling the story of Derry City. It was one of the best Exhibitions of its kind I have ever seen and is well worth a visit if you are ever in Derry. On our return journey we called to Kells, where in May 1967 I took up duty as a Town Clerk and where after marrying we lived for two months at the end of a one and a half year term in the job. The Town Hall where I had my office is now an Auctioneers but otherwise like Monaghan the streetscape shows few changes. Kells held many memories for me. It was there that a small group of us living in digs played football almost every evening in St. Colmcille’s Park. Amongst those were the legendary footballers Des Ferguson and Greg Hughes who were living in Kells at that time. They appeared once or twice a week while the rest of us haunted the playing pitch every evening. I recalled those whose company I enjoyed while working in Kells and also in Monaghan and as I walked the once familiar streets of both towns, the fading memories of 50 years or more ago returned. The friends and acquaintances have in many cases passed on but they are still remembered with fondness. During the week, a one time resident of Offaly Street passed away. Eileen Tuohy lived in No. 22 Offaly Street with her parents Michael and Annie and with her older brother Tommy and younger sister Mary. Michael was an old IRA man from East Clare who served as a Garda in Athy for many years. He died in 1972 and his wife Annie whom he married while he was stationed in Tullow, died four years later. Mary, the youngest of the family died in London in 2015 and six years later. her brother Tommy, a Marist priest, died. Eileen who was born in 1936 was the last of the Tuohy family which formed part of the strong family based community which existed in Offaly Street in the 1940’s and beyond. The street is no longer home to any of the families who lived there during my young days. Sadly, the local shops Kitty Websters and Sylvesters as well as Moore’s on Emily Square corner are no more while even the local pub and Bobs Cinema are long closed. Friendships and acquaintances forged in younger days are constantly being lost as old age gathers more and more of us in its grip. My journey of remembrance which started in Monaghan followed by a visit to Kells ended this week with a funeral to St. Michael’s cemetery to bid farewell to an old neighbour.

World War I refugees in Monaghan

Recent large-scale objections in Dublin to the State’s continuing efforts to accommodate Ukrainian refugees reminded me of similar opposition mounted by many persons in Oughterard a few years ago. That west of Ireland community successfully stopped plans to use a nearby hotel as a refugee centre, even though the hotel had been vacant for several years. I was surprised by their action and by that of the Dubliners, remembering how many communities throughout Ireland acted speedily and with commendable charity to help families who fled their homeland at the start of World War I. I first became aware of the help given to Belgian refugees in 1914 when I lived in Monaghan town in the late 1960s during my time there as town clerk. One of the many roles performed by a town clerk is to manage council housing estates of which there were many in Monaghan at that time, with names honouring noteworthy persons of the past. One housing scheme stood out, simply because its name clearly had no connection with either Irish personages of past importance or the commonly known Monaghan place names. I knew the estate as Belgium Square, but in fact its correct name was Belgian Square. Intrigued as how the name arose I approached Paddy Turley, the long serving editor of the local newspaper ‘The Monaghan Standard’ to be told the full story behind the naming of Belgian Square. A call went out at the start of World War I for Irish local authorities to accommodate Belgian refugees fleeing from German troops advancing into Belgium. One of the many Councils who responded to the call was Monaghan Urban District Council. The Council members hosted a meeting in the local courthouse, following which a Belgium refugee committee was formed. This followed a decision of the Urban Council two years previously to convert the then vacant Monaghan Military Barracks, the former home of the Monaghan Militia, into Council houses or as they were known in those days ‘artisan houses’. In addition to the Barracks conversion the Council also agreed to build 16 three-bedroom cottages on what had been the military barracks parade ground. The cottages were nearing completion in October 1914 when the Belgium refugee crisis arose. In what might be seen as an extraordinary generous act, Monaghan Urban District Council decided to make a number of the newly built cottages available to accommodate refugees. The ‘Northern Standard’ reported as follows:- ‘The party of Belgian refugees allocated to Monaghan arrived here on Friday morning by the 9.50 train from Belfast. News of their coming had got through the town and there was quite a large crowd present at the station, and prominently displayed in the button hole or on the breasts of practically every person were the Belgian colours.’ The local refugee committee provided the families with furniture and food and a collection was later taken up at all churches in Monaghan parish on behalf of the refugees. The Belgian refugees had a very good relationship with the local people in Monaghan, so much so that at an Urban District Council meeting in 1915 the Council members agreed to call the newly called housing scheme ‘Belgium Square’. This is a name I remember, although a wall plaque at the entrance to the square, has the name Belgian Square. Monaghan Urban District Council’s response to the refugee crisis of 1914 was replicated in other parts of Ireland at a time when many young Irish men had enlisted to fight in the war. About 3,000 Belgian refugees came to Ireland in the last months of 1914 where they were accommodated in Workhouses in Ardee, Dunshaughlin, Balrothery and I believe several families found shelter in Naas and Celbridge. The Celbridge Workhouse accommodated 36 Belgian refugees from October 1914 until the spring of the following year when they were transferred to the Workhouse in Dunshaughlin. The refugees accommodated in Monaghan, with one or two exceptions, returned to their homeland at the end of World War I. However, Belgian Square Monaghan was to house up to 20 Catholic families who fled from Belfast during the anti-Catholic riots of the early 1920s. Kildare County Council officials have been engaged in finding accommodation for refugees for the past year and Athy today hosts several individual refugee families. The difficulties faced by these families, uprooted from their homes and separated from their own communities, is difficult to imagine. They can only look to us for help and unlike those communities who had turned their backs on refugees, the people of Athy, will I am sure, welcome the displaced families from Ukraine and other war torn countries into our community. 2022 will shortly pass, leaving behind memories of happy days, but also less happy memories which are an inevitable part of our daily lives. Lets look forward to a new year with a promise of happiness and good health for all. Happy Christmas to all readers of Eye on the Past.