A man who never forgot his native Nenagh

My father Seán Doyle was a Nenagh man through and through. It is more than half a century since he left it – reluctantly – but he never forgot its people and the nooks and crannies of the town. To the end of his days, just shy of his 97th birthday, he spoke about his youth, his schooling and his friends from the town he loved so well.

Born in 1923 in St John’s Terrace, at the end of the Civil War, he was born with the State and became an exemplary citizen of it. He was one of six children born to Willie Doyle, who was the Porter at the Bank of Ireland, and Johanna Kett. Willie Doyle was noted for his gardening skills and green-thumb and, as my father often said, half the gardens in Nenagh looked good and lush because Wille applied his skills as a favour to the owner. He was, like my dad, a tender-hearted man, much liked.

Nenagh made my dad Seán and never left him. He could tell Nenagh stories without prompting and he relished telling them. The time during the Emergency when he and his friends set out to see Tipp play a Munster Final in Thurles but had no way of getting there. It took three of them to assemble the pony, bridle and trap from different sources, to make the journey. Tipp lost but it was a glorious outing. The time he and some cronies went to Kerry, to practice their Irish in Corca Dhuibhne and later ended up at the Puck Fair in Killorglin. He was the only one sober when the climactic hour arrived and they were looking up at a puck goat on a pedestal, and he wondered what the hell was the meaning of that.

He was, you see, the kind of man who had an imagination that transcended his roots but, at the same time, was fashioned and formed by those roots, and he knew it. Nenagh is a small town but my father intuitively grasped that the local is universal and a way to understand everything in life.

A MAN OF IMAGINATION

He was a friend of the late Willie Heaney, the legendary Nenagh Guardian writer, and Willie knew the Doyle family well. In fact, one of his classic photographs of life in Nenagh is of my cousins Liam and Breda Morrissey in St John’s Terrace, around 1960. My father drank his pint in Paddy Rohan’s pub and stood in the sun or rain to support Éire Óg.

He married a beautiful woman, Mary Ahern, who worked in Gleeson's Bakery and Tearoom on Mitchel Street, and kept her tight to his heart the rest of his life. We lived on Sarsfield Street. And forgive me here: I insist on it being Sarsfield Street, since Patrick Sarsfield was a gallant hero of the Irish cause in the Williamite Wars and became part of the Irish diaspora, as I am now. I much prefer it to “Pound Street”.

Anyway, during our time in that house Sean was much involved in Irish language amateur drama, for Conradh na Gaeilge and the Kilruane Players. When he came home late at night, after a play rehearsal or a drama competition, he’d turn off the car engine and cruise to his parking spot, then take off his shoes and walk in his stocking feet to the door, so as not to disturb the neighbours. That was him; not wanting to upset his neighbours.

KEEN GOLFER

He was a golfer and a very good one. His love of golf arose from the days of his youth when he and his twin brother Paddy would work on the weekends as caddies at Nenagh Golf Club. They worked for tips and or got a sandwich for their work. Sometimes, they got neither. My father was never bitter about this. It made him rueful and made him determined to become an accomplished golfer and to embrace the game, no matter who he played with or against. He joined the local golf club wherever his job with Irish Life Assurance took him, to Leitrim, Carlow or Dublin. He became, as one of his golfing buddies, a man fifty years his junior, told me, just a few years year ago, “a demon golfer”.

He bought our first television set at Jackie Whelan’s electrical shop, and Jackie was a great favourite of my dad. He’d been a Postman and had decided that he’d be better off selling radio batteries from his own shop in Nenagh instead of delivering them on a bicycle around the locality in all weathers. My father admired enterprise and hard work. And stories about the working men and shopkeepers of Nenagh would pour out of hm. In particular, as I remember it, he savoured telling yarns about the battle of wits between the butcher Nick Scroope and Bagsy Gregan, who sold newspapers outside on the street.

He told me, when I was a boy in Nenagh, to never judge a man by his job or his home, but only by his manner and sincerity. He was right, and he learned that in Nenagh. Seán Doyle was a positive man and forward-thinking, welcoming change and progress, but his youth in Nenagh anchored him always, and did him a power of good through a long and richly-lived life.

- John Doyle is a writer for The Globe and Mail, a national newspaper in Canada