No, it was not a blue raincoat but rather a Crombie of an unusual hue. Yet the wearing of it while dining in, not one but two Dublin hotels, was rejected by the headwaiters of such places. The set for this culinary tragedy was not the famous Restaurant Jammet, or the Royal Hibernian, but rather the Central Hotel and the Wicklow Hotel, both near enough to affluent Grafton Street but not haute cuisine for all that.
(more…)Category: Leisure
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Tullamore and the Third World War: a hasty departure from Berlin in 1961. Blog no. 820 in the Offaly History Series, 1 October 2026. By Fergal MacCabe
As the 13th of August comes around, the present rising tensions between Russia and the West bring me back sixty-five years to the Summer of 1961 and my ringside seat at its most momentous event.
The Cold War was hotting up and the nuclear powers were preparing for a confrontation when myself and some classmates from the School of Architecture in UCD arrived in London hoping to make enough summer money to get us through the next year. Our skills were instantly snapped up by firms engaged in the delivery of priority defence projects.
For the next two months I worked night and day churning out drawings for the construction of a nuclear submarine base at Faslane in Scotland. By the end of July we were all exhausted but having saved enough money, we badly needed a break. One of us had bought a second-hand car so we decided to make an architectural pilgrimage to the Continent before returning to Ireland.
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Urban Regeneration in Tullamore. By Fergal MacCabe. Blog no. 808 in the Offaly History Series. 31.7.2026
PROJECT 2040
Many may find it hard to believe, but Ireland has a pretty good planning structure and system.
Some years ago we embarked on an exercise of estimating where as a nation- indeed as an island – we should be going. How many people would we need to cater for, where would they live, how would they get around and what about climate change?
The outcome was Project 2040 which set out a broad overall framework and most importantly had a dedicated budget to deliver it. Its national vision is now filtering down through regional planning, to county planning, then to more detailed statutory plans for the cities and finally for the more important towns.
As a ‘Key Town’, Tullamore has a particular role to play and, in anticipation of an additional population projection of 1 million persons in the State by 2040, is presently making its own contribution by upping its housing projections to provide for an additional c. 2,000 houses and identifying an ambitious new employment and enterprise zone with direct access to the national road network.
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Recent Written History of Hurling. By John Dolan, no. 779 in Offaly History Blog Series, 6 Feb. 2026.
As mentioned earlier there are many histories of hurling in recent times, particularly county and local club histories. A major and broad history of hurling, Scéal na hIomána was produced by Brother Liam Ó Caithnia in Irish and was published in 1980, but was left largely unappreciated for decades. Ó Caithnia’s history was an exhaustive work, the definitive historical account, written initially as an academic thesis, 826 pages long, written in dense Irish with a small print font and included references and appendixes. Over a dozen mentions of Co. Offaly are to be found in the Scéal.
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COOL POOL: James Scully (Kilbeggan Bridge, Tullamore) recalls happy times at the Tullamore Outdoor Swimming Pool (1938, Church Road) in the course of the launch of the new book of memories. Blog No 767, 13th Dec 2025
ROSE-TINTED: Memories of the Tullamore Swimming Pool inevitably come through rose-tinted glasses. Some can be explained: The glorious weather – you didn’t go to the pool unless the weather was good. But there were heatwaves!! I vividly remember tar bubbling up on red hot road surfaces beyond Hop Hill Church, destroying the soles of our bare feet or God forbid THE NEW SANDALS!! from Owen Marron’s sweet smelling leathery shoe shop [in Patrick Street]
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Tullamore’s Irish National Foresters building in Church Street. By Michael Byrne and Offaly History. In the Offaly History series on Church Street, Tullamore: houses, businesses and families over 300 years. No. 10 in the 2025 Living in towns series prepared with the support of the Heritage Council. Blog No 755, 15th October 2025
The Foresters building fronting Church Street would not be so easy to recognise today as the ground floor is part of the Chanapa Thai restaurant east of the old Shambles.
In March 2024 we published two articles in this series by Aidan Doyle marking the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Tullamore branch of the Irish National Foresters (I.N.F) and the 100th anniversary of the opening of its new cinema in Market Square. As was noted in a Midland Tribune article forty years ago[1] the Irish National Foresters Benefit Society is an organisation about which most people know very little about although the Tullamore (Conn of the Hundred Battles) branch has been part and parcel of the town since 1899. The I.N.F. may be the fourth oldest organisation in Tullamore after the Freemasons (1759), GAA Tullamore (1888) and the Tullamore Golf Club of 1895-6.
The home of the club in the early years was the CYMS , later called St Mary’s Hall in Thomas/Benburb Street. By 1903 Tullamore I.N.F had its own building on part of the harbour site at the junction of Harbour Street and Henry/O’Carroll Street. The new building worked well for four years but things went badly against them with a fire in the clubhouse in Harbour Street in July 1907: ‘The Tullamore blaze destroyed what was probably one of the finest Forester Halls in the provinces. And what makes the occurrence all the more lamentable is the fact that it had been built only four years.’
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Sharavogue Shinrone, County Offaly and the King’s County Polo Club. By Aidan Doyle. Blog No 710, 23rd April 2025
Polo traces its origins to the game of Chovgan, an equestrian team sport played by the aristocracy of the Persian Empire. It spread across Asia evolving along the way. By the 1400s it had arrived in India, supposedly introduced during the Muslim conquests of the subcontinent. During the Mughal period polo was dubbed the ‘Sport of Kings’ and the emperor Jalal ud-din Akbar introduced a set of rules governing the sport in the 1560s. In 1859, British soldiers and tea planters serving in India established the Calcutta Polo Club and the game was quickly introduced to Britain. When Carlow hosted Ireland’s first polo match in 1872, the local press referred to it as ‘Hurling on Horseback’. A year later the All-Ireland Polo Club was founded, with its grounds at the Nine Acres in the Phoenix Park. In 1875 the Hurlingham Polo Committee in London drew up a set of rules which would shape the polo in the century which followed. In the same year polo had migrated once again and in time the scions of Argentina’s richest families would establish that countries position as the global powerhouse of the game.
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Striking the right note: The formation of Ferbane’s Confraternity Brass Band in 1925. By Aidan Doyle. No 5 in the Anniversaries Series from Offaly History. Blog No 693, 15th Feb 2025
There is a long history dating back to the Middle Ages of lay confraternities seeking to bring together Christians for prayer and charitable actions and during the 19th century several such organisations came into being. In 1844, a Dutch born, Belgian army captain Henri Belletable established the Holy Family Archconfraternity in an effort to promoted piety and prayer among the industrial workers of Liege. The group enjoyed a meteoric rise across catholic Europe, in part due to the support of the Redemptorist Order.
Massive changes in relation to industrialisation, urbanisation, education, and transportation acted as a catalyst during the 19th century, facilitating the creation of religious, political, fraternal and sporting bodies. While the term the ‘Golden Age of Fraternalism’ is often applied to the United States during the later third of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, Europe too saw ordinary people engage a plethora of new organisations with mass membership during this period.
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Dancing in Ireland’s Biggest marquee at Killeigh Carnival and the revival of the ancient Killeigh Festival in 1950s Killeigh, County Offaly. By Offaly History storytellers. No 3 in our Offaly Anniversaries Series 2025. Blog No 690, 1st Feb 2025,
On Thursday July 24th 1958 the following article appeared in the Irish Press.
Dancing in Ireland’s Biggest marquee at Killeigh Carnival
The Irish Press Thursday, 24th July 1958
Killeigh Macra na Feirme Branch
Back L-R: Tommy Clavin, Peter Phelan, Jim Plunkett, Jim O’Rourke, Senchell Gallagher or ? O’Brien, Phil Deering, Dick White, Jack Bracken, Mick Dunne, Dinny Plunkett, Joe Plunkett, ? O’Brien, [], John Deering, Ben Purcell, Mick Dunne, Paddy Conroy, Christy Murray, Tony/Sony Foy, Jimmy Meackle, Ned Berry, Mick Murray, Brian Deering, Aage Delaney, Harry Cox, Willie O’Rourke, Ned McElduff.
Centre Kneeling: Brian O’Rourke, Joe Kane, Paudie (Pat) Condron, Seated: Martin O’Grady, Billy Mitchell, James Matthews, Fr. Donohoe, John Kearney, Mick Horan, Paddy Mitchel
Front: Paddy Berry, P.J. Meehan, Pauline O’Brien, Marie O’Rourke (?Molloy), ?O’Brien, [?], [?] , Dolores Plunkett, ? O’Brien, John Cox, Jim Gallagher
If any names are incorrect or missing please let us know in Offaly Historical Society at info@offalyhistory.com or 057 9321421.
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Tullamore in the Sixties. A new book of essays on Tullamore in an eventful decade, just published. Blog No 674, 29th Nov 2024
This volume of essays brings together the contributions of eighteen people who kept a keen eye on developments in Tullamore in the 1960s. Perhaps none more so than the late Joe Kenny who came to Tullamore in the 1950s as a vocational schoolteacher and was held in high esteem for his sound judgement and abilities as an impartial chairman. In that capacity he was the inaugural president of Tullamore Credit Union in 1963. Fergal MacCabe, as a Tullamore native, with a professional life in architecture and town planning in Dublin, brings a unique contribution by way of his recollections of Tullamore in the 1950s and his review of the first town plan of the 1960s. The same can be said of Vincent Hussey as a planning officer with Offaly County Council with his recollections of Tullamore since the 1960s. Niall Sweeney, an engineer and former Offaly County Manager, takes a close look at the provision of public infrastructure in Tullamore over the period from the 1960s to 2014. The late Jack Taaffe, as town clerk in Tullamore in 1970–72 demonstrates just how underfunded urban authorities were in those years. He went on to become county manager in Westmeath presiding over the progress of the county from 1981 to 1988. Michael Byrne looks at the history of business in Tullamore and sought to cover the principal enterprises of the 1960s in manufacturing, distribution, shopping, entertainment and dancing. Noel Guerin, as a former employee of ‘the bacon factory’, was able to write of a company that employed up to 100 people in Tullamore over forty years and made the name of the town famous for the Tullamore sausage. Ronnie Colton, from his own extensive involvement in the motor business brings a knowledge from the garage floor and sales yard that few others can match.
Miss Savage, a well-loved teacher in the Mercy primary school Alan Mahon, as the grandson of an innovative cinema proprietor, recalls two cinemas in Tullamore whose cultural contribution is perhaps forgotten now but was all important to the people of Tullamore and district over a period of sixty or seventy years, if one takes it from the commencement of the Foresters cinema (later the Grand Central) in 1914.
Sport, so important to so many, brings us to the essay by Kevin Corrigan who looks at a formative decade leading on to the GAA Senior Football All-Ireland victories in the 1970s. Kevin had the challenging job of reducing to a short essay what could fill twenty books were one to address in detail each of the sporting activities that came to the forefront in the sixties.
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