A winter afternoon in the mid nineteen seventies, on the stretch of street where Michael Sweeney’s undertakers is now. It was McDermott’s then, a television shop run by a family from Carrick-on-Shannon, and the window was the best thing in Boyle. Four or five sets on stands on a carpeted platform, all of them colour, and a speaker hooked up under the sign outside so you got the sound as well as the picture.

Brendan McGee used to stop there on the way home from school with Sean Mahon, Adrian McKenna and John Milani. None of them had a colour television at home. One day they went that bit further and walked into the shop, and nobody said anything, so they climbed into the window itself and got down on their hunkers in front of the sets.

“I remember turning round, it was dark, it was winter, and there was about 12 people outside looking at us in the window.”

Carlo calls it the original Gogglebox. Brendan, who has spent his working life in a shop on Bridge Street, noticed something else at the time. Three or four televisions went out the door in boxes that afternoon.

“I’ve always considered myself a bit of a blow in”

He was not born in Boyle, and most of his grandparents were not from Boyle either, which is the basis of the claim. Austin Tarpey was a schoolteacher from County Mayo, and Theresa, who was Theresa Cahill, ran what had been Cahill’s pub at the top of the Crescent and became Tarpey’s. His grandfather Edward McGee came from County Down and arrived on his own in 1912 to take up the job of organist and choirmaster at St Joseph’s Church. He was also the town’s first librarian.

The Fleadh outside the door

He was born in Ballymote in 1966, because his mother held that if there were nuns in a nursing home the place would be clean. It was a Sunday morning and the church bell was ringing outside, and the nuns told her he was going to be a bishop. He notes that this has not happened yet.

Nineteen sixty six was also the year of the second All-Ireland Fleadh in Boyle, and it arrived when he was two or three months old. By his account nearly every shop in the town turned into some class of a pub for the weekend. Taylor’s hardware, across the road from the family home on Bridge Street, had metal Tannoy speakers out blaring traditional music into the street. The baby screamed the house down. His father worked out that it was the music, and went across at three in the morning to ask them to turn it down.

“I’ve disliked Irish traditional music for my entire life.”

A penny for the sweet jar

School started at four, in the convent, and his first teacher was Sister Philomena, the only nun who ever taught him. He remembers his first day because she asked the class what they wanted to be. He said a train driver. That did not work out either. Two things from that room stayed with him. A wooden rocking horse you were only allowed up on if you had done something good, and a jar of boiled sweets and gobstoppers run on a scheme called A Penny for the Black Babies. You brought down a penny and you got a sweet. He raises it himself and flags it himself as the sort of thing that would not be run today.

First communion was on a Sunday, at seven, with an hour of fasting beforehand. Una filed them over to the old St Joseph’s Church behind a banner. He was one of the smallest, so he and Rory Nevin were put at the front of the parade, and Jared Cuff, the tallest, carried it. Afterwards a prefab called the all purpose room had been laid out with long tables, boys at one and girls at the other, jelly and ice cream and, he thinks, red lemonade. The friends he made on that first day are still his friends.

Leaving the convent for the boys’ school out in Abbeytown is one of the sharper memories in the hour. They went out through the playground on a Friday evening and through the little gate at the side, and turned around, and all the girls they had grown up with since they were four were waving out the windows. Some of them were crying.

“Felt like we were going off to war, which maybe we were.”

“There’s just back streets and yards and gates”

His father, Dick McGee, photographed Boyle for decades, and Brendan has the slides. They were shot on a small Fuji camera that took half frames, sixteen millimetres rather than thirty five, which got two pictures out of every frame of film. It has made the archive awkward, because every scanner is built for full frame and the half frames come back with flare, so the images he has released were photographed off a projected screen. He calls that primitive himself.

The method is the part worth keeping. In the early seventies his father went round the town at eight in the morning photographing shop fronts, streets and back lanes. When he showed a batch at home, his wife looked at them and said what most people would say.

“There’s just back streets and yards and gates.”

His answer was that that was Boyle. He wrote on every slide, what it was and when it was taken, which is the thing that turns a box of transparencies into a record. There are hundreds of them. The cardboard mounts went brittle and Brendan re-glued a load of them about twenty years ago. The DVDs he put out of the fifties, sixties and seventies are, in his own words, the tip of the iceberg.

“Colour TV isn’t perfected yet”

Before the window incident there was a long campaign at home for a colour television. One of his father’s best friends was Cecil Taylor, a television engineer, and Cecil’s line was that colour television was not perfected yet. The news travelled through the school. The principal came into the class one day and mentioned that a colour television had arrived in Wynne’s house, and Nicola Wynne, who was in his class, was asked what it was like. Her answer was that it was alright, but most of the programmes were still in black and white, which was true, because RTE was not fully colour yet.

A name given by a guard

He and Rory Nevin bought Hot Press in Christie Wynne’s, where Christie kept your order behind the counter with your name on it. Graham Linehan, later one of the writers on Father Ted, had a line in the magazine to the effect that a rock band coming out of County Roscommon was about as likely as anything he could think of. They read it and formed a band. Virgil Brown up at the station had a drum kit and Stephen Tighe could sing, and the four of them became Plastic Passion, named after a Cure song. Not a rock band, he is careful to say. An indie band.

With Jerry Casey on lead guitar and Brendan Reid singing they became Strange But True and played on the back of a lorry on the Crescent at one of the gala festivals, the lighting supplied by people’s car headlights and the power by a cable run out of Emmett’s shop. Somebody drove a van through the wire, which ended the gig. The turn came when he saw John O’Dowd and Matt Burke playing acoustic guitars in Lavin’s with people singing along, and thought it looked like more fun than pretending to be stadium rock on the Crescent. The name of the next band came from Frank Egan, a guard, who watched them in Lavin’s with packets of strings on the table, breaking one a song because they were still learning, and called them the String Records.

“If there’s no music in my head, I’m probably dead.”

In 1992 a group of local musicians got together to raise money for Africa, with Sean Nicholson one of the instigators, and it was recorded in Sean’s house out the road towards Lough Key. Every act had to write and record a song, Derek Caldbeck wrote one called Mr Misery, and there was a twelve track album at the end of it. Brendan has the digital masters and borrowed a DAT machine a few years ago to get them onto a format that still exists. It went back out as a download for Trocaire during a drought in Somalia about two years ago.

Forty pictures, and two blank years

Boyle Musical Society started in 1984, after people working in the Bank of Ireland got talking about how good it would be to have one and called a public meeting. Liam O’Callaghan became the first director and the first show was The White Horse Inn. His sister Suzanne was in it and told him to get involved, so he joined for the second show. He went on the committee about ten years later and is still on it, which he calls committee for life, and is now the press officer. For the fortieth anniversary he posted a photograph from every year of the society. The two COVID years are blank.

Three reels of film and a Scandinavian soundtrack

About ten years ago he put together a film for the arts festival called Boyle Through the Magic Lantern, from three sources. His grand uncle Walter Cahill, who lived most of his life in America, filmed Boyle in the nineteen sixties, some of it from a car driven by Frankie Tarpey. The late Jerry Dodd filmed the old St Joseph’s Church burning, and Brendan got hold of that through Emma Dodd and had the Film Institute digitise it. The rest came from the late Jimmy Duffy.

He was in fifth class when the church went on fire in 1977. His classroom looked out at the houses in Abbeytown and they could see the smoke without knowing what it was. Jack Fallon, who taught him for three years because he moved up with the class every year, thought it might be coming from the mill. Then Kevin O’Connor burst in from sixth class to say that Master Carty had said nobody was to go home through the church grounds, and left again. They all went home through the church grounds. They had to write an essay about it the next day.

“Boyle is always bypassed”

He has been in business on the street long enough to have opinions about the street. He thinks Boyle has been in decline for a long time and puts some of it down to the one way system brought in around 2002, which he says divided the town and drove traffic out of it before bringing it back in, by which time people had gone elsewhere. What Boyle has that other towns do not, he says, is a set of fairly cool independent retailers and no multinationals. The new footpath, finished in January, he describes as nice looking and wide enough to land an aircraft on. He also has a story about people from Dublin, thirty years ago, who thought Boyle consisted of the Forest Park Hotel, the Catholic church and the Abbey.

“They didn’t know there was a whole town by turning left.”

He is not bitter about any of it. He spent years going to traders’ meetings and has more or less stopped, and at this stage he keeps his head down and provides a service as best he can. Twenty five years ago there was no online shopping, and now the Dunnes van comes to town more often, and what it brings is no longer clothing and footwear but the weekly shop.

Listen to the full episode

The conversation runs to about seventy minutes, and takes in the Abbey Cinema and Joe Walsh’s torch, a Hammer horror that gave him months of bad dreams, Gaffney’s jukebox, Cleo’s and Parker’s, the K Arts Festival and the gala festivals, and a left hand drive Volkswagen Beetle that went from his grand uncle to Carlo’s grandfather.