Of county managers and sporting success

The first county manager I came across was the legendary Matt Macken. He was the Carlow/Kildare county manager when I got my first job as a clerical officer with Kildare County Council in St Mary’s Naas. He was the nearest thing to God and he received as much obsequious treat-ment from the Council staff as you might expect the Pope to receive today. Well I remember if he appeared in the hallway of the Council offices, mere clerical officers such as myself ducked out of view in much the same way as servants did in the days of the big houses.

My next encounter with that heady level of administrative excellence was when I went to Kells as town clerk. My first day on the job coincided with the monthly meeting of the urban council, which the county manager in those days always attended. Denis Candy was the manager’s name and he too came from Athy, the scion of a well-known Athy family.

Belying his name, he was not all sweetness. Indeed, Denis Candy was a difficult man to get on with at the best of times but, given my lowly position in the ranks, I just had to knuckle under and get on with the job. Legendary are the stories told of Denis Candy’s time in County Meath, equalled only by those told of my next county manager, George Cannon of Monaghan. I have written before of George Cannon, a man small in terms of physique but an intellectual giant who stood apart from his colleagues as much for his waspish contrariness as for the individual streak which marked his daily activities.

Denis Candy, as I have said earlier, was an Athy man and strangely and perhaps uniquely the South Kildare town has given us three county managers since the first County Management Act of 1940. Apart from Denis Candy there was Jack Taaffe, the now retired county manager for Westmeath and John Keyes, presently occupying the premier local government position in the county of Cavan.

John is the son of the late Jackie and Liz Keyes of William Street. Jackie Keyes was office manager in the Asbestos factory in the 1950s and was one of three Keyes brothers who worked for the same company. Jackie’s brothers, Billy and Tommy, worked in the Asbestos company’s head office in Dublin. Their father, William Keyes, was local postman and in the days before footballing of all kinds held sway, was a cricketer of note who played for Athy Cricket Club. Indeed, the Keyes’ involvement in the game of cricket passed from father William to his sons and Jackie Keyes was an excellent cricketer in his younger days. Apart from the three sons, William and his wife, the former Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, had four daughters, Katie, Margaret, Angie and Mamie, all of whom married, uniting in marriage the Rowan, Ryan, Prendergast and McNamara families.

John Keyes, who now holds the reins of municipal power in County Cavan, started his education in the local Christian Brothers School. He was a member of the under-15 school team which won the 1967 Leinster College Championship. Athy CBS played what was the country final against Portlarlington in Mullingar and emerged winners, courtesy of two goals scored by Christy Delahunt. The final saw the country winners, Athy CBS, pitched against St Declan’s, the Dublin City winners in the provincial final played on the GAA pitch in Naas. Athy won, with the Stapleton brothers, Dan and Martin, between them amassing a wealth of scores to ensure Athy’s victory. That year also saw the young footballer, John Keyes, take up association football with Athy Soccer Club, where he played on the under-15 team before graduating to the seniors, where he achieved more success. He was a member of the Athy soccer team which won the Sheeran Cup in 1972. John played on the Athy team with the likes of Cha Chanders and Vincent Gray, who later had a stint with Shamrock Rovers and Limerick City and he recalls one of the more memorable football occasions outside the cup final of 1972 as the last soccer game of what was Cha Chanders long footballing career.

John went to university in Dublin, from where in time he graduated from UCD with an engineering degree. While in university, he played rugby, the game at which his father and his uncle Billy had won Provincial Towns Cup medals with Athy. He was a member of the Anderson cupwinning team of the 1972/73 season and played on the Athy team which competed for the Provincial Towns Cup in the 1975/ 76 season. The photograph of that team shows John sixth from the left at the back row with his father Jackie, then the president of Athy Rugby Club on the extreme left of the same row.

John’s biggest regret is that he transferred from the Athy Club to play senior rugby with Monkstown in Dublin soon thereafter and missed out on the Provincial Towns Cup victories which came Athy’s way in the latter part of the 1970s. John retired from rugby playing following a serious injury in 1981, but continued his involvement in the game as a coach.

The Keyes family name goes back several generations in Athy and over the decades from William onwards the Keyes name has graced the cricket pitch, the rugby pitch, the soccer pitch and the Gaelic playing field. Sport played an important part in the life of at least three generations of the Keyes family, but perhaps none had a more varied sporting career than John Keyes. The holder of winning medals in Gaelic football, association football and rugby, his is a record to be envied. His sporting achievements are in a sense mirrored by the successes in his professional life.

Graduating as an engineer from UCD, he first worked for Dublin Corporation in the mid-1980s, transferring in 1991 to Offaly County Council as a senior executive engineer. He spent 12 years in County Offaly becoming the director of community enterprise and planning in 1999, before taking up the appointment of county manager in Cavan in 2004.

The drive which gave John his successful sporting and professional career may owe something to his spirited grandmother Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, who married the postman William Keyes. It was she who in the early 1930s opened the shop at the corner of William Street and Shrewleen Lane which proved so important after William suffered a stroke a few years later. Elizabeth died in 1963, but the Keyes’ shop was a readily identifiable landmark during the ’40s and ’50s and continued in business right up to the early 1960s, coinciding with the opening of Dreamland Ballroom on the Kilkenny road.

It is a wonderful achievement for a former Christian Brothers schoolboy to climb the highest rung on the local government ladder and for Athy to boast no less than three county managers is a great tribute to the town and to our local schools.

Great sporting moments from our history

The extraordinary event - TriAthy 2007 has come and gone. Never before has Athy played host to such a huge gathering of sportsmen, over 700 in all, who swam, cycled and ran their way to the finishing line at Barrow Quay. Athy has seen many major sporting events in its time, from All Ireland football and hurling finals played in Geraldine Park to National Ploughing championships run off at Russellstown, but never, I believe, have so many participants been involved in a single event such as took place last weekend. It was a magnificent spectacle, organised on the day with extraordinary precision and fulsome congratulations are due to the organisers who included local man Arthur Lynch. Emily Square in the centre of the town proved its worth yet again, providing as it did welcome space for competitors and bikes alike on a scale which few other towns in Ireland could match. All in all TriAthy was a resounding success and hopefully it will become an annual event in the sporting and social calendar of Athy.

Sporting activity has been a prominent feature of life in Athy for many decades. However, it wasn’t so apparent to a visitor who in 1884 wrote of his time spent in the town of Athy. “There was little sport about Athy.” There may well have been little inducement for sport in those given the social unrest due to Land League activities and chronic unemployment in the area.

We must go back even further than 1884 to find a record of sports in which the locals were actively involved. Cockfighting was one such sport and it retained its popularity amongst the local people right up to the 1920’s. A cockpit was located in Duke Street and hosted regular cock fights up to the middle of the 19th century when the medieval “sport” was made illegal. However, cockfighting still retained a large following in the area up to the 1920’s and beyond.

Another more acceptable form of sport which was popular in Athy over the years was handball. Athy once boasted two handball alleys, one located in Leinster Street, the other in Barrack Lane. The Estate Map of Athy prepared for the Duke of Leinster in 1827 showed both handball courts, the Barrack Lane court lying adjacent to the Military Barracks which had been built in the 1730’s. Clearly the court had been provided primarily for the use of the soldiers, while the Leinster Street court was presumably a commercial venture lying behind one of the local public houses. The Barrack Lane Court survived up to the 1970’s and in fact was replaced by a newly built court provided by the Urban District Council which however remained unused and was demolished after a few years.

Some of the local handballing champions from the past included John Delaney, Tom Aldridge, George Robinson, Jack Delaney, Bill Aldridge, Jim Foley and George Ryan. The last named won a junior All Ireland title in 1946 and so far as I know he was the last All Ireland champion to play out of Athy Handball Club.

Cycling was another sport which caught the publics imagination, even if it did not necessarily involve many locals as active participants. The sport developed in the 1890’s soon after J.P. Dunlop developed the pneumatic tyre. Local cyclists whose names figured prominently in the sport in its early years included C.W. Taylor of Forest Farm, Harry and Bob Large of Rheban, Andy Bergin and his brother J.J. Bergin of Maybrook.

Archery and rowing were two other sports which once figured on the sporting calendar for Athy. I have come across references to archery contests in the Peoples Park in the 1860’s or thereabouts, while around the same time the annual Athy regatta was a prominent local venture. The rowing boats used the same river course taken by the swimmers in the triathlon event last weekend and so popular was the sport that the regatta became and remained a regular event for many years.

Pat Bell in his book on 150 years of cricket in Kildare acknowledged that “Athy can justifiably lay claim to be the oldest cricket club in Kildare. There was a club in the town in 1870 which went by the name of Offaly Cricket Club whose Honorary Secretary was J.F. MacDonald of the Rectory. Two years later Athy Cricket Club was formed but sharing the same secretary”. I have in front of me John Lawrence’s Handbook of Cricket in Ireland for 1872/73, an annual then in its 8th issue which gave a detailed account of the Irish Cricket Club and their activities during the year. For the Athy Cricket Club the following entry appears.

“In 1872 the club played 3 matches, won 1 and lost 2. This club did not play any matches till very late in the season. The first was against the Portarlington, played on the Athy ground, and won by the home club. The return was played on the Portarlington ground, and won by the Portarlington. Both of these matches were played on very wet days. The third match was played against an eleven got up by Sir A.C. Weldon, and played on his domain at Kilmorony, in which the Athy suffered another defeat.”

The other Athy Club, Offaly Cricket Club, is noted merely with an entry as to its Honorary Secretary, H.P. MacDonald, The Rectory, Athy, who was the local Church of Ireland Curate.

In 1895 Athy Cricket Club won the Leinster Intermediate Cup with a team comprised of H.P. Hannon, A.K. Pennycook, H. Eckford, J.A. Duncan, T.J. Whelan, J. O’Neill, W. Keyes, H. O’Neill, A. Hutton and P. O’Neill. Victory in the Intermediate Cup was again secured by Athy Cricket Club in 1896. The sport continued to be played all over South Kildare up to the end of the 1930’s with teams from Ardreigh, Bert, Castlemitchell and Kilkea in addition to the Athy town team. A brief revival of cricket in Athy in the 1980’s saw Athy Cricket Club gain victories in the Midland Plate of 1990 and the Griffin Hawe Cup three years later. Today cricket, like cockfighting, and handball, is no longer an active sport in the Athy area.

To return to the triathlon of last weekend, the high number of participants made me think of the great sporting events which Athy has hosted over the decades. The All Ireland Football Final of 1906 played in Geraldine Park, between Kickhams of Dublin and Fermoy of Cork was obviously an important sporting event as was the Hurling Final of 1908, played in the same venue between Thurles of Tipperary and Kickhams of Dublin on 27th June 1909. It was a great privilege then to host an All Ireland Final as it was last weekend to provide the venue for the most successful triathlon event every held in this country. Here’s hoping TriAthy will become an annual event in the town’s sporting calendar.

Nowadays sporting activities rely on the provision of facilities which were not available decades ago. I can remember togging out at the side of playing fields in Narraghmore, Rheban and Castlemitchell before football matches in the late 1950’s. Inclement weather or otherwise, it made no difference as we struggled to shield our “modesty” which in those innocent days seemed more important than warding off the downpours which always appeared to accompany our visits to outlying rural football pitches. Recently I attended a birthday celebration for a good friend in St. Laurence’s G.A.A. Club and I marvelled at the wonderful facilities now available in the recently opened community complex. It’s a great credit to the people of Narraghmore, Ballitore, Fontstown and the other rural areas which now make up the St. Laurence’s Club. The truly magnificent club house together with several playing fields provide ample evidence of the success of the club which was formed 50 years ago when the G.A.A. clubs of Ballitore and Narraghmore came together. Congratulations to everyone associated with St. Laurence’s G.A.A. Club, not forgetting the good lady whose birthday party prompted my first visit to their new sporting complex.