Book town Hay on Wye and Athy's Lions Club Book Shop

Hay-on-Wye, a Welsh village just a step or two within the Welsh English border, is a book lovers paradise. The late Richard Booth opened his first second hand book shop in the village of Hay in 1962. He went on to open a number of other book shops in Hay and was joined there by other second hand book dealers to create the world’s best known book town. I first visited Hay-on-Wye in the early 1980s when the Welsh town with a population of about 2,000 was home to upwards of 30 second hand book shops. One of those shops was the town’s former cinema which was fitted out by Richard Booth to make what was then one of the world's largest second hand book shops. Today the cinema book shop is still in business, offering a huge variety of books for sale as do the twenty or so other book shops still located around the town of Hay-on-Wye. Amazon and other online book dealers have of course restricted the growth of book towns such as Hay-on-Wye in Wales and Wigtown in Scotland. Nevertheless both continue to thrive and Hay-on-Wye especially so during the annual Hay Festival of Literature which was founded in 1988. I was reminded of the importance of book shops in the development of our personal cultural lives when I read the headlines in the London Times on Monday ‘Return of book shops is a novel idea’. ‘A record 142 book shops opened in France last year, notably in small provincial towns’, reported the Times. Apparently there has been a steady growth in book shop openings over the past decade, a trend which has been attributed to anti-Amazon activism and demographic changes that have led city dwellers to settle in the provinces. Here in Athy we have witnessed an enormous growth in population with the town numbers increasing by over 150% in recent years. The current population of 10,000 or so far exceeds the population figures which were more or less static for more than a century, hovering as it did in or around 4,000. This increase has not brought with it the additional services which one might expect. One such missing service is a book shop and the absence of a cultural mecca for readers prompted the local Lions Club some years ago to open the Lions second hand book shop in Duke Street. It provides a wonderful service for book readers but Athy still needs a dedicated book shop offering for sale the latest publications from Irish and overseas publishers. Athy cannot hope to emulate the success of Hay-on-Wye or even Scotland’s Wigtown, but the town’s reading public presently served by an excellent town library surely deserves the opening of a new book shop. The local Lions Club which with the help of its honorary Lions Club member Alice Rowan, opens the second hand book shop five days a week, has now planned the first National Book Fair for Athy on Saturday 25th March. Opening at 10am in the A.R.C.H. on the Kilkenny Road the fair will bring together a number of book dealers offering an interesting and varying collection of books for sale. There will be one book stall devoted to books published on different aspects of Athy’s history. It offers a unique opportunity for those who came to live in Athy in recent years to learn more about the south Kildare town which they now call home. The Shackleton Museum will also have a stall at the book fair offering for sale a mixture of local and polar exploration titles, including the recently published ‘An Antarctic Affair’ by Fergus O’Gorman. A few days later Marc Guernon will give the next lecture in the Lecture Series organised by Athy’s Historical Society in the Arts Centre in Woodstock Street. Marc, who is an archaeologist and a gifted artist, will describe and illustrate some of the hidden elements of the medieval landscape of Athy which have long remained hidden. It promises to be an interesting overview of the medieval town of Athy, which because of its location played an important part in many aspects of Ireland’s medieval history. Admission is free to the lecture which starts at 8pm on Tuesday 28th March in the Arts Centre. Writing of books I must mention the book launch planned for St. Lawrence’s G.A.A. clubhouse on Saturday, 22nd April at 8pm. The book ‘A Life’s Harvest: Stories from the Home Place Loraine’ written by Tom O’Connell, a native of nearby Loraine Fontstown, is his late father’s stories of life in rural Ireland. More about this book launch nearer the event.

Hay on Wye / Sean MacFheorais

I was in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye last weekend and attended Mass in the local parish church.  The fifty or so attending the only Sunday Mass in the Welsh border town almost filled the small church to capacity.  I have been visiting Hay for almost 30 years as a result of Richard Booth’s entrepreneurial spirit which saw him developing the market town as the world’s first book town.  With a population of less than 2,000 Hay has no less than 27 second hand book shops, one of which is perhaps the largest to be found in Britain. 

The elderly Parish Priest of Hay is Fr. Tim Maloney whose name prompted the belief that he was Irish.  However, he told me he was born in India, although the Irish connection was made when he told me that his mother spent her last years in Wexford where she died.

Hay, like Athy, owes its existence to the Normans and both towns were established as key border fortifications.  Hay is located on the Welsh/English border, while Athy is located on what was the border lands which separated the Normans from the Irish. 

What struck me about the Mass in Hay was the very vocal participation of the congregation.  Hymns were sung with fervour and responses were clear and uplifting.  It was an active participation which I have come to associate with Anglican services but which perhaps owes more to the English or Welsh character than anything else.  I could not but help comparing my Sunday morning experience in Hay with Mass in Athy or indeed Mass anywhere in Ireland.  Is it a lack of confidence which limits the Irish person’s participation in communal hymn singing?  How I wish we could import some of the panache and vigour of the small Hay congregation to Athy.

The Anglican Church in Hay is high Church and the present Anglican incumbent continues the High Church tradition which goes back many decades in the Welsh border town.  Relations between the Anglican Church and the other local churches are apparently good but were not always so. As late as 1742 a Methodist preacher was stoned to death by a mob of angry locals in Hay.  There were also serious outbreaks of anti-Catholic feeling reported in Hay in 1850 when effigies of Pope Pius IX and Cardinal Wiseman were burnt in the centre of the town following the Pope’s announcement of the reorganisation of the Catholic Church in Britain.

In 1968 when the local Catholics of Hay acquired their present place of worship there was again an outcry fuelled by many outsiders including Rev. Ian Paisley.  The building acquired had previously served a local Calvinistic Methodist group known as the ‘Jumpers’, a name given to them on account of their energetic involvement in services and communal hymn singing.  Its proposed use as a Catholic Church proved a bridge too far for those opposed to the Catholic Ministry.  Nowadays all this is forgotten and the small Catholic community in Hay provides an interesting contrast in a Welsh countryside which is renowned for the multiplicity of its dissenting churches.  If you are interested in books do visit Hay-on-Wye.

Two weeks ago I got an email all the way from Queensland Australia with a request for the words of the poem ‘An Tincéir Sas O’Neill’ which my correspondent, a native of Cobh, had sung in school in the 1960s to the tune of ‘Spancil Hill’.  He thought it was composed by Athy man Sean MacFheorais and so it was.  The poem simply called ‘An Tincéir’ was included in MacFheorais’s first book of Irish poetry ‘Gearrcaigh na hOiche’ published in 1954.  I was pleased to have a copy of the book and was able to send the words of ‘An Tincéir’ to my Queensland correspondent.

I never met Sean MacFheorais but was looking forward to doing so when he was scheduled to give the first public reading of his then newly written poem on Athy in the Vocational School on 17^th March 1984.  Tragically at just 69 years of age he died a few weeks before his planned visit.  I wrote of Sean MacFheorais in Eye No. 76 bemoaning his loss and how we tend to overlook the local men or women who make a meaningful contribution to Irish life and culture.  Sean MacFheorais was one such man and his poetry reaches out far beyond the shores of his native Ireland as evidenced by the request I received recently from Queensland, Australia.