Being Irish and living in Wales I've been the buttof a few jokes in my time, but some real events that my wife Jennifer (she's Welsh) and I have witnessed during our visits to Ireland have had us in stitches. Driving down to Kerry in an old Ford Cortina I noticed that every time I took a sharp turn to the right there was an irritating clunk from the back axle. This was annoying as I'd only just had it MOT'd, and had the grommets changed on that back axle! When we got to Tralee I decided to have it checked out. The old guy in the garage told me that his nephew was the expert and he'd look at it, so we gave him an hour to look it over. When we came back the nephew shook his head slowly and gave a shrug of his shoulders. "I'd say you need a new axle - this one's had it." he said in a grave whisper. "How much will that cost?" we queried, aware that we only had so much holiday money to play with. "About £100," he answered. In those days, £100 was all of our holiday money. We couldn't afford that! "What about a re-conditioned one?" I asked him. He scratched his head with a rusty piece of pipe that he was holding in his hand."A re-conditioned one would be about £150," he mumbled. After a shocked silence I thought I'd better challenge this quote. "Are you saying a re-conditioned one costs more than a new one?" "Of course it does," he said, indignantly. "Shur doesn't a lot of work go into a reconditioned one!" I decided to risk driving it back to Wales, where I took the car back to the garage that did the orignal MOT. The problem? They'd only put the grommet on upside down! Total cost of a grommet - £1.30 ...
...and there's more ... One beautiful Sunday morning we decided to drive back to Dingle. Hot and thirsty, we arrived at a lovely old pub about eleven forty-five, and decided to have a quick drink before exploring the famous Conor Pass. We'd positioned ourselves at a comfortable table by the window when the cheerful young barman obounced over. "As 'tis Sunday," he said, full of apologies, "I'm afraid I can't serve you until twelve o'clock." "Ok," we said. "As it's only ten minutes, we'll wait." "That's grand," he beamed. "And would you like a drink while you're waiting...?"
The Harness Maker
It’s long gone now, of course, the old Harness Maker’s shop in Lower William Street, Listowel.
Faded away into the fog of bygone days, it lives on only in the memory of those of us who can recall the time when the horse was the lifeblood of the rural Kerry community, and Moss Scanlon, Harness Maker, provided an essential service to the farmer.
Back in those days everyone depended on the pony and trap for transport. Horses were crucial too for ploughing the fields and pulling the haycarts, and the donkey and cart was the best way for getting the milk to the creamery. Needless to say, all those animals required a large assortment of leather goods to support them, and the necessary saddles, harnesses, blinkers, straps, and a whole variety of other bits and pieces were usually made, and repaired, in the local harness maker’s shop.
Coming through the archway to the old cattle market near Tae Lane, I look across the street to where the shop used to be, half expecting to see the top of Moss Scanlon’s head bobbing about inside the big window that had Harness Maker written in big letters across it, and suddenly I’m wallowing in a wonderfully sunny period from my childhood.
It was the late 1950s, and my sister, my brother and I took the bus from Tralee to spend a couple of weeks of our summer holiday with our Grand Uncle, Moss Scanlon, Harness Maker.
As the bus clattered to a halt outside the hardware shop in the Square, we bounced down the steps into a cloud of diesel smoke, carrying a little brown suitcase between us. We walk quickly past the amazing Maid of Erin, sticking out from half way up the front of a pub, and around the corner into Lower William Street. And there it was across the road, the door wide open and wonderfully inviting.
The first thing to greet us was the chirping of the two songbirds in the cage above the door, then the wonderful aroma of leather that wafted through the shop, mingling with the scent of dye and a sprinkling of wood shavings filtering through it. It was magic.
‘Aye, aye,’ Moss said as he looked at us over the top of his glasses.
Moss was a man of few words, but that didn’t matter because his nephew Mick, who worked in the shop with him, made up for it. When Mick wasn’t talking he was singing, usually songs that nobody had heard of before. Or maybe it was the way he sang them that made them so unrecognisable.
Anyway, we went straight through to the back room to say hello to our grandmother, who was sitting beside the big black range. There was always a kettle puffing steam on top of that range, and a teapot with tea in it that was as thick as tar.
Dropping the suitcase we hurried back out to the shop and perched ourselves up on the counter where we could casually observe the general activity of the day, both in the shop and outside in the hustle and bustle of the street.
We quickly noticed how the shop was a magnet for all sorts of colourful characters who would wander in for a chat and a bit of jovial banter. Bryan MacMahon himself once corrected my grammar.
‘It’s not different to,’ he told me. ‘It’s different from.’
When Market Day came there was a riot of activity with animals all over the street, horses and carts, ducks, chickens, pigs tied up to lamp posts, dogs snapping at each other, farmers snapping at the dogs, cows with their rear ends slap up against shop windows, clusters of men disappearing into the inviting atmosphere of the many pubs and emerging again in a much better mood, laughter, banter, the odd person on a fiddle bringing a rash of foot tapping and hand clapping, deals done and sometimes begrudged, and a steady stream of people coming into the shop with bits and pieces to be repaired, some of which were beyond resurrection. And then we’d have the wonderful scenario of Moss trying to convince the wary farmer that it should be replaced with a new one.
‘How much would that be?’ the farmer would ask, and whatever Moss told him would be answered by an unbelieving yelp of ‘How much?’
This could have been Mission Impossible, but Moss was good, and many a farmer went home with a piece of excellently crafted kit for his animal. I’m sure Arkwright in Open All Hours was based on Moss Scanlon, Harness Maker, Listowel.
But, even back then, times were already changing, and, in Moss Scanlon’s view, not necessarily for the better, either.
First came the tractor, then the combined harvester, followed by the threshers and bailers, and slowly the traditional ways of working in the countryside succumbed to the relentless drip, drip of progress. Gradually the farmer became less and less dependent on the harness maker and his expertise.
Of course it took a good few years for these machines to filter across to the west coast of Ireland, and initially few people could afford them anyway. The cost was prohibitive, until someone created the co-operative!
Then they spread like a rash and the farmers were delighted.
For Moss Scanlon, though, they brought with them the whisper of advancing doom.
Sadly Moss became ill, forcing him to spend time in hospital on several occasions during the sixties. His nephew Mick gallantly soldiered on, but it eventually became a struggle for him as the business faltered.
Then Moss died sometime in the early seventies and Mick had no choice but to put the shutters up over the big window with M Scanlon Harness Maker on it, and close the door for the final time.
I take out a handkerchief and blow my nose, wipe a sudden speck of dust from my eye, and wander back through the arch.
The End
B Gerad O’Brien
Don’t get me wrong: I love my car. If it wasn’t for my car I would never have been able to visit all the wonderful places that I’ve been to over the years.
I mean, what’s nicer than hopping in the car and bimbling off out to Fenit or Banna for a stroll on a warm evening?
So it came as a bit of a shock one day during the festival to suddenly realise how much cars have taken over our lives, and how Tralee has totally succumbed to the onslaught of the motor vehicle. Not just succumbed, but surrendered completely!
This amazing revelation happened at about two o’clock in the afternoon. Coming out of The Bank Of Ireland I was amazed to see that the whole of Castle St had become totally gridlocked. Two cars were straddling the pavement by the corner to Denny St while the drivers went to use the cash point, seemingly oblivious to the chaos they were causing all around them. A large van was trying to turn into Ashe Street, but a truck was parked right on the corner with its rear end poking out while the driver was taking boxes off the back. Between the cars and the truck, the van didn’t have enough room to swing around into Ashe St, so he was stranded in the middle of the road.
Cars coming from The Mall couldn’t come down Castle St now so there was also a tail back right down to Bridge St.
So I leant against the railing and idly watched all the fun, and as I casually scanned the faces of the people stuck in the queue of cars I wondered how many of them actually needed to be there at all. How many had a legitimate reason for being there, and how many of them were just cruising through, not going anywhere in particular?
How many were just looking for a parking space as close to the shops as possible so they didn’t have to exert themselves too much by actually walking? I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve done it myself many, many times. (What? Why can’t I drive into the shop?)
But now, as I watched streams of people darting in and out amongst the stationary cars as they crossed over from one side of the road to the other, I was well intrigued by one big question: how did we evolve into a society where one person in a tin can is allowed to commandeer the whole of the street, while the rest of us are crammed onto narrow bits of scabby pavements?
Across the road from the bank I counted eleven cars parked legally, and four more on the double yellow lines, illegally parked up on the pavement by the traffic lights outside St John’s Church. (Bless them! They were probably in a rush. And the poor sod in the wheelchair trying to squeeze by? Not my problem! He’ll just have to go around. The old girl with the stick? Didn’t see her, sorry!)
Anyway, on the other side of the cars a constant line of shoppers was anxiously trying to negotiate their way along the extremely narrow pavement, trying to avoid the cobbles so they didn’t break a foot, sidestepping the advertising boards and dancing around the wheelie bins: mothers with pushchairs looked totally flustered, a group of bemused tourists were hesitating and looking around in a haze of confusion, a lady pushing an elderly man in a wheelchair having to squeeze into a shop doorway until she managed to find a gap to push through. In the short time I was there I counted over one hundred people trying to squeeze through that narrow space, and none of them could stop to look in the shop windows. It would have been impossible: they just didn’t have the room.
So I wondered what the local retailers think about all this? Surely it must affect their business. They must know that it is the people on foot who keep the shops alive, which is why most other towns in the country are introducing pedestrian zones and wider, safer pavements. You only have to look around to see that most shopper in Tralee gravitate towards the Square and the Mall, where they can shop in comfort without getting a fong up the butt from an impatient car driver.
As I’ve been in retail for over twenty years I’m well aware that if you want people to buy your merchandise you have to display it in a way that the customers are comfortable while they’re looking at it. They need to be able take their time: they must feel relaxed as they make up their minds on whether to buy or not. But it’s no good if your shop is hidden behind a barricade of cars and your potential customers can’t even pause for a moment to look in your window before being shoved out of the way by the sheer volume of people squeezing by behind the parked cars.
I can tell you, if I had a business on that street I’d be roaring to have those cars removed and the pavement widened. How can it be right that, for the convenience of eleven people, we totally inconvenience hundreds?
My curiosity was aroused by now so I thought I’d have a look at the situation in the Mall. I went along and stood outside Der Sullivan’s. To establish what percentage of cars actually stopped along this stretch of road I counted the first one hundred cars to turn into the Mall from Bridge St. How many stopped? Four! And they were all Taxis! The rest were on their way to somewhere else. So again, did they need to go this way?
And what about the tourists? We’re moaning about the lack of visitors to the town, but what kind of welcome do we give them? They don’t all want to sit in an auld pub all day supping a pint of the black stuff. They want to see the town, wallow in the history of old Ireland. Tralee is a beautiful town, oozing character, and it’s a treat to discover. But you just can’t enjoy a moment to look at it. If you don’t watch your step as you walk around the streets you’ll crack your shin on a car parked up on the pavement. You can’t use the pedestrian crossing because there’ll be a car parked on it. There’s actually a standing joke in Tralee that if you park on the pavement you’re technically not parked on the yellow lines – you’re parked over them.
I have to tell you, though, it opened my eyes. The next time I go to the Post Office I’ll have to ask myself if it’s right to just hop up on the pavement and run in. (Did you notice that if someone gets caught in a queue they’ll moan that they’ve been standing there for twenty minutes, but if they see the traffic warden they’ll swear they were there for just half a minute!)
I’ve no doubt that some people see absolutely nothing wrong with this casual attitude to casual parking. In fact, a couple of years ago as I was walking up Ashe St – before the one way system was built – there was a line of Gardai ‘no parking’ cones along the front of the Court House. But there were several cars parked between the cones! A very young lady garda was standing near by, busily gazing at nothing in particular, and when I drew her attention to this rather amusing situation she seemed totally un-phased.
‘Shur they’re not doing any harm!’ she muttered before wandering off to the other side of the street, glancing back at me once or twice as if I was a bit slow in the head.
So what do we do about it? Is it something we should be concerned about? Should we put a concerted effort into bringing Tralee up to the standard and discipline enforced in all the other towns in the developed world? Should we make the town pedestrian friendly so that the residents of the town, and the numerous visitors and tourists whom we try to encourage to come here, can see the town in safety and not have to risk life and limb while trying to do so?
Or is it a quaint auld way of life, an throwback to the slower pace and casual attitude of bygone days, that we should treasure at all costs - until we grind to a complete stop?
