'Auld stock' is an honorific that Shay wears well

The expression ‘auld stock’ is one I have heard many times over the years in the environs of Clonmel. It’s used as a description of someone native to the town.

Living in Clonmel for forty years I’m still not ‘auld stock’ but it’s an honorific that Shay Hurley wears with ease. I’ve known Shay for the better part of three decades now, as the jovial man whom I meet on the street and who gives instructional talks to school children on local history and ecology, yet when it came to gathering questions for this interview, I realised that I knew very little about him and looked forward to rectifying that oversight.

He ushers me into his front room with a ‘tá fáilte romhat’ and I know I’m stepping into part of Clonmel’s history. The house is the same one he was born and grew up in. As we sit at the kitchen table and settle in for our chat, I can see signs of generations past. The dresser at the wall facing me with its eclectic set of books and the photograph of the Nire Valley draped in snow, are two that I notice first.

“That picture is from 1947, the year that I was born,” he muses. “There was heavy snow again in ’68 on my father’s first anniversary - such heavy snow we didn’t know if we’d be able to get in or out of the valley for his service. It was the first and only time I saw a priest on horseback come to say Mass.”
I ask Shay how he feels about being chosen as an Elder of Clonmel, as he doesn’t strike me as someone ready to don the mantle of Elder. “My youngest brother has always called me the elder lemon,” he chuckles. “So that has always been in my ear.”

He continues in a humble and self-deprecating way. “I was surprised that anyone would want to know about my life, or my youth for instance, or my life in religion as it was called then, as a Christian Brother.” Again I’m struck by his simple and humble statement. I had never known Shay was a Christian Brother and yet he drops it into conversation as though it were the most natural and unremarkable thing in the world.

“I lived in Clonmel for the first thirteen years of my life before heading on to Dublin to study for the Leaving Cert and eventually college and life as a Christian Brother for some thirty years,” he says. “Before receiving my dispensation from Rome to return to Clonmel and this house to live with and care for my mother in 1990.”

He reminisces about the house and his mother’s life to explain why he came home. “Take a simple thing like running water,” he says. “The running water was outside the house, at the other side of that wall there.”
He points to the wall that the sink now occupies, “and the toilet was outside too, though my father had put in the flush toilet in the ’50s. At the time it was one of the first on this street. Before that there was a dry toilet, a plank with a hole over what we affectionately referred to as ‘the long drop’.” He smiles at the memory.
“In my childhood we had some flaming rows, my mother and me, as I had a fierce temper and she did too.” He recounts another memory: “The night before I was due to leave for Dublin, we had a huge row and when my father came home, I was to be found in a corner, defiantly holding a chair with the legs facing out. My mother told him: ‘We can’t let him go tomorrow, he’ll make a show of us.’ ‘I’m going,’ I stated flatly in response.” He laughs again, “I think she knew she was fighting a losing battle.”

“When I left Clonmel at age thirteen,” he says, “waved off by the family, there were four of us on board the train. We had been given a small envelope by M.V. Concannon, our class teacher, a man of mixed memories and a bit of a brute if I’m honest. These contained our primary school results and we had strict instructions not to open them before reaching Dublin. How he got them I don’t know because they weren’t supposed to be out at that time.”

He continues, “Of course as soon as the train moved, we each adjourned to the carriage toilets so each could open them in private.” Shay goes on to mention the three other boys by name and recounts where each one had come from in the town, with surprising clarity for such a long undisturbed memory.
So, were you just shipped off to school in Dublin? I ask.
“Oh no, we were involved in all stages of the decision. My neighbour Mrs Ross Lonergan, she of the double-barrelled name, said to my mother that ‘your Seamus has been talking about being a teacher since he was four’,” mimicking her pitch.
“I was always interested in teaching and we were almost in the shadow of the Brothers here in Irishtown, where they lived in the Tinsley House. We often worked in their garden as part of our schooling and sometimes picking apples.”
“Brother Kelly had called to the house a number of times prior to the final departure, to speak to me and to my parents,” Shay continues. “And so I became the postulant, the person knocking on the door asking for admission into religious life.”

He tells me that the Brothers were active recruiters in sixth class, that going was an opportunity for a free secondary education (something not universally available until 1967), an opportunity to see if a boy really wanted to become a Brother and teacher, and the chance to go to ‘The Big Smoke’. “I began my teaching career there, firstly in Marino and other schools in Dublin and later in other parts of the country.”

We talk more about the importance of family, of his memories as a child of staying in the Nire Valley with his grandparents during summers and of its importance in keeping the bonds of family alive. I mention that it doesn’t really happen anymore.
“More’s the pity, I think,” he replies. “It really is an enriching experience and it’s the thread that holds us all together.”
He mentions his extended family and his grandnieces and nephews and how much they mean to him, particularly William. “He’s a voracious reader and not at all happy about being five. I look forward to what he will come out with when he’s six!”
I bring the conversation round to things that have changed since his childhood and Shay lists reams of shops, businesses and landmarks long since gone as though they had only closed yesterday. I discover that some of his most vivid memories are those associated with smells.

“The smell from Cusson’s chipper down by the West Gate, or Conway’s fruit and veg shop which was a feast for the senses because everything was out on trays in front of the shop, and if there were spuds for example you could smell the half a field carried on each one or the smell of the cabbages.” He snorts a laugh.
“The aroma of fresh tea in tea chests outside Lipton’s. It’s things like that I think are a loss.” He pauses a moment. “It’s what kills me about the town now, those missing smells, and is probably why I can’t wait to get down to the riverside each day where you can smell the flora and get close to the fauna. People still provide an anchor to the town and it’s the people that I meet that keep memories alive.”

As we begin to discuss the river and his interest in Suir Island, Shay’s stories swirl about each other, from days playing as a child, to the conservation he cares so deeply about and all the things he’s done linked to the river over the last twenty-five years, and still smells pervade his memories.
“The smell of new tar, Mother of God, that we smeared on our homemade aircraft fashioned from lollipop sticks and set alight for better bombing of the enemy base as we played war down Cronin’s Lane, or the smell of incense in the church on Sunday, what memories they evoke!”
I ask Shay about his work promoting ecology and preserving the river as a cultural experience for the people of the town. “It was part and parcel of growing up near or on the river. My father was in the Boatman’s Club and we would often be in a row boat on the river, trailing our hands in the water, despite numerous warnings of monsters lurking in the depths from our mother, so yes, I think it’s important.”

He continues explaining about Suir Island and its use before and demise during the 1950s. He mentions head races, salmon spawning and tail races and I have to admit I’m stumped. ‘The head races led to tunnels under the Island. The whole car park that’s there now sits on a warren of tunnels that water was fed through to generate water power via water wheel for Hughes Mills and other mills, and tail races were the openings at the other end where the water flowed out again.”
Mentioning the flood relief scheme, which Shay says serves its purpose. “Unfortunately, some damage was done. One morning a zealous engineer had the old steps removed, steps carved from living rock that went down to the river that had carried boatmen to what Donal Crean first described as ‘the cot fields’. Where farmers had their fields and livestock, fishermen had the river as their fields.” He shrugs. “I managed at least to save the stone arches of the tail races. They are incorporated into the bridge that stands there now.”

“‘Ascent and descent gone,/A memory now,/The dew weeps.’” he says quietly. “An excerpt from a poem I wrote about it in both English and Irish. Sometimes you have to get out how you feel by putting it on paper.”
“It’s not just important to preserve history,” he says. “But to ensure that we have a record of living local history to hand on to the next generation. When I was in school there was no local history as such. We have what I referred to in my first photographic exhibition as iarsmaí or fragments because that’s what’s left and the most immediate way to see them, to experience them, is to walk the ground they inhabited.” Again, I’m quietly amazed at how Shay drops photographic exhibitions into conversation as though it might be something everyone does.

“I was conscious, when I came back, of things I wanted to do,” he goes on. “Joining the Boatmen’s Club was one, and because of my background, teaching local history. There was one book, called Cois Siúire, which delved into local history but there was a lack of material for kids and so I set up The River Suir Project within the Workman’s Boat Club to give information to schools about the river’s flora and fauna.”
Shay talked about many facets of his life in Clonmel for far longer than we had agreed. We ran well over time but neither of us seemed to care. His stories, like the head races and the tunnels under Suir Island, meandered and crisscrossed, yet they lost nothing in the telling, each enriching the next or the last. He is ‘auld stock’ indeed, a man who can proudly call himself an Elder of Clonmel.

His last comment to me, I think, perfectly encapsulates the man: “I have great faith in kids. Each of them is a unique individual, with a unique vision, and with encouragement and good teachers like I was fortunate to have, they give me hope.”

Karl Clancy

Karl Clancy, fifty and in danger of adolescence. Father of four, philosopher, martial artist, journalist, columnist, graphic designer, and sometime poet when he’s not painting houses or portraits.
Karl says he has always written but only recently discovered what he wanted to write about, namely life, including traumas navigated, the healing experience, learning peace and learning to see life clearly.
Karl is also involved in a program teaching self-awareness to transition year and first year college students.