Clonmullin Soccer Club

The local newspapers headlined Clonmullin’s AFC latest victory as ‘Clonmullin’s Magical Treble’, while another newspaper more sedately described the winning of the Senior Division Cup Final as ‘Record for Clonmullin’. The soccer match played in Clane saw the Athy team defeat the Coill Dubh AFC team on the score line of 3 goals to nil. It marked the end of an extraordinary season which saw Clonmullin AFC become the first team in the Kildare Division Football League since the League’s foundation in 1994 to complete the treble of Senior Division League Champions, Lumsden League Cup Champions and by virtue of the win in Clane, Senior Division Cup winners. The Clonmullin Soccer Club, founded in 1995, known locally as ‘The Mull’, has succeeded remarkably well, particularly so in recent years and this year’s treble success marks a new high for the club which had to wait until 10 years ago to have a clubhouse built next to their Clonmullin pitch. The club chairman is Joe Robinson and club secretary/treasurer is Eddie Hennessy, both of whom, with an energetic club committee have overseen the great strides made by Clonmullin AFC in recent years. The current senior team is captained by Michael Lawless who received the Karina Donnelly Cup on behalf of his teammates as winners of the Senior Division Cup Final. His teammates are Keane Cully, Jonathan Fennell, Timmy Doyle, Mark Hughes, Gary Comerford, Lee Doyle, Nathan Robinson, Cody Mulhall, Jodie Dillon and Danny Thompson. Substitutes on the final match day included Nathan Germaine, Lee Day, Evan Phillips, Lee Foley, Corey Moore and Richie Moriarty. The victory was secured by goals scored by Cody Mulhall, Jodie Dillon and Lee Foley who scored the last goal within a minute of his introduction during the closing stages of the match. All of the team members are talented players, but I might be excused if I mention one player who has been the subject of a previous Eye on the Past. Cody Mulhall, grandson of my friend Ber Foley and son of Ber’s daughter Caroline, from an early age displayed a wonderful footballing talent. It’s a talent which he now displays in the Clonmullin team shirt as the team vice-captain and true to form it was Cody’s goal in the 19th minute of the game in Clane which set the Clonmullin team on the way to a historic win. Cody won international caps at U-16, U-16 and U-17 and previously played for Hibernian in the Scottish League, Shamrock Rovers and Longford Town in the Irish Premier League. He has formed a prolific partnership on the Clonmullin team with Jodie Dillon. The longest serving player on the team is Ross Cardiff who has played for Clonmullin for 15 years, while the most decorated player in the history of the Kildare League and Clonmullin’s oldest player is the inspirational Timmy Doyle. Two other players with League of Ireland experience are Mark Hughes and Gary Comerford, both of whom joined the Clonmullin club last year. The management team for the club’s most successful season ever were Brian Kenny, Barry Hughes, Martin Redmond and Derek Brophy. Congratulations to the players, mentors and members of Clonmullin AFC on a wonderful season which has brought them a remarkable and history making success. Congratulations also to the Castlemitchell girls’ minor team which on the same day as the Clonmullin AFC win were victors in their final. The girls team was captained by Erin Brereton Foley, who played for the Kildare County Minor team which won this year’s Leinster championship. Also on the Castlemitchell team was Amy Larn who captained the Kildare County minor team and has been selected for the Ireland’s women 7’s rugby squad. Some weeks ago when writing Eye No. 1557 I drew attention to Dara English, captain of Athy’s U-16 championship winning team and his great grandfather Tommy Buggy who was a member of the Athy Senior Football Championship team of 1937. I did not realise when writing the article that the goalkeeper for the Under 16 team was Rory Chanders whose great great grandfather was the legendary Patrick ‘Cuddy’ Chanders who played in goal for the Athy championship winning teams of 1933 and 1934. Cuddy was also the goalkeeper on the Kildare Senior County team between October 1934 and August 1935. However, he was sensationally dropped for the 1935 All Ireland Final which Kildare lost to Cavan. Cuddy was a substitute on the Kildare team for that All Ireland Final, as was his Athy teammates Jim Fox and Barney Dunne. Athy footballers who played in that final were Tommy Mulhall and Paul Matthews, with Paddy Martin and Patrick Byrne, both from Castledermot. Cuddy was allegedly not selected for the final because it was claimed that the Kildare selectors wanted a collar and tie man for the USA trip which was to follow the expected Kildare victory. Cuddy was restored as the county goalkeeper two months later and featured for the last time in the county colours in 1936. Interestingly it was another Athy man, Johnny McEvoy, who featured as the County Kildare senior goalkeeper between 1937 and 1939. Athy has an enviable history in terms of sporting successes over the years and 2022 has seen Clonmullin AFC, Athy GFC and neighbours Castlemitchell add to that long list of successes.

Joey Carbery and Jeremy Loughman

My reference last week to the absence of community notice boards in Athy prompted a quick response from several readers who like me bemoaned the information vacuum which surrounds many events held in the town. It just wasn’t the need for notice boards which attracted the public’s attention. Many queried why it was so difficult to find out what organisations, clubs, associations and societies existed in the town. It prompted me to think to a time some decades ago when Athy’s Junior Chamber of Commerce published a town directory. Such a publication would today be of immeasurable benefit to the many young families who came to live in Athy in recent years. Unfortunately Athy no longer has a Chamber of Commerce as a result of a regrettable decision some years ago to amalgamate with the County Chamber of Commerce. I wonder if the local Municipal Council would take on the responsibility of employing a person to undertake the task of compiling a much-needed town directory. The past week also saw two former members of Athy’s rugby club win international caps as members of Ireland’s rugby team. This was a unique occurrence and one seldom enjoyed, if ever, by an Irish provincial rugby club. Joey Carbery and Jeremy Loughman are former pupils of Ardscoil na Tríonóide, successors to my old Christian Brothers School of St. John’s Lane. Both attended the Athy’s secondary school at the same time and figured on the same local rugby club team. Their achievements as rugby players give all of us here in Athy further reason to be proud of our town. The Carbery and Loughman family names go back many generations and my older readers particularly will remember Joey’s great grandparents, Joe and Betty Carbery and Jeremy’s grandparents, David and Pauline Loughman. Achievements on the playing field, whether that of Clonmullin AFC or the Athy GFC underage teams, have been noteworthy this year. Great strides have been made over the years by various sporting clubs in Athy to provide facilities for the young people of the town. A few generations ago Athy offered little by way of recreational sporting activities for its young people. These were the same youngsters whom we honoured on Remembrance Sunday as we stood in the shadow of St. Michael’s Medieval Church to honour the memory of the Athy men who died in wars, especially the Great War of 1914-18. When that war ended a substantial part of the town’s younger adult generation had died fighting overseas. 144 men and one woman from Athy have been identified as fatal casualties of the Great War. The ceremony on Remembrance Sunday at which the names of the Athy dead were read aloud brought home to those gathered in St. Michael’s Cemetery the futility of war. It also helped to remind us of the consequential family and wider social problems which inevitably resulted from the loss of fathers, sons, husbands and brothers. How can we imagine did parents, James and Brigid Byrne of 3 Chapel Lane, overcome the loss of three sons in war between April 1915 and March 1916. Their next door neighbours John and Mary Kelly of 4 Chapel Lane also lost three sons in that war between May 1915 and September 1916. They were not the only Athy families to lose three sons in the 1914-18 war, a sad experience suffered by the Curtis family of Quarry Farm and the Doyle/Reilly family of Athy. With a population of less than 4,000 at the start of the war the loss of so many young persons brought hardships which affected some local families for generations thereafter. St. Michael’s Cemetery with its ruined medieval church is perhaps our most honoured and respected reminder of Athy’s past. Woodstock Castle and the White Castle are medieval companions of the cemetery where recent preservation work on the church has been completed. The cemetery holds the remains of seven participants in the Great War and their family members stretching back over several generations. It also holds the remains of various Carbery and Loughman families, including the great grandparents and grandparents I mentioned earlier. The past week has been a time to enjoy and take pride in the achievements of two young men of a generation separated by more than 100 years from an earlier lost generation. Athy is a town where families suffered hardships for many years as a result of deaths on the battlefields of France and Flanders. It is now a town which has recovered and takes pride in the successful sporting careers of Joey Carbery and Jeremy Loughman, while at the same time remembering with pride the young men who did not have the means or the opportunities to enjoy sporting lifes so many years ago.

Athy Tidy Towns Committee

The recently announced Tidy Town competition results for this year show that Athy has made substantial gains in its overall marks and elicited from the adjudicator the welcome comment ‘Athy is blessed with many wonderful amenities’. Our town has been involved in the Tidy Towns competition for the past 24 years and this year’s results, so far as I know, gave us the highest marks achieved to date. It’s a result which reflects the public’s greater awareness of our surroundings and the need to keep our town as litter free as possible. The local Municipal District Council, funded by local businesses and tax payers, has statutory responsibility for street cleaning. Their work in that regard is hugely helped by the activities of the volunteers who make up the local Tidy Towns Committee. That committee, headed up by Ger Kelly, was established the same year Athy first entered the nationwide Tidy Towns competition. The first chairman of the committee was the late Noel Scully and Ger Kelly took over from Noel many years ago. You will have seen the volunteer workers cleaning and tidying different areas of Athy, particularly during the summer months. They usually meet at Emily Square at 6pm on Fridays during the period March to September and sometimes twice a week, before setting off with brushes, shovels and bags to begin their voluntary work on behalf of the local community. The Tidy Towns volunteers are the unsung heroes of our town and are fully deserving of our praise and thanks for the generous and time-consuming role they play in our community. With Ger Kelly are Patricia Berry, Martina Donnelly, Hilary May, Deirdre Germaine, Bill Lawler, Jim Fitzpatrick, Brendan Moloney, Brian Fitzpatrick, Joe Mullaniff and Geraldine Murphy. This year’s Tidy Towns adjudicator was full of praise for Athy’s efforts, but expressed some disappointment at the amount of litter found in the People’s Park. The park, opened sometime in the middle of the 19th century and gifted to the people of Athy by the Duke of Leinster, is endowed with many splendid mature trees. It is a wonderful space on which Kildare County Council, with the assistance of a government grant, recently spent considerable funds to improve footpaths and seating. It is unfortunate that the opportunity was not taken at the same time to supply the children’s playground with suitable fencing so as to deter adults from using the children’s play equipment. I was particularly interested in the adjudicator’s remarks regarding the use of a community notice board in the town. This was a subject I raised in an Eye on the Past earlier this year as I felt there was a pressing need for community notice boards to be provided in the town. There was no immediate response by the Municipal Council to my suggestion, but strangely the one notice board which was located in Emily Square was removed, presumably by the local authority. Since then it has been brought to my attention by several persons that local families are not aware of events in the town and so miss the opportunity of being involved. Maybe the Municipal Councillors, successors to the Urban District Councillors of old, will consider the desirability, indeed the necessity, of providing a community notice board in the centre of the town? Ger Kelly, chairman of the Tidy Towns Committee, tells me that a noticeable worrying trend is the increase in illegal dumping, mainly on the outskirts of the town. In addition, the refuse bins in and around the town are often used by some individuals to dispose of household rubbish. All of this is a direct result of the Council’s decision some years not to provide bin collection services for households as a public utility service. I felt then, and I still do, that Kildare County Council’s decision in that regard was a short sighted one which would lead to the dumping problems we are now experiencing. The adjudicator’s comments in relation to Edmund Rice Square, which I look out on every day, brought home to me that as locals we need to look at our town through visitor’s eyes. The report noted ‘Duke Street car park was disappointing, especially since it is in a gorgeous location, with views of the castle and the river. The planters are too high to be easily watered and managed. They were not being managed and brings a dilapidated look to the area which is a shame.’ Overall the adjudicator’s report was a good report for Athy and ended with the references to the ‘great social capital in Athy’ and the town’s ‘many beautiful aspects such as the river, canal and many heritage buildings.’

World War I and Athy

Next Sunday, November 13th at 3.00pm we will gather in St. Michael’s Cemetery to remember the young men from Athy and district who died in the first World War. It is a commemoration ceremony which was first started over 30 years ago. Those early services were held at a time when public commemoration of our war dead was not a common feature of Irish life. Indeed remembering the Irish men who died fighting in an English uniform on foreign battle fields was not thought appropriate. Clem Roche in his excellent book ‘Athy and District World War I Roll of Honour’ lists 226 men from our town and outlying areas who died in that war. They enlisted for a variety of reasons. Unemployment and poverty provided sufficient reason for many of the young men who enlisted. All of them were encouraged by Athy’s church and civic leaders to enlist and they were treated as heroes as they marched behind the Leinster Street Fife and Drum Band on their way to the local railway station from where many of them travelled to the Royal Dublin Fusiliers Barracks in Naas. The soldiers demobbed at the end of the war found that public attitudes had changed dramatically compared to the recruiting days of a few years earlier. The execution of the 1916 Rebellion leaders led that change and it was amplified by the demands for Home Rule and the developing demand for Irish independence. Many decades were to pass before the Irishmen who died in World War I were acknowledged. So many families in south Kildare were affected by the deaths of husbands, fathers, sons and brothers. Indeed the loss of so many young men from a relatively small Irish provincial town created social and family problems which were evident for generations afterwards. The people of Athy have made amends for the decades of silence surrounding the victims of World War I. Clem Roche’s book of Athy war dead was published in 2016 and subsequently a very fine World War I memorial was unveiled in St. Michael’s Cemetery. Further research has revealed the names of Athy men not previously known who died in the 1914-18 war and their names have recently been added to the Athy memorial. The List of Athy’s war World War I dead has now reached 256. Recent generations of Irish people have lived through peaceful times and for many of us it is difficult to appreciate the heartfelt sense of loss endured by wives, parents and children following the death of a loved one. Here in Athy there were accounts of multiple deaths within the same families. Three sons of John and Mary Kelly of 4 Chapel Lane were killed in the war. They were joined in death by the three sons of John and Margaret Curtis of Quarry Farm and the three sons of James and Bridget Byrne of Chapel Lane. How could we measure the sorrow and loss of those families or any of the families who like the Staffords of Butlers Row and the Hannons of Ardreigh House, each of whom suffered the loss of two sons. The deaths of 26-year-old John Coulson Hannon and his 20-year-old brother Norman Leslie were to cause their father John to commit suicide and was largely responsible for the closure of the Hannon Mill shortly thereafter. Yet as I sat in school in the Christian Brothers in St. John’s Lane taking history lessons, I never heard of Athy men’s involvement in the First World War. History lessons in the 1950s ended with the 1916 Rebellion and so an important part of the town’s story was never told. Indeed the families of the dead soldiers felt unable for decades to commemorate their dead or to give public expression to their loss. Thankfully the sacrifices shared by the local families who lost loved ones in war can now be acknowledged. We can take pride in understanding why young men from Athy went to war over 100 years ago. Most of all we can acknowledge the hardships suffered by those men while in the trenches and the hardship and deprivation suffered by the families who lost loved ones in war. The commemoration for Athy men who died in the First World War and in all wars takes place on Sunday next at 3pm in St. Michael’s Cemetery. The next lecture in Athy’s Arts Centre History Series will be given by Kevin Kenny, who will speak of the life and adventures of the Kilkea born polar explorer, Ernest Shackleton. Kevin will give his talk under the title ‘Get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton’. Admission to the lecture, which will take place on Tuesday 15th November at 8pm in the Arts Centre, Woodstock Street is free.

Athy's Under 16 G.A.A. team County Champions 2022

Athy’s young footballers won the under 16 Division A County Championship final last week. The team captain was Dara English, grandson of my much missed friend and former Urban Councillor, Frank English. Dara unlike his grandfather who never featured on a Gaelic football team was good enough to play on the minor winning team which defeated Clane in the Minor A Championship Final the previous week. He played corner back on the minor team and filled the full back position for the Under 16 final. There is footballing blood in the English family veins, for Athy’s 1937 County Championship senior winning team featured Dara’s great grandfather, Tommy in the left corner back position. Tommy Buggy he was called, reared as he was by a family of the same name but in fact he was Tommy English and is shown in the photograph lying in front on the right hand side. I am told that the last time Athy’s under 16’s won the County Championship was 48 years ago. This year has been a very successful footballing year for the underage footballers from Athy Gaelic football club. The mentors for the under 16’s team are Barry Dunne, Colm Byrne and James Eaton who can rejoice in a club success with links stretching back over 85 years ago to what were the glory days of Athy Gaelic Football and a time which saw Athy senior teams win four County Championship finals between 1933 and 1942. Dara English visited his grandfather’s grave following the County final and in the second photograph is shown with the champions cup at Frank’s last resting place. The two photographs showing footballers three generations apart signal the importance of Gaelic games in our family lives and of our shared memories of the past.