The coffin would be picked out by the family and brought in from the shed across the lane. Then it went up on chairs in a room at the back of Cosgrove’s pub on St Patrick Street, and young Noel Sheerin, aged ten or twelve, maybe fourteen, would be called in from next door to help.

There was straw, and there was nice white material. You stapled the material around the sides of the coffin, stuffed it with straw, and stapled it neatly closed. Dominic and May Cosgrove ran the pub and the undertaking business, and between them they trained him well.

“I was well trained with that. It had to be nice.”

Noel was born in Boyle on 3 December 1953, left in 1977 and lives in Tulsk, where he sat down with Carlo for the first of two episodes with a notepad on the table. He remembers Boyle street by street, and that is how he tells it.

Patrick Street, between the undertakers and the O’Dowds

The family shop was Sheerin’s, a drapery on St Patrick Street, which his sister Geraldine kept going until she retired. It closed only recently. His father was a Westmeath man who came to Boyle in the late twenties.

Next door on one side were John and Kaye O’Dowd, grandparents of the actor Chris O’Dowd. On the other was Cosgrove’s. Behind the row ran a lane down to the Shambles yard. Carlo thinks it was Eaton Lane, and Noel agrees, but on the street it was just the lane. Cosgrove’s kept the coffins and the hearse in a shed across it, and the hearse sat there until a few years ago, when somebody bought it to restore.

Every letter, every word

Down the other way were the Roscommon Herald works, and Noel was often in there as a child, watching the men set the type. There is a name for that trade, he says, and it escapes him. Slow and tedious work, and it mattered, because every letter and every word had to be right.

The Herald came out on a Wednesday. His father had a taxi, and every week he had a list of newsagents around the county to deliver to.

Then one morning, around 1965, Noel was walking up to St Joseph’s boys’ school, past the Herald, and there was commotion and smoke. He didn’t know what it was. By the time they were sitting at their desks the smoke was pouring up and the boys were all at the windows watching the flames and the fire brigades. The works burned to the ground. The paper kept going from other premises. Everything changed after that.

Money on a wire

Up from the Herald was Candon’s, a huge business. Much of what they sold came in by train, and two men with a horse and cart would go up and down from the railway station a few times a day.

Inside, the shop had a payment system that Noel would go in just to watch. The assistant wrote out your docket and took your money. Then, if they were tall enough, they reached up to a little cup screwed into a device on a wire, pulled a handle, and the cup shot across the shop to the office at the back. The girl in the office took out the money, worked out your change, and sent it flying back. Sloan’s had the very same system.

Further up was the factory, where Noel got a summer job at sixteen or seventeen after his father asked Patsy Quinn, who ran it. They made steel lockers, the kind you’d find in a school, and had just started on aluminium windows. Between the Herald, Candon’s and the factory, Carlo has heard there might be a hundred people walking back into town at six o’clock.

Three mousetraps

The boys’ school was upstairs in a long building, and the classrooms had mice. One morning a teacher, Michael Carty, Noel thinks, decided he’d had enough and put down mousetraps with cheese in them. At least three of them.

The whole class sat in total silence, waiting. A mouse would come out, go for the cheese, and bang. It went on for a few hours. Noel calls it a lovely, quiet, peaceful morning. They may have got a lot of homework afterwards.

A man inside the box

Down towards Main Street, beside Gaffney’s chipper, was Flaherty’s, a pub and shop, and that is where Noel saw a television for the first time, in the early sixties, a small screen at the far end of the bar.

“I could not understand how there was a man inside this box.”

He still remembers the puzzlement. How in the name of god did he get in there, and how was he able to talk out to them?

Ryan’s chemist was nearby, and that’s where Noel saw his first corpse. Paddy Ryan’s father had died and was laid out upstairs. Noel’s father told him to feel the cold of death, and he did. Years later he told one of the Ryans, and they were fascinated.

When snow fell, it really fell

In the winters of the sixties a gang of them would borrow round drink trays from Tom Wynne’s pub at the bottom of the Crescent. Tom gave them out, though not every time, and Noel doesn’t blame him. They’d walk to the top of Green Street, sit on a tray and slide the whole way down on snow packed into ice, hoping not to go in through a shop window. At home the question was what in the name of god had happened to the backside of his trousers.

“When snow fell, it really fell.”

The tinsmith was John Reilly

Near the top of Green Street, on the right hand side, a man used to sit on the footpath with his tools and sheets of tin. Noel watched him cut the tin, shape it with little hammers, and rivet it into a saucepan or a kettle. He was brilliant at it, Noel says.

Years later Noel was at a Christy Moore concert. Christy introduced The Well Below the Valley the way he always does, by talking about the man he learned it from, John Reilly.

“God almighty, that’s the John Reilly.”

John Reilly was from the Travelling community, and he had learned the old songs from his own people and kept them. Christy Moore has credited him every time he has sung that song since. There is a plaque to him in the town now.

Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye

Main Street had Fred Perry’s, the first supermarket in Boyle, and Carlo wonders if it was one of the first in the west of Ireland. Until then everything was done across a counter. Now you got a trolley and took what you wanted off the shelves. Noel calls it a whole new ballgame.

Around then a biscuit company, Jacob’s or another, he isn’t sure, sent a character called Jim Figg around the country to promote fig rolls, with a big moustache, a long coat and a hat. If you spotted him and spoke to him you got something. He came to Boyle. Noel saw him, but never got near enough.

And there was Ned Kelly, the town crier. A small, stout man in glasses, in a long black tailcoat with a white shirt and a waistcoat, ringing a big bell around Main Street, Patrick Street, Bridge Street and up the Crescent. He announced whatever was coming, whether it was Duffy’s Circus, Murray’s Amusements or something happening in one of the shops. The Candons were very good to him, Noel says.

“Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye. Duffy’s circus coming to town this evening.”

The mystery tours

Most summers in the sixties, CIÉ ran mystery tours. You got on a train in Dublin, paid your money, and had no idea where you were going until you got there. A good few of them came to Boyle.

Most people on them were fine, Noel says, families out for a day. But on a few occasions a gang came down to drink and cause trouble, some carrying chains. Windows were broken in pubs. He remembers a stand-off outside the old guard barracks beside what is now King House, with things being thrown at the guards, who then followed the gang around until the train left at seven or half seven. The tours stopped coming. The business people didn’t want them, and Noel understands why, though he feels for the families whose day was spoiled.

Tennis, the hop, and the top of the Abbey

Beside the barracks was the tennis club, where Noel spent whole summer days in his early teens, and the pavilion where they had the hop, with a man keeping an eye out so nobody got too close.

At the Abbey, derelict then, they climbed the round steps up into the tower on the corner nearest the road and stood at the wall at the very top. He says there was no fear in any of them back then.

He hurled under age for Boyle under a man he thinks was Bob Carr, from Tipperary, with twenty young lads packed into three cars and jerseys three times too big. Later John McGowan, a detective in the town, gave the young footballers a lot of his time, and would pile them into his Volkswagen for the craic.

The young royal

Noel is delighted to see the old Royal Hotel looking well again, even if it isn’t going to be a hotel. Somebody told him the new name, An Ríoga, means the young royal, the new version of the old place, and he likes that. The coffee shop by the river in the old stone house was Morris’s barbershop when he was a boy.

The day at the river wall

Noel was very small, five or six, he thinks, walking home from school down the lane by the river beside King House. There was a commotion at the little wall where you look down over the water. A young boy, one of the Carroll family, had fallen into the river and drowned. His body was found further down the river the same day.

Noel knew the little lad. He says he wouldn’t have understood death or drowning at that age, but he remembers it having a real effect on him, and slowly coming to realise how sad it was. It is the only tragedy he remembers from those years. He and his friends used to fish for perch off a ledge by the bridge, always trying to be careful, and thank god nothing ever happened there.

Eggs, wool and fair day

At the side of the Shambles was an egg store, where every egg was held up to a big bulb in a box before it was packed. In the Shambles yard a shed was hung with huge canvas sacks of wool, with ropes down from the roof, and the boys swung from one sack to the next. Great craic, he says.

On fair days farmers drove cattle past the shop in the early hours, up to the fair green at the top of Green Street, and the shops put hoarding over their windows. At the Fleadh, 1960 or 1966, the streets filled with bands, and Noel, a small child, got squeezed into a crowd at the bottom of the Crescent so tight he thought he would never get out.

“I thought I was going to die.”

In the eighties he came back from Tulsk for the arts festival and spent hours at the music beside the Shambles. Brian Scanlon’s footage of the 1985 festival is on YouTube, full of faces he still knows.

Noel Sheerin & Carlo Cretaro | September 2023

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