By Petronelle Clifton Brown
Transcript
Willie wore a long tweed coat and always had his cap firmly planted on his head above his dark bearded face.
He was to be seen in the Cashel Mart on Lower Gate Street on the days when it was noisy, crammed with trailers, tractors, livestock lorries and broken down cars. All were thronging the gates trying to access the sale pens. Willie was there, along with the long, lanky wild-haired fellow nicknamed ‘the Nun’. (He broke into the Convent Boarding School on occasion.)
Between them they confusingly directed and redirected sheep into wooden hurdled pens and cattle into sturdier steel poled pens. The cattle were sold ‘through the ring’ and soon the drone of the Auctioneer added to the clamour of sheep, cattle, dogs and people.
An escapee caused an excuse for wild dashing about waving sticks – Willie to the fore! Occasionally, it became even more exciting when an animal made a break for freedom out onto the road!
Everyone knew Willie.
“Are you buying or selling?”
“Ah, now, I’m only looking!”
Willie’s family were known as the ‘Ryan Thistles’ – so many Ryans live in the Cashel area that occupations often got attached to the surname.
So Willie’s father was a ‘thistle cutter’. Every summer fierce Garda notices would appear warning farmers to control their ‘Noxious weeds’, which were: docks, buachalán (ragwort) and thistles. So Willie’s father had a horse drawn thistle cutter and had a busy time travelling from farm to farm levelling the noxious weeds.
I never knew Willie to persecute the thistles himself. Instead he did odd jobs around the town and was the messenger for the Presentation Convent in Friar Street. (This was a busy place right up to the 1980s with a full compliment of nuns, boarding and day school, the ‘orphans’ and a laundry.)
Willie was to be seen with a bag for messages or a wheelbarrow.
One time a nice pile of logs for the fire was stacked in Maryville in Boherclough Street (then a Deanery). The pile seemed to be diminishing. One day, Willie and his wheelbarrow were spotted coming out of the gates and crossing the road to the pub then called ‘The Royal Oak’, now the ‘Brian Ború’.
The owner was very pleased to receive logs via Willie but he obviously did not know their source!
I wonder if Willie was ever paid for them? Or did he think he was just helping out?