Mary steps down after 50 years of work

A NENAGH woman who spent most of her working life in the hotel industry has decided to call time on her career which has spanned half a century.

Mary Shiels secured a job as a receptionist in the Ormond Hotel in the early 1970s, shortly after leaving school when the hotel was still operated by its founders, the Gilmartin family.

“I think I started the job in 1971,” says Mary, who concurs that hotels back in those days were not frequented by your average man and woman on the street as they are today.

Hotels were places for people who had money, but at the same time Mary could see that times were slowly changing as the country began to enjoy some prosperity after decades of economic depression.

“Lunches started to become popular with people, especially on Sundays,” she recalls.

Another thing that started to become popular in the Ormond half a century ago was Afternoon Tea. “People used to come in for tea and sandwiches in the afternoon, but then this trend died off again,” Mary recalls (some might speculate here that we ultimately decided that we didn’t want to ape the British).

TURKEY LEGS

Mary remembers how turkey legs were not served at weddings in the hotel, only breast meat. “The legs would instead be sent out to customers drinking in the bar. I remember they would be brought into the bar on a large tray with serviettes. Customers would eat them while having their drinks or others would take them home. It was a great thing after weddings; there was no waste back then.”

It was still over three decades before Ireland started to see significant immigration from countries like Poland and other Eastern European countries, but Nenagh in the early 1970s was not as insular as many other provincial towns, principally because the Canadian mining company, Mogul, were starting up mining operations in Silvermines, offering jobs to people from all over the world who had experience in mining.

“A lot of people from Canada and other countries came to stay in the hotel while waiting for their houses to be ready,” says Mary, referring to the fact that Mogul had decided to build two housing schemes – one in Ballygraigue (Ballygraigue Estate) and the other in Tyone (Knights Crescent) to accommodate its international workforce.

“It was a great experience getting to know all these people and their cultures,” says Mary. “The Mogul mining operations were a big economic boost for the town and it was probably my first encounter with people from other countries.”

Daughter of tailor Tommy and district midwife Bridget Condon, Mary grew up in Knockanpierce from where her father operated his tailor’s workshop. “I remember all the men from the locality coming to the house to get fitted for a suit,” says Mary, who revealed that her father also made the uniforms for local members of An Garda Síochána.

Her paternal grandfather was also a tailor, who operated out of a small house in Kenyon Street. Mary still has a bronze medal that he won in a City and Guilds competition for his skills.

After working for a few years in the Ormond Hotel, Mary moved to take up a job as a receptionist in the Nenagh Motor Inn, owned by the late Denis Gilmartin, which is now the site of the Abbey Court Hotel.

As a young woman she yearned to see the lights of other places and so ended up taking up receptionist posts in the Glentworth Hotel and Woodfield House, in Limerick, and the Aberdeen Arms in Lahinch in Co Clare.

‘HOME BIRD’

“But I was really a home bird and didn’t stay away from Nenagh for very long," she says.

And so she returned to her native sod and decided on a different career path after her daughter, Ciara, was born in the mid-1970s.

“I wanted to stay at home with Ciara when she was a baby and so instead of full-time work I took up a role in a play group run by Nenagh Social Services that Ciara was attending in the Round House (now Nenagh Heritage Centre) and I also did some childminding and worked in local shops.”

But by 1989 Mary was back working in the hotel sector again, returning to the Nenagh Motor Inn which at that stage had changed hands and was operating under a new name, Nenagh Lodge.

On completing her shift as a receptionist in the Lodge, she would go back to the Ormond Hotel at weekends to help run the nightclub there.

With the technological age dawning, Mary was keenly aware she had to hone her computer and business skills in order to stay in the workforce and so decided to do a FÁS course in Business Appraisal and Computer Office Skills.

In the mid to late 1990s she again departed the hotel sector briefly to work in the office at Nenagh CBS Secondary School and Sheahan’s Hardware Store in Banba Square.

hotel calls again

But in October 1998 it was back to the hotel industry. She was appointed a receptionist in the Abbey Court Hotel and she held that position for 23 years up to her retirement last month.

Mary’s working life has lasted longer that most people’s – a span of half a century. Did she not mind getting up and heading off to work for years after conventional retirement age?

“No”, she says, “I stayed on a long time because I really enjoyed it. I never consciously decided to stay working until now, but one year just drifted into the next . . . Then I just sat down at home and thought about it and I decided I had given it enough.”

But there’s no chance this highly active woman is now going to sit down and put her feet up for the rest of her life.

“I don’t think I’m going to be bored anyway - there’s always something coming up,” says Mary, who has dedicated a huge amount of her spare time over over decades to working as a volunteer in charitable organisations and local social and sports clubs.

SPECIAL OLYMPICS

She is a volunteer of many years with Special Olympics at local, regional and national level and was a member of the backup team for athletes that competed in the World Games in Athens in 2011, Los Angeles in 2015 and Abu Dhabi in 2019 (her daughter Ciara was also a volunteer at the two former games).

Mary is also volunteer with the Riding for Disabled group in Nenagh, introducing disabled children to the pleasures of horse riding.

For a long number of years she has helped out in coaching young boys and girls in Nenagh Olympic Athletic Club. She acquired a love of traditional Irish music and singing after going along to the monthly Rambling House sessions in the Pastoral Centre organised by the late and great traditional singer Nora Butler, where she was appointed “tea woman” for those great social occasions.

POSITIVITY

Pandemic lockdowns brought their challenges to everyone, but Mary, blessed with a positive and get-up-and-go nature, reacted by resuming knitting, a skill the nuns had taught her as a child in the local Convent of Mercy primary school she attended as a pupil (The baby cardigans she knits are all gifted to the little offspring and relations of appreciative friends).

She also took to the highways and byways walking for hours on end. And when she got really fit she took on multi-thousand step challenges to raise funds for Special Olympics and other worthy causes.

Swimming is something she loves, and, in fact, she was the first member of the Abbey Court Hotel staff to join its Trinity Leisure Centre when it first opened 21 years ago, where she still enjoys the pleasures of the heated pool and other amenities to this day.

Her paid working life may be over, but Mary is definitely a woman that will not be retiring when it comes to living a full life, and in a way that contributes so richly to enhancing the lives of others.