Christmas Cards
A selection of Fethard Christmas Cards are currently available for sale in local shops.

Fethard GAA Club News
Please note the venue change for our ‘Club Forum’ on this Friday 8th December is now the Tirry Centre at 8pm and not the Abymill as previously advertised.

We have an ‘Urgent Photo Plea’ on behalf of the club to immediately put together photos of teams that won South titles since 1984 for the South Board History Book. Please give photographs to Noel Byrne and we promise they will be returned to owners after use. Thank You.

To the Mathews family in Fethard we offer our deepest sympathy on their recent bereavement. Go Ndeana Dhia Trocaire ar an Ainmeachta.

The Well Golf Society
The recent adverse weather conditions put paid to last Sundays outing, however, weather permitting, we hope to play our final outing this coming Sunday, 10th December, at Slievenamon Golf Club. Tee off is again fixed for 12 noon.

Juvenile GAA Notes
Our ‘Race Night’ went ahead last weekend in McCarthys pub and it proved to be a great success. The first race commenced at 9.45pm and the last at 12.30pm. We ran a total of ten races, two of which were auctioned on the night, and we also held two auctions. Nights like this take a lot of work and time and could not go ahead without the support of the public. We take this opportunity to thank everyone who turned up on the night to made this happen for our local children and club. We would like to thank McCarthys Hotel for giving us the venue and service we received on the night; to Stephen O’Brien for doing a great job organising the races; to Johnny Looby our MC for the auctions and providing great entertainment in doing so; to Vincent Cummins and John Hurley for looking after the tote that was expertly run on the night; to our hard working committee — Theresa Hurley, Kathleen Maher, Ann Fleming, Caroline Sheehan, Tommy Sheehan and Mick O’Dwyer — that covered every square inch of the hotel. We would also like to thank all the local businesses who sponsored races and to every one of the 351 people who bought lines on the race card. To all the punters who turned up and bought horses in our auction races and to those winners of both who kindly gave their winnings back to our club. We are very grateful of your generosity.

Finally to Mouse Morris and Conor O’Dwyer who signed a portrait of  Gold Cup winner, ‘War of Attrition’, which was organised by Johnny Cummins and framed by local man Pat Carroll, all free of charge. To Tipp hurler Eoin Kelly, who donated the hurley he played against limerick with this year and scored 14 points. Both items were bought by two local people in a auction on the night. Our club would like to thank everyone involved and wish you all a Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year and look forward to 2007.

ICA Notes
We extend our sincere sympathy to the family of Mary Meagher, Cloneen, who died recently. Mary was a much-valued member of our guild for many years.

The Winter Federation meeting takes place this Thursday night, in Brú Ború, Cashel at 7.30pm as many members as possible are asked to attend.

Our Christmas Party Dinner will be held in Fairways Restaurant again this year, on Tuesday 12th December, replacing our December meeting. Music will be supplied by Joan O'Brien. We are hoping for a large turnout of members, anyone who has not given their names already are asked to phone 31455 or 31411 with their names as soon as possible. Former members are very welcome to join us. We will have the usual exchange of gifts.

McCarthy’s Hotel Golf Society
The Golf Society are holding their Annual General Meeting on Thursday 7th December at 8.30 pm in the Hotel. All are asked to attend. Any new members are welcome.

Our final outing of the year takes place in Co Tipperary Golf and Country Club (Dundrum) on Saturday 9th December. Tee off times are from 9.30am to 11.00am. The sheet is up on the notice board in the Hotel. All players are asked to bring a prize to the value of not more than €20, gift wrapped if possible (and nothing from Cuba, Eoin).

St. Vincent de Paul Collection
The annual collection for the above takes place at all masses this coming weekend. As always, we know that the parish of Fethard & Killusty will again support this worthy cause. Many still need our help, which really means your help. Be as generous as you can please. 

Putting Christ back into Christmas!

The Chapel at Presentation Convent in the 1950s

Last Monday night’s preparation service for Christmas, by Sr. Winnie, at the Presentation Convent Chapel was very well attended and appreciated by all present. The small but beautiful convent chapel, a house of prayer for over 130 years, evoked a mood of relaxation in stark contrast to the hustle and bustle usually experienced at this time of year. This opportunity afforded us one hour to reflect on the real meaning of Christmas — and it works.

The following ‘Advent Reflection’ is adapted from ‘A Time of Waiting’ by Anne Thurston.

"To enter into the space of stillness offered by the season of Advent is not to escape from the world but to come to see it more clearly. Everything around us conspires against the possibility of allowing us to walk in darkness and yet this is what we must do before we can come to the light. The longest night leads to the sweetest dawn. In a similar way our culture resists silence, refuses us a space of stillness, but this is also what we need before we can receive wisdom's word. The poet Patrick Kavanagh speaks of the ‘Advent-darkened room', which can restore the soul to wonder. Advent offers a space of stillness, a time of darkness, a place of waiting in expectant trust.”

Next Monday night at 8pm you are again invited to come along and prepare for the birth of Jesus. Put Christ back into Christmas by spending an hour in this pleasant prayerful environment. All age groups welcome.

Emigrants’ Addresses
Please hand in your, change of addresses, or new addresses to be added to the mailing list for this year’s Emigrants Newsletter, as soon as possible to Joe Kenny, Rocklow Road.

Neilie does it again — for the 11th time
Congratulations to Neilie Hall, who raised a fine total of €1,349 for South Tipperary Hospice by running in the recent Dublin City Marathon.  This is Neilie’s eleventh time participating in the event.

Fethard Athletic Club News
Fethard Athletic Club invite all athletes to join in their end-of-year outing to Sean Kelly Swimming Pool in Carrick-on-Suir on Monday 18th December. No doubt we can look forward to a good evening. Further details closer to the time at training, or from Fintan, Mary or Cora. Training continues Mondays and Wednesdays from 6.30pm to 7.30pm.

Leaving Cert 1960

Fethard Patrician Brothers School Leaving Certificate Class Group 1960. Front L to R: Rae Molloy, Richard Butler, Tom Burke, Lory Dineen, Philip Ward, Tom Mackey, Eamon Maher and Damien McLellan. Back: Frank Hughes, Bro Albert Small, Mr. Timmy O'Connor (teacher), Tommy Healy and Sean Evans.

Parents’ Association Christmas Draw
The Patrician Presentation Parents’ Association will hold their annual Christmas Draw for beautiful Christmas Hampers, Uniform Voucher and Iced Christmas Cake. Lines are now on sale at €2 each or €20 for a card of twelve.

At the Parents’ Association recent AGM, the following committee were elected: Rita Kenny (Chairperson), Mary Carroll (Vice-Chairperson), Joan Hayes (Secretary), Mary Healy (Treasurer); committee members, Paul Wyatt, Xuan Wyatt, Veronica Fogarty, Maura Gorey, Marie McGrath, Helena O’Shea, Valerie Rice, Mary Prout, Ann Sheehan, Finola Anglim, Jane Hayes and Catherine McGrath. Board of Management representatives are John White and Ann Fleming.

Fethard Catholic Churches 1837
(The following article is taken from The Tipperary Free Press dated Wednesday 6th September, 1837, and supplied by Michael Hall, Drangan, who always has an eye out for interesting articles relating to Fethard, and, indeed, his own parish.)

In looking through the ‘Courier’ we find the following letter from a Correspondent of that journal, regarding the Town of Fethard. Here the Catholic Clergy are busy in building and repairing churches — in begging and borrowing, and running in debt for the purpose —trusting to Providence and the piety of individuals for the means of reimbursement; and, in spite of all the lets and hindrances to which they are subjected — despite of the poverty by which they are everywhere encountered — the furious persecution of several of the landlords, and the exclusive system preached from the pulpit — even at Fethard — the Catholic Clergy are succeeding — while not a voluntary sixpence has been subscribed by the Protestants to similar pious purposes. We recommend this letter to the Rectors of Inniscarra and Gurtroe:

Fethard is, emphatically, the town of ruins. You enter it under a rough old archway, and as you pass along its lonely low-housed streets, the eye rises by instinct, as it were, over the patched roofs of the mean dwellings of the modern inhabitants to sundry dark towers which preserve the memory of ancient strength and power amidst the miserable haunts of a now weak and destitute population. Of the poverty of this place you may easily draw a tolerable picture to yourself, as ideas of Irish want and discomfort are as plentiful amongst well-informed English readers as blackberries are amongst the untaught Irish; but I cannot so well assist in getting at a fair notion of the lowly and deserted appearance of Fethard. I had always, in thinking of Irish distress, coupled with it a mass of craving humanity, and had always attributed Irish un-cleanliness to crowded and dense moving bodies. But here there seemed to be the usual portion of low-living and hard-suffering, without any mob or masses of unfed creatures huddled in dirt and confusion together. On the contrary, the town was quite deserted. I remained in it four or five hours, and did not perceive half a dozen persons at one time stirring in the street, and the shops and houses into which I looked seemed to be as thinly tenanted as the streets were indifferently peopled.

Whoever would write an account of Fethard would, doubtless, have many tales to tell of battle strife and bloodshed; for it was evidently a stronghold of great extent and importance. Large portions of the fortifications still challenge observation, and huge fragments of castle walls, and whole towers are still standing. The market-house exhibits proofs of less remote traffic and respectability, but not a vestige of actual business or modern comfort refreshes the eye of the traveller, wearied out by the constant demands upon his sympathy, and pained by the never-ending exhibitions of extreme suffering and degradation. Nor is there much that is now interesting, but the remains of ancient buildings, for which alone the town is worth going to see. There is a friary in the outskirts, which, according to several tombs erected to the memory of the Lords Dunboyne must have been in a state of preservation in the sixteenth century. Two or three years ago it was a ruin; but a Catholic gentleman in the neighbourhood purchased the fee of the land upon which it stands, and restored it to a few members of the brotherhood who held it of old. One of these reverend fathers lives in a thatched cottage close by, and with a taste as pure as his piety, has set himself to the arduous labour of shutting out the wind and weather, and making it fit for divine worship, at the same time preserving in his humble restorations the original style of architecture in which the edifice was built. His means unfortunately are wholly unequal to the undertaking, but it is impossible not to admire the spirit by which he is animated. To snatch a venerable ruin from the slow workings of complete destruction and restore it to the holy office for which the primitive devotion of the country had consecrated it, was of itself an aspiration of uncommon merit; but still more gratifying to me was it to observe that this piety was as refined as it was enthusiastic and that the learned father loved not the ruin only, but the art which made it comely, and that, though forbidden by his resources to preserve the fine trace work and graceful curves of the, old Gothic arches and ornaments in appropriate stone, he had the taste and feeling to copy and continue their style and fashion, as far as the workmanship of the village carpenter could go, in wood. Let me here record a humble tribute of praise to the poor friar of Fethard who deserves to be put in possession of means to finish zealous labours in a manner more congenial to the first origin and immediate object of the time worn edifice in which he worships according to the faith of his fathers, than as yet have reached him.


Holy Trinity Protestant Church c.1895

I was the more impressed with a sense of the high character and felicitous influence proper to such an undertaking as has upon returning into the town and visiting the Protestant church, a fabric originally much larger in size and finer in architecture than the friary just alluded to, but which had been utterly spoiled by the ignorance or the avarice of the clergy men who have had the direction of its repairs.

Instead of keeping up, as they easily, might have done, and as the wealth their establishment has uniformly possessed would have justified, the building in its original dimensions, they lately cut away some forty feet from its length, and lopped off some twenty feet from its height; and more barbarous still, instead of preserving the well-wrought and graceful stone windows, with which the just design of a pure age surmounted the walls, they pierced the sides with rustic windows of the rudest shape and commonest material. The men who could thus abuse the classical relics of the church could hardly fail to produce more degenerate and violent successors. I was sorry, but not surprised, to learn that the pulpit of the Protestant church at Fethard, had been disgraced, only a Sunday or two ago by the curate, who preached a rancorous political sermon, and had the hardihood to denounce by name, a physician of extensive practice and high reputation in Fethard, as an atheist and an infidel, because he had voted at the election the week before for Messrs. Sheil and Cave. The wickedness of such language is only, to be matched by the ignorance it displays of the meaning of words; but while the State lavishes millions a year upon such persons as this curate, to be the only teachers of religion, can we wonder that the Irish are half savages, or that the gaol of Clonmel continues to be crowded as Lord Glengall loves to describe it. 
— (‘S.’)

Nano Nagle Christmas show

Rehearsing for the Nano Nagle Primary School 'Christmas Show', which will take place in the Abymill Theatre on Wednesday 13th, Friday 15th, and Sunday 17th December (matinée) are Back L to R: Emma Keating (Snowman), Laura Butler (Mouse), Courtney Walsh (Reindeer), Chloe Burke (Santa). In front is Ebony Burke (Jack-in-the-Box).


Senior infants class rehearsing for 'Born in Bethlehem', which is part of the Nano Nagle Primary School 'Christmas Show', which will take place in the Abymill Theatre. The Christmas Show will also include: ‘Christmas Eve in the Toy Shop’ (Junior Infants); 'The Night before Christmas' (1st and 2nd Classes); and 'The Snow Queen' (3rd to 6th Classes). Tickets will be available at the school.


Rehearsing for the Nano Nagle Primary School 'Christmas Show', which will take place in the Abymill Theatre in December are L to R: Adam O'Sullivan, Ryan Butler and Cian Hennessy.


Rehearsing for the Nano Nagle Primary School 'Christmas Show', which will take place in the Abymill Theatre in December are Back L to R: Sinead Regan, Kyle Allen, Megan Ryan. In front is Laura Kiely.

1997-2005
ARCHIVE