Athy born Thomas Condon, first President of Irish Tourist Board

The Anniversary of the outbreak of the Easter 1916 Rising passed with little fanfare this year. If the commemoration seemed more muted than previous years, it was probably a reflection of an element of cultural exhaustion. The State funded and promoted Decade of Commemorations 2013 to 2023 brought a renewed vigour to the study of the revolutionary period but a downturn in interest was bound to follow given the plethora of publications and events over those ten years. By 1925 the nascent Irish Free State faced into an economic depression with food shortages across the country. There was no official Declaration of any national crisis, but times were difficult enough that the Free State Government allocated £250,00 in relief funds that same year. The year prior, 1924 the Irish Tourist Association was formed with a view “ to promoting tourism to the benefit of the nation”. This tourism body was brought to my attention when I recently acquired a pamphlet (published by the ITA) titled “Irish Curiosities – A collection of Strange, Fascinating, Puzzling or Picturesque Oddities of Ireland’. Despite the intriguing title, much of the “curiosities” featured there were the standard tourist fare you could expect to find at the time in the country. Among the Kildare antiquities was featured was what was described as the ‘Earl’s Table’. This is the famous rent table, of the Earls of Kildare originally at Maynooth Castle and later at Kilkea Castle which will be a star exhibit in the Shackleton Museum which opens at end of the summer. The Irish Tourist Association was subsequently taken over by the State and relaunched as the Irish Tourist Board in 1939. Its first chairperson was the Athy born Thomas Condon. Condon was born in Athy on the 16th May 1883, the son of Thomas Condon, a Sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary. He was one of eight children of Thomas Condon and his wife Helena, Sergeant Condon spent most of his later service in the R.I.C. in Laois and Kildare. The family would suffer tragedy with the loss of their daughter Helena who died in the Police Barracks in Graigue in County Laois at the age of three months while in 1885 their daughter Mary died at the age of fourteen in Ballylinan. Thomas’s father died at Ballylinan in August 1883, 3 months after his son’s birth, at the age of forty-four and the family later moved to Waterford. With his schooling completed Thomas joined the Civil Service in Dublin and later married Margaret Maguire, a teacher from Co. Leitrim. Thomas had six children, one of whom was Colm Condon, would become the Attorney General of Ireland under the governments of Sean Lemass and Jack Lynch At some point Thomas became involved in the nationalist revolutionary movement as a member of the Irish Volunteers. He was one of the sixty or so men involved in the assault on the Royal Irish Constabulary Barracks in Ashbourne led by Thomas Ashe during the Easter Rising of 1916. It was one of the few successful actions by the Irish Volunteers. Thomas was subsequently imprisoned in Wandsworth in London. The men of 1916 shared their prison with conscientious objectors to the Great War and serving British soldiers who had fallen foul of the army authorities. Thomas had an older brother David born in 1877. David enlisted in the Royal Engineers in the British Army in 1901 but left the army in 1908. On the outbreak of the Great War, he was recalled to the colours and served as a Company Quarter Master with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers going to France in December 1915. After being wounded, he was transferred to the Labour Corp and was discharged from the army at the end of the war as a company sergeant major. He is commemorated on the Newtownards and District War Memorial as a war casualty as his death, in 1922, was attributed to war related causes. The paths trod by Thomas Condon and his brother David where quite different and reflected the divisions in Irish families during the revolutionary period. This was not unusual. Kevin O’Higgins, the Stradbally born, Minister for Justice from 1922 until his assassination in 1927, had two brothers, Jack and Michael, both serving in the British Army during the First Word War, one of whom Michael was killed. It is a reminder that our shared histories remain complicated and challenging but none the less one of the by products of the decade of commemorations was the new maturity applied to the studies of both sides in the revolutionary era. After his release from prison Thomas spent much of his life in County Meath where he sat as a County Councillor on Meath County Council from 1934 to 1954. He was also an independent member of Seanad Eireann from 1938 to 1944. In 1939 he was appointed the First President of the Irish Tourist Board, the successor to the Irish Tourist Association. He died in Ashbourne, County Meath on the 12th of September 1963

We have recovered our local history

When I returned to Athy in June 1982 after an absence of twenty-one years, I found the town in much the same state as it was in the 1950’s. Its population had not seen any significant change in over one hundred years and it persistently stood in the mid four thousand’s. Today that figure has increased to almost eleven thousand as more and more people move out of Dublin aware of the availability of less costly housing in South Kildare. They bring with them a change of attitude to how the town is viewed. In the past, the natives of Athy and other ‘blow ins’ “of pre 1960’s had no understanding or appreciation of the town’s history or heritage. Athy was never referred to as a heritage town or historic town for the simple reason that we did not have an understanding of it either as applied to the place we lived. Having gone through the education system at both primary and secondary level in the local CBS School, I knew little or nothing of the town’s history. Even though I passed the White Castle at least four times every day while attending school in St. John’s Lane, I was not aware of the significant part it played in the Confederate wars of the 1640’s. I learned of the Great Famine and the sad times in West Cork and Mayo during the 1840’s but not of the effect that the famine had on the people of the Poor Law Union of Athy and the deaths in Athy’s workhouse. Irish history finished in 1916 so as far as the Irish education system was concerned but even this did not extend to learning about the 1798 rebellion in our home town. Knowledge of the six local men marched out of White’s Castle and hanged at the Grand Canal basin was lost to memory. Maybe the beheading of two of these six young men and the subsequent display of their severed heads on Crom a Boo bridge, which we pass over every day in 2025, was the reason the events of ’98 were lost in time. We have revived our local history in recent years and honoured the dead of the Rebellion in ’98 with a monument in Emily Square which was officially unveiled in 2010. The workhouse inmates who died during the famine and whose bodies were committed to St. Mary’s Cemetery to be buried in unmarked graves are remembered on the National Famine Commemoration Day in a ceremony in St. Mary’s. We have recovered our history, and the recovery is marked by the number of people who are on Facebook and other social media platforms showing their pride in the historic Town of Athy. I get the feeling that most of these people are new additions to the town who appreciate the historical background rather more than the town natives. For too many decades, Athy families were haunted by the deaths of local men who died during World War 1 and the shameful disregard for those men who returned from the bloodied fields of France and Flanders. This was an unrecognised part of Irish history and it was only with the holding of the first Remembrance Sunday events in St. Michael’s Cemetery about thirty years ago that a gradual acceptance of that part of our local history was noted. Not only do we now have a bigger attendance at our annual remembrance ceremony but St. Michael’s cemetery has one of the finest and World War 1 memorials remembering the Athy men and wwoman whodied in the War. Times have changed not only in terms of our knowledge and understanding of what was once a lost history but also the forms of the cultural heritage of the town. Not only is Athy referred to as a historic town, but the term heritage town is often commonly used when it emerged that Athy was granted heritage status by Bord Failte in the late 1990’s. It brought to play various elements of Athy’s heritage and made us realise the importance of the cultural heritage which for so long was generated and protected by community effort. Who can doubt the enormous cultural heritage of song, dance and drama which was created by the Musical and Dramatic Society in the 1940’s, the Social Club players and subsequent drama societies, the local bands nurtured by Joe O’Neill and his colleagues of St. Joseph’s Terrace. The first, band I have noted was that of the CYMS (Catholic Young Mens Society) in the 1890’s, while the Churchtown Pipe Band helped create a lasting musical heritage. The built heritage of the Town represented by White’s Castle, Woodstock Castle, The Town Hall, The Courthouse and many other buildings gives us a sense of antiquity which was not always appreciated in the absence of the history behind these buildings. Those prize buildings were largely ignored to a shameful extent that in the 1950’s when stone was taken from Woodstock Castle in order to help restore other buildings in Nelson Street. We have now come to realise the importance of the different strands of our Heritage and in many ways I feel we may have to look to the new arrivals to Athy to thank them for our changing attitudes to Athy’s heritage and history Please remember the official opening of Denise Curtin’s exhibition ‘Ó Mhná by the Athy novelist Niamh Boyce in the Art House, Leinster Street on Saturday 26th April.

Great Famine and Athy's Workhouse

Some years ago the Government nominated the third Sunday of May as the Irish Famine National Commemoration Day. This year it falls on May 18th and Athy folk, as they have done for many years past, will participate in a commemoration service in St. Mary’s Cemetery at 3pm that day. By December 1843 work on the Workhouse in Athy was completed. Just three months previously the clerk of the Board of Guardians announced his resignation. At a subsequent meeting Jeremiah Dunne was appointed clerk of the Workhouse. On 9th January 1844 the Board of Guardians agreed the diet for the Workhouse inmates. For adults of both sexes above 15 years of age breakfast would consist of 7ozs. of oatmeal made into stirabout and 1 pint of milk. Dinner would consist of 3 ½ lbs. of potatoes and 1 pint of buttermilk. Young persons from 3 to 15 years of age were to be provided with a breakfast of 4 ozs. of oatmeal made into stirabout and half a pint of sweet milk. Dinner to consist of 2lbs. of potatoes, with half a pint of buttermilk. For supper the youngsters received a quarter of a pound of bread and a half a pint of buttermilk. Infants from one to three years of age received 4 ozs. of oatmeal at breakfast, together with a half-pound of bread and one pint of sweet milk. The Workhouse, which was built to accommodate 360 adults and 240 children, admitted the first paupers on 9th January 1844. On that day five men, four women, ten boys, five girls and one infant were categorised as paupers on their admission to the Workhouse. A week later a further six men, fifteen women, thirteen boys, five girls and two infants were admitted to the Workhouse. Just a few years previously in a letter to Athy Literary Magazine, an unidentified letter writer wrote how ‘sickness and starvation visited the able bodied and the aged poor’ of the South Kildare town of Athy. No surprise therefore to find that within ten months of the opening of the Workhouse it was home to 297 paupers. On 9th September 1845 the Dublin Evening Post reported the appearance of potato blight in Ireland. On 19th September the Athy constabulary indicated that there was no appearance of potato blight in the Athy area. Within one month a further report from Athy constabulary confirmed that the disease had appeared in several fields. On 10th November 1845 Dublin Corporation sent an address to Queen Victoria seeking relief. Within days the Relief Commission had met and agreed to purchase Indian meal in America for shipment to Cork Harbour where it arrived in January 1846. Food depots were established around the country and Athy was one of the centres providing relief for the midlands. The food depots were closed the following August. Athy Workhouse had slightly fewer inmates in November 1845 than it had 12 months previously. The failure of the 1845 potato crop would appear to have less of an impact in County Kildare than elsewhere in Ireland. This may have been due not only to the low rate of dependency on the potato diet by people in the County of Kildare where the potato crop was the smallest of all the Irish counties but may have also been due in part to the building of the railway line in Carlow. This major project gave much needed employment in the Athy area throughout 1845 and during the first half of 1846. On 3rd June 1846 the potato blight was again noted in County Cork. It was not until August that it became clear that the blight was more severe than that experienced the previous year. Delays in bringing forward a relief work scheme caused problems in the Athy area as the local constabulary reported that the people of Athy had ‘pawned everything and cannot bear it much longer.’ Returns from the two local pawn shops showed that 49,953 items were pawned in 1845 and the following year 75,545 were pawned. Clearly the level of hardship and distress of the local people had increased dramatically over that 12-month period. Admissions to the local Workhouse increased during 1846 and in the last week of November 616 inmates were registered. In the weekend of 5th December 1846 three inmates died. Seven more inmates died the following week when the inmate numbers in the Workhouse had reached 652. In November 1846 the Society of Friends, commonly called ‘Quakers’, established their Central Relief Committee which concentrated its fund and energies on the opening of food kitchens throughout the country. Fr. Thomas Greene, C.C. Athy, received a grant from the Central Relief Committee for the poor of Athy town. In February 1847 Athy Board of Guardians advised that it provided accommodation for additional inmates by fitting up sheds formerly used as straw and turf stores to accommodate fever patients. One month later additional accommodation for 50 more inmates was provided by appropriating sheds in the boys and girls wards for use by children under 4 years of age. In April 1847 the Workhouse accommodation had increased to 714 inmates. Within a week ten persons died in the Workhouse and during the first four months of 1847 the Workhouse inmates in Athy varied between 583 and 704 and deaths averaged ten per week. The ever-increasing death toll and the need to provide coffins for internments created demands on the finances of the Board of Guardians. This resulted in the Poor Law Commissioners directing that coffins for outdoor relief recipients should not be provided by the Athy Board. Instead, they were financed by the local Church of Ireland wardens. In Athy for many years prior to the Famine the local select vestry had provided ten pounds each year for parish coffins. However, no such provision was made after 1838. It is not unreasonable to assume that many who died outside the Workhouse during the Famine were buried without coffins. During the Famine period a total of 1,205 paupers died in Athy Workhouse and the local Fever Hospital. They lie buried in unmarked graves in St. Mary’s Cemetery where services are held each Famine Commemoration Day to honour the memory of those unfortunate men, women and children. At the same time the population of Athy is estimated to have fallen by an estimated 1036 persons and many of those losses may have been related to Famine deaths or disease. In my ‘Eye’ last week dealing with Denise Curtin’s exhibition, I incorrectly stated that it was to be opened by novelist Niamh Boyce on 19th April. In fact the exhibition will open on 19th April, but will not be officially opened by Niamh Boyce until Saturday 26th April at 3pm. Do come along and support both Denise and Niamh, two of our most valuable members of Athy’s literary heritage.

Denise Curtin's poetic Exhibition in Athy Art Shop

‘Where Hazel Darling Taps every known Irish Dance into tiny feet. A musty hall Reels with the shoes And the echoes Of swing and Dance. Our baby steps March with history.’ Do you remember the above lines which you might have seen attached to the wall in the Town Hall as you approached the first landing while walking the stairs to the Town Library on the first floor? They were taken from Denise Curtin’s book of poetry, ‘Heartland’. Denise, a native of Athy, is married and has lived in Portlaoise for many years. She has not lost her love for the town of her birth and Athy and its people have featured in her poetry for many years. Her work has appeared in the Irish Times, Poetry Ireland, The Sunday Tribune and many other journals and her work achieved on at least two occasions nominations for the Hennessy Literary Award. The reason Denise is featured in this week’s ‘Eye’ is because her Exhibition ‘O’Mhna’ will open in the Art House, Leinster Street, Athy on Easter Saturday, 19th April at 3.00pm. It will run for at least two weeks, with opening times from 11am-1pm (Monday) and 11am-3pm (Wed. and Thurs.) and otherwise by appointment (email haughey.anthony@gmail.com). Admission Free. The Art House is two doors from Bradbury’s restaurant. The ‘O’Mhna’ exhibition is a celebration of women who have made a difference and was opened in the Arts House, Stradbally on Women’s International Day 2025. The poet dedicated the exhibition to her great grandmother Catherine O’Brien Delaney [1889-1969], who lived in Stradbally and Denise wrote ‘whether it concerns knitting wraps for babies or conflict zones, creating a tiny museum in a community hospital, working as an inspirational teacher or a volunteer with the homeless, this exhibition celebrates the difference these women have made to the lives of others.’ Amongst those featured in the Exhibition are a number of Athy women including the late Mary O’Murchú who worked as a teacher in Scoil Mhuire, Athy and who taught Denise. She is remembered in the poem ‘Modern English’, the final verse of which reads: ‘You could have been the centre-piece Of any Yeats’s poems, Or Shakespeare’s flower, Instead you were the length and breadth Of great words; true to you We remain their guardians.’ Another Athy woman remembered in the Exhibition is the late Mrs. Hughes of Leinster Street whom the poet reminds us: ‘Mrs. Hughes and her assistants Know you better than you know yourself They’ve dressed your mother, Aunts, Cousins and Grandmothers. They’ll figure you out. Between all of them.’ But perhaps the fondest tribute was paid by Denise to her mother, the former Lal Malone, once of St. Patrick’s Avenue, who is still happily with us and now living for some time past in Portlaoise. ‘She always seemed so happy, Designing and creating For us and our dolls, we felt so proud of her without knowing it, as we learned from her the craft of love.’ Many of my readers may not know that the Art House, recently opened, is intended to stimulate interest in the visual arts which is regarded as a vital part of Athy’s heritage. The visual arts share with music, literary work and many other elements of Athy’s cultural heritage, give the historic town an enhanced background to its growth over the generations. We are presently short of literary figures in Athy so the opportunity to bring Denise’s work to her home town where the exhibition will be opened by Athy novelist Niamh Boyce, is a welcome treat for readers. Do come along on Easter Saturday, 19th April at 3.00pm and give your support to Denise Curtin, poet and Niamh Boyce, novelist in what is their home town.

Athy family and early medieval village of Athy

The name ‘Athy’ is commonly believed to have come to us as the anglicized form of the ancient Irish place name Ath Ae. Woulfe in his book “Irish names and placenames” writes that “at the time of the Norman invasion, surnames were still far from universal in England and many of the first settlers came to this country with only single names. Some of these took surnames on Irish soil after the Norman fashion, from the places where they settled.” So it was that one of the first families to settle in and around South Kildare took their surname from the ancient Irish placename “Ath Ae” which was anglicised as “Athy”. The Athy family did not stay long in South Kildare. After a short stay they moved to Galway where tradition relates one of the Athy family erected the first stone house or castle in that area. The Athy family was later to become one of the 14 ancient tribes of Galway. There is no evidence of a fortress or settlement at Ath Ae in ancient times and so to Norman influence must be credited the first riverside settlement in the post 1169 period. Under the Normans, most of the province of Leinster passed into the hands of Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, better known as Strongbow. Orpen in his pioneering work “Ireland under the Normans” stated that the Barony of Rheban was probably granted by Strongbow to Robert de St. Michael. This must have occurred prior to 1176, the year of Strongbow’s death. Land allocation was generally followed by the construction of military fortresses in localities selected for their strategic importance. Such precautions were necessary against the dispossessed Irish who had been driven from the lands. The river Barrow was traversed at both Ath Ae and Rheban by fords, the control of which were vital to the Normans in maintaining supremacy over the Irish in the area. It is therefore reasonable to assume that Rheban Castle and Woodstock Castle or the earlier wooden structures which they might have replaced, were built soon after the arrival of the Normans. Many previous writers on Athy have ascribed the building of Rheban Castle to Richard de St. Michael. Richard was the son and heir of David de St. Michael and the grandson of the original grantee of the lands Robert de St. Michael. We know that David de St. Michael granted the Church of Rheban to the Abbey of St. Mary’s in Dublin before the end of 1200, a grant which was subsequently confirmed by his son Richard in 1215. It is highly probable that the Church of Rheban came into existence after the erection of a Castle in the same locality, this being the usual sequence in a hostile country. Rheban Castle is therefore most likely of pre-1200 construction. On the other hand Woodstock Castle is universally accepted to have been built by Richard de St. Michael who succeeded to his father’s property and title sometime before the confirmation of the gift of the Church of Rheban in 1215. There is no agreement amongst the many writers on Athy as to the year of the Castle’s construction. In “Residences and Castles of the Duke of Leinster” the year 1190 is claimed, but not substantiated, as the year in which Woodstock Castle was built. In Anthologica Hibernica it is written that Woodstock was built about the time of the foundation of St. John’s Abbey by Richard de St. Michael as an appendage to the Palatinate of Dunamaes. St. John’s Abbey was founded by Richard during the reign of King John who died in 1216. All the evidence points to the erection of Woodstock Castle in 1215 or thereabouts and as such the Castle and St. John’s priory represent the earliest buildings of what we now know as Athy, with the Castle as the probable first building. The Castle’s location, with the River Barrow to its rear and an extensive wood to the front, made the fortress almost impregnable and well sited to protect the ford over which it was to stand for many years. The catholic invaders of a catholic people who spoke a different language from that of the natives, and whose customs and traditions were also different, as far as possible made their settlements self-sufficient. Religious settlements played an important part in Anglo Norman life as they had done in ancient Ireland. One may assume that the desire to make the everyday lives of the early settlers at Woodstock as Anglo Norman as possible prompted the Baron of Rheban, Richard de St. Michael, to invite the Order of Crouched Friars or Friars of the Holy Cross to come to the area. The Friars of the Holy Cross were so called because of an embroidered cross worn on the habits of community members. Their Monastery was established under the invocation of St. John and its domain consisted of an island in the river Barrow and the adjacent fields as far as the former Barrack yard in Barrack Street. It included that part of the town now called St. John’s and St. John’s Lane. For the first 40 years or so of its life, the settlement on the western bank of the ford of Ae consisted of Woodstock Castle, with the Monastery of St. John’s in its shadow and the huts of the Anglo Norman settlers who came in the wake of Strongbow’s army.