 Firstly, we hope you had a peaceful and restful Christmas and are ready for the new year. We were busy delivering The Album to our local shops and posting copies worldwide. By Christmas Eve the rush had stopped and we could relax and make plans for the society in 2023.This newsletter is a review of our activities last year, and some of our plans and ideas for this coming year. Thank you as aways for your support of the society, we couldn’t do what we do without you. If you want to contact us on local history matters here are our numbers Arlene 086 3586293, Deborah 086 8334433. Or you can send an email to KillaloeBallinaLHS@gmail.com  After the strangeness of 2020 and 2021 it was quite difficult to get back to normal public talks. We found that attendance was down on previous years as people were still nervous about going to gatherings, and perhaps had become more used to online events. But we persisted and held a total of 7 talks.We started with a talk by Michael Houlihan on the Holy Wells of Co. Clare, Michael focused on the wells in our area. It was a really interesting talk and we appreciate all the work Michael and his team have done in compiling a database with images of the Wells in Co Clare, it can be accessed here: https://heritage.clareheritage.org/category/places/holy-wells Our next talk was by Joachim Fischer, Dr. Fischer is a lecturer in German Studies at the University of Limerick and for sometime he had been researching the little-known Limerick writer Maria Frances Dickson (1809-1885). Maria was the first female Irish writer to publish a full book-length travel account of Germany in 1837. In 1824 Maria’s uncle, Sir William Abraham Chatterton married Henrietta Georgiana Lascelles who was only 3 years older than Maria. Lady Chatterton went on to be a widely read Victorian novelist. The two ladies shared a strong inclination for travelling, both visited several continental countries and travelled extensively in Ireland, in many instances together. Of particular interest was their visit to this area in 1838, Lady Chatterton gave an interesting account of Killaloe and their visit to Bishop Sandes at Clarisford which Joachim covered in his talk. Next for Féile Brian Ború we had our own Arlene White give a talk on the Spaights of Derrycastle. Arlene has become our local expert on the Spaights. She even contributed to RTÉ’s Documentary on One “The Custom of the Sea” which covered an incident of cannibalism aboard one of Francis Spaight’s ships. We held Arlene’s talk at St. Flannan’s Cathedral, the talk attracted quite a few people from Limerick and as a result more information has come to light about the Spaight family. There is definitely another talk in Arlene on the Spaights, one of her favourite subjects. In Heritage Week we collaborated with St. Flannan’s Cathedral and held a talk on the lesser known tales about our 800+ year old church. At this talk we took part in the launch of the ‘Discover St. Flannan’s’ guide which was researched by Dr. Judith Hill, the Architectural Historian involved in the cathedral’s conservation. The research and publication of the guide was funded by the Heritage Council as part of their Community Heritage Grant scheme. In September we held a series of 3 talks to commemorate the Decade of Centenaries. Ger Browne covered WW1 and Co Clare, Darlene Meskell told us the story of John Meskell whose house in Ballina was burned by Auxilliary Forces in 1920 and Darren O’Connell shared his research on John Charlesworth in his talk ‘The Lost Forester’, afterwards we visited John’s grave in the cathedral graveyard. This series of talks was funded by Clare County Council in their Decade of Centenaries commemoration programme.We would like to thank all our speakers and also the Lakeside Hotel and St. Flannan’s Cathedral for providing venues for the talks. The cathedral proved to be a good venue for the summer months and it took the pressure off the Lakeside during their busy period. We would like to also thank Scariff Bay Community Radio who have recorded all our talks and broadcast them. Many can be found on podcast. ‘Waterways and Means’ by Brian J. Goggin  In June we participated in the launch of Brian Goggin’s posthumously published book ‘Waterways and Means’. Brian was very dear to us, he gave 3 talks in all for the society. His last, when he was quite sick, was so well attended the overflow audience had to look through the windows at the Lakeside Hotel to view Brian’s presentation. Brian also helped us with our Waterways History Panels, fact checking and giving us content. We miss him greatly. The launch of this book by his wife, Anne, and family was held at Flanagan’s on the Lake and was similarly well attended. So many of us wanted one last memory of Brian. It is an excellent book, as you would expect. To find out how to purchase just follow this link  For Féile Brian Ború we funded and hung an exhibition of images of Killaloe and Ballina entitled ‘Then & Now’. These images were shared with us by Robert and Siobhán of Buffalo Studios and the Killaloe Photography Group. We printed large to A0 size on polyboard and hung on the railings at the Pier Head. The exhibition stayed up until the end of August and we then distributed the images to various locations – The Lakeside Hotel, Killaloe River Cruises, Killaloe Ballina Family Resource Centre, Collin’s Pharmacy and some outdoor spots. We have started a bit of a trend as this was our 2nd exhibition at the Pier Head, we better start thinking of the 2023 exhibition soon! Although the panels are quite expensive to produce, you can’t put a price on the interest and awareness of our local history they create. Paul McGrath has hung some of the 2022 exhibition, ‘The Peter Lacy Collection’, on the gates to Crotty’s yard so they can still be viewed. Paul loaned us Peter’s collection of photographic negatives in 2021 and these negatives started the Pier Head exhibition trend. The ALBUM – Christmas 2022  As 2022 was so busy we ran out of time to produce our annual Journal, so instead we came up with the idea of The Album. We have collected a lot of images since our inception in 2017 and not all of them are in print. Also the National Library of Ireland has a wonderful image archive which contains old images of Killaloe and Ballina, not all of which are easy to find. We have one eagle eyed contributor – Martina Ryan – who pointed out some photos in old albums on the NLI archive which we just had to get out there. We bought the rights to reproduce these images and still have some left over. Once news spread that we were producing a book of images the photos started pouring in. We were given a box of colour slides by Margaret Egan, these were photos taken by Fr Brendan Scanlan of Gortmagee back in the early 1960s, wonderful images of farming life 60+ years ago. Since the Album has been produced we have been given another box of slides by Antoinette Ryan, these were taken by Fr. Joseph Minogue, from The Green. To avoid graphic design costs we designed The Album ourselves, and printed in A4 stapled format, so even though paper costs have risen 50% we were able to offer at €12 per copy. Nenagh Guardian Print did the honours as usual in making our PDF a reality, and delivered 500 copies of our new baby on the 5th of December. Sales were brisk but we still have some copies left, if you would like one just email us on killaloeballinalhs@gmail.com or if you are local copies are stocked in The Forge, Heaney’s, Ponte Vecchio, TJ’s and Larkin’s Gala. We will definitely produce another Album in the future in order to share our loans and donations of images with everyone. Building History Signs  We have another batch of building history signs to be put up, we have the Tech7 loaded in the squeezy gun and ready to go, it’s just a matter of making the time on a dry day to hang. We are looking forward to adding to the existing collection of signs. It gives us great satisfaction to see people reading all about our buildings. Ideas for 2023 Talks We have a few speakers in our sights and will be firming up dates for our talks in the near future, we will issue a newsletter before our first talk of 2023. Membership Regarding membership, to manage the memberships takes quite a bit of time, so we are thinking of letting people donate as a friend of the society instead. We have you, our newsletter subscribers, and are always happy to add more subscribers. We also have our Grant Maestro Arlene who manages to get grants for a lot of our activities. We will continue to have a donation bucket at our talks if people want to contribute. Waterways Ireland Sign We have received grant funding from Waterways Ireland to erect a sign to mark the location of St. Lua’s Oratory and Friar’s Island. Christine of Fifth Gear Design did a super job with the artwork and Tipperary County Council are in agreement to the sign’s erection. It will be at the little picnic area on the riverside below the location of the new bridge. Recipe Book? Since creating The Journal & The Album we have the publishing bug. And what better way to capture the essence of Killaloe and Ballina than to gather those old family recipes, and some new ones, and put them in the form of a handy cookbook. Killaloe and Ballina’s Kitchen is a suggested working title. Each recipe would have the donor’s name and a little bit about the recipe’s origins. We can ask our local eateries also for a favourite recipe. Deborah puts black pepper in her brown bread and it makes a difference, perhaps you have some secret ingredient you want to let people know about. We also have a lot of residents from overseas who might have recipes they would like to share. A suitable charity could be the recipient of profits. While you are mulling this over we will see if there is any grant funding for such a venture, and take it from there. Valuation Day? On Sunday 25th August, 2019 we held a valuation day. George Stacpoole and local antiques expert Robin O’Donnell helped to gather a group of valuers. The purpose of the event was to raise funds to start our building history sign project, and it did, we raised nearly €1,000! We were wondering if there is interest in us holding another valuation day, you can root out all your treasures and find out all about them from the experts. Let us know if you think it is a good idea and we will start planning, our email address is killaloeballinalhs@gmail.com.      If you haven’t received this email directly but it has been passed from another please feel free to contact us on killaloeballinalhs@gmail.com and we will add you to our newsletter distribution list. We are on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter if you wish to follow us on social media. |
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