Clonmel was the home Paddy cherished coming back to

It's a drizzly but humid Friday evening in June when I arrive outside Patrick Daly’s home on the outskirts of Clonmel.
It’s one of a dozen detached houses on a hill with a garden outside full of colourful shrubbery. His son Brian, a bespectacled, relatively young man who is dressed casually, is already waiting for me outside. As he brings me inside his parents’ home, I notice two impressive identical stone statues of a dog, possibly a retriever, on either side of the front door.

In the living room, my interviewee Patrick, who turned eighty this year, a stocky, neatly attired man is sitting in a comfy armchair. Across the way, his wife Nora (seventy-seven) of just under fifty years sits on the compact family sofa.
A lovely lady, originally from Cork, dressed in a crisp white t–shirt and dark slacks, she says hello as she heads off out for the evening. As she leaves, Patrick asks his spouse if she’s not going to stay for accuracy purposes. She shoots back that he doesn’t need her help with that!

MODEST GENTLEMAN
It’s this little back and forth that informs me that Patrick, or Paddy as he prefers to be called, seems to be a very modest gentleman. Somewhat typical of his generation it could be said. Apparently, he loves to read, do crosswords and is a history buff, anything from Ancient Egypt to English royal history.
Brian joins us as we sit down with the traditionally Irish round of cups of tea and biscuits. There are family photographs everywhere. Another testament to Paddy’s character that he’s obviously a proud family man. The things he likes the most about Clonmel are the location, people, facilities and, most importantly, that it’s home.
Brian, who works in the Abbott Vascular factory on the other side of town, nominated his father because he thought his life was interesting. Paddy’s response when he found out what his only son had done? “You did what?!” This elicits a little chuckle from the three of us.

Paddy was born in Clonmel.
“We lived on O’Connell Terrace,” he says. “My parents were blow-ins. In 1930, my dad had a choice of two jobs – one in Monaghan, the other in Clonmel. Obviously, he picked Clonmel and worked as a butcher in Ryan’s. My mother was from Killenaule. It was just my brother and myself.”
He says there was nothing out of the ordinary in his home life. It was a typical Irish childhood with firm but fair parents. He played out in the street along with everyone else as there were no playgrounds back in the 1940s/1950s.

BOOKWORM
Paddy was more of a bookworm than the outdoorsy type. He said that back then, the key to the front door of the house used to be hung on a string inside the door and you could just put your hand in the letter box to get the key and let yourself in as needed.
These were more trusting times obviously. He said most of the street would have been the same. A prelude to the latchkey kids of later generations in a way.
Holidays mostly consisted of “trips to the seaside” like Tramore and that, unfortunately, there were no sporting achievements, much to his mother’s disappointment who played on the Munster Camogie team.
As his father was a butcher, there was plenty of foodstuffs to go around for stews, chops and roast lamb regularly on a Sunday.
“We would have had meat a lot more regularly than a lot of my schoolmates,” he states.
Paddy’s father earned and his mother did the housework. His mother worked in Cunningham’s drapery shop in Clonmel when she was younger but that stopped after she married. “It was the way things were done back then.”
In 1947, Paddy began his education at the Loreto, before moving onto Ss Peter and Paul’s primary school in the town. He liked his elementary experience.
“The nuns were very nice and kind, although some were notorious for shouting!” Surprisingly for the time and luckily for Paddy, there was no corporal punishment as such. He skipped a year, going straight from fourth class to sixth class so he was only eleven when he finished primary school.
For second level, he attended Clonmel High School. Again, Paddy got along with his teachers who, although strict, encouraged him to do well. As for the Leaving Certificate, the pressure was on. It was this high expectation that led Paddy to getting a scholarship to study at University College Dublin.

UNIVERSITY
He says he loved Dublin during his time there and while he enjoyed coming back to Clonmel, he never got homesick. Why did he adore Dublin?
“Big city, everything you could want was there in terms of music, sport, entertainment etc. Very different to Clonmel in the 1960s in that regard. I also made some good friends that I’m still in touch with,” said Paddy.
From an early age, Paddy wanted to become a teacher and while at UCD, he learned that if he completed the Ceard-Teastas Gaeilge exam which was the Irish exam requirement to teach in vocational schools, that it would make things easier to pick up a teaching job after graduating. Fortunately, his Irish was good enough from what he learned in school to get through the Irish exams without any difficulty.
So, when he graduated from UCD with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1964, he began teaching at the Central Technical Institute. Nowadays, the CTI is comprised of three educational entities: a secondary school, a second level Gaelscoil and a third level college.
He stayed there for two years before going back to UCD to do a higher diploma in education. The Ceard-Teastas Gaeilge exam was worth an exemption for the Irish exam that secondary school teachers needed to do back then.

SIERRA LEONE
Paddy spent six years teaching out in Sierra Leone in West Africa. What was it like? “Sierra Leone is equatorial so it’s pretty much hot all year long. Approximately 38°C in the dry season and then cooling to around 30°C in the wet season. I had the pleasure of getting malaria while there; not fun.”
“Food wise they had pretty much the same type of fare as they had back home. There was a mine nearby that was run by Europeans and it had a store that stocked British supplies which we were allowed to buy from so that’s where we got all our provisions. We ate very little African cuisine at all.”
Paddy said the Africans ate lots of rice-based dishes with plenty of corn also. Rice was cheap and plentiful so it’s what people lived off in a poor country.
Jollof rice would have been a very common one but some of the spices and flavours that were used in these dishes were probably a bit overpowering for someone coming from Ireland in the 1960s where salt and pepper were basically the only seasoning that they were used to.
They also used a vegetable called cassava in a lot of their stews, often as a substitute for rice or potatoes. Sweet potatoes were also quite common.
He says, “We did try the African dishes and would have eaten them on and off but when we could access things like rashers, sausages and cuts of meat that we were used to from home we tended to go for that more often.”
“Teaching was much the same as back home. It was a West African syllabus and the standard was like what you would have had as O levels in the UK. I lived in a school compound owned by the Holy Ghost priests. There were six houses plus the school on the compound. It was only teachers that lived in the houses.”

BALLYBUNION
It was in the summer of 1969, while home on leave from Sierra Leone that Paddy met his wife. They were both on holiday in Ballybunion, County Kerry.
“A good college friend of mine from Dublin, who was also in Sierra Leone with me, was teaching in a school with my future sister-in-law in Cork. She and Nora were in Ballybunion for a weekend at the same time as my friend and me. The first thing I said about her to my friend was “Who’s the one in the green dress?” Paddy says there was “an immediate attraction” and ever since they’ve never looked back.
When he returned to Sierra Leone, Paddy kept in contact with Nora by letter. “All communication was done by post back then,” he says. “I used to write and send or receive letters to my parents fortnightly. If my mother got the letter in the post by 2.30pm on a Thursday and sent by air mail, it used to arrive to me by 10am on the Saturday morning. The ones to Nora were less frequent, only a couple of months or so.” He was keen to keep in contact with the news from home:
“My mam used to send out copies of The Nationalist newspaper to me via surface mail as the cost of sending six copies of a newspaper by air mail was eye-watering back then.”
ROCKWELL COLLEGE
After returning from West Africa, Paddy got a position teaching Physics at Rockwell College where he remained until he took early retirement twenty years ago. When he started, it was a boys only institution before becoming co-ed. Interestingly, Paddy believes there’s no real difference between teaching boys and girls and that “girls can be just as focused, if not more so.”
His biggest achievement was serving for two years as the chairperson of the Irish Science Teachers Association. He proudly showed me the black marble commemorative plaque he received from the organization.
Despite all his academic and professional success, Paddy says his only regret in life was that he didn’t work harder in college.
Clonmel has changed in lots of ways over the course of his lifetime. Although O’Connell Street isn’t what it used to be he believes that Parnell and Gladstone Streets are booming. One noticeable change is the manifestation of shopping centres on the periphery of the town which has taken a lot of business from the town itself and closed many independent shops down. Paddy also laments the loss of some factories over the years and even how Bulmers has decreased the number of employees at its Clonmel plant.
Events such as Ireland joining the EEC and the Northern Ireland Troubles, Paddy says, didn’t affect him or Clonmel really.
“A lot of these things passed me by.” However, he still remembers the 1950 reenactment of the Siege of Clonmel, three hundred years previously. He says it was a proud day in the town’s history.
The unioniSation of the workplace also resonates with Paddy, especially as he was a teacher for so many years. He feels this led to “workers having more back-up.”

FLOOD DEFENCES
Another improvement is the increase in Clonmel’s population. Brian tells me that the town’s flood defence scheme has been a godsend during the notorious bouts of flooding.
Paddy says, “My house was one of the first to be submerged in water from the river Suir. My mother had to be carried out in the digger of a JCB one time it was so bad!”
Paddy believes that a sad day in the town of Clonmel was when the gates shut for the last time at Kickham Barracks in 2012.
“Three hundred years of history gone just like that,” he states ruefully. He felt more could have been done to save the garrison by certain factions, but for whatever reason it wasn’t.
Although, he does think that the new development currently being built on the old Kickham site could potentially be a great asset.
Paddy holds the same opinion about the recent closure of the Friary in Clonmel which held even more history after being in operation for seven hundred years.
Besides Brian, who’s the youngest, they have two daughters and eight grandchildren, two of whom make an appearance during the interview. A little girl in a pink dress comes in shyly to see what’s going on and Brian’s son who asks very politely for the car keys. Brian and one of his sisters and five of Paddy’s grandchildren live in Clonmel and his other daughter resides in Wicklow with her three children.

What does he hope for, for his grandchildren? “The same success as I have had in life.”
I ask Paddy’s advice to a long and happy marriage. “Keep the head down and say yes to everything!”
I conclude by asking Paddy if he hopes the Elders of Clonmel social history project will contribute to Clonmel town and its people. “I’m not sure really. Hopefully it’ll be something interesting for the people who’ve lived here all their lives.”
As I leave the Daly house, I realise there’s a lot to be said for living a quiet, contented life. And even though it’s exciting to head off to a big city like Dublin or somewhere exotic like Sierra Leone, it’s always reassuring to know that there’s a home to come back to.

Laura enjoys working on collaboratiive projects

This is the second collaborative writing project that Laura Buckley has worked on for Clonmel Applefest after the Artisans of Tipperary series last year. She has lived in the Premier County for nearly all her life. She started writing as an Honours English Leaving Certificate student and has been professionally published since the age of nineteen.
Her work has appeared in Woman’s Way, Gript Media and The Conservative Woman.