The post office in Boyle started its day long before anyone came in to buy a stamp. At half five in the morning John Burke was already there as cleaner, putting down the fires. One, two, three, up to five of them, stoves that had to be warm by the time the lads came in for the normal shift.

Then he took the post out and walked it. Not on a bike. The whole town, on his own, finishing around midday.

That was seven years of John’s working life. It came before the 18 years he gave to the Boyle fire brigade, before the painting that put a coat on most of the walls in town, and before the seasons he spent driving the Trinity on Lough Key. He sat down with Carlo to go back over all of it, plainly, with the odd story that stops you.

“I did the whole town on my own, on foot.”

On the Roscommon side of Rooskey Bridge

John was born in Rooskey, and he is particular about which side: the Roscommon side of the bridge. He was four when the family moved to Carrick-on-Shannon, because his father was working for Irish Shell and the commute every day was a long one. He went to national school in Carrick, and that’s where he grew up.

There’s an odd footnote to his school days. Years later, chatting about school, he and Brian Flaherty worked out that they had gone to the same school in Cork. Neither of them had any idea.

Married in the convent chapel

John came to Boyle in 1976. He says 1978 first and corrects himself, because 1978 is the other date that matters: the year he married Marie. He met her in a pub in Carrick. It was the Tavern then and it’s the Poitín Stil now. Marie used to go over and help out Catherine Tivnan, a local girl from Great Meddagh who worked there.

They married in 1978 in the convent, which had a separate chapel of its own, and went straight back to England. Richard was born there in 1980 and Emma in 1982. They came home because Marie’s mother wasn’t well, and decided to move back for good, into a house owned by Tom and Bridie Gallagher in Abbeytown.

“No, it was all on foot”

The post office was his first job in Boyle after that, and he stayed seven years. Carlo asks if he had a bicycle. He didn’t. It was all on foot, and at the start he didn’t know where anybody lived, so he learned the town door by door.

One man made the mornings easier. John talks warmly about the late Tom Callan, who met him every morning and took a big bundle of post off him for the office. It lightened the load a lot.

The conversation turns to Pat Lyons, one of the last postmen you would still see on a bicycle around Boyle. At the time of recording, John said Pat was finishing up in March.

First position that particular year

John joined the fire brigade in Boyle in 1990. You didn’t just put your name down. There was an exam and then an interview in Roscommon, since the service ran under Roscommon County Council. He came first that year and was taken on. He trained in Athlone and did the breathing apparatus course in Mullingar.

When he joined, he says, things were pretty basic. There were eight of them in the Boyle station and one basic engine. The big change over his years was cutting equipment, which mattered because road accidents were a frequent call out. The fires themselves were mostly chimney fires.

Then came the surprise. In 2007 a group of them went over to visit New York, expecting to be impressed.

“We were amazed at how antiquated the New York Fire Brigade were compared to what we had here.”

You’d have expected it the other way around, he says. It wasn’t.

First in the door

Carlo asks about the Taylor’s fire, which plenty of people in Boyle still remember. John remembers it well. They put it at around 1992, a couple of years before the new station opened in 1994.

“Myself and John Hatter were actually the first two in the door.”

Carlo calls it the end of a big era for Boyle. John says it was huge.

The call out John picks first, when Carlo asks for one that stuck out, was a house fire at O’Connor’s, out in the middle of nowhere. The house was well ablaze when they got there, and as they worked, bullets or cartridges from guns inside were going off and coming up at them from below.

“We were over there for days”

The other big one was the meat factory in Ballaghaderreen, in the mid 1990s. The crews were there for days. The factory, John explains, worked mainly for the Russian market, exporting offal and cuts that weren’t wanted here. Candon’s, which Carlo asks about, burned before John’s time.

Asked what he took from 18 years in the service, he doesn’t talk about fires at all. He talks about the men.

“It was second to none, great camaraderie between the lot of us.”

He reckons there may be one more firefighter in the Boyle station now than in his day.

A lick of paint

The painting started long before any of that. John began at 18, in Carrick, and kept at it right through, alongside everything else. Carlo reckons there aren’t too many walls in Boyle that didn’t get a lick of paint from him, and John doesn’t argue. Martin Tymon worked with him for a while.

Some of that work was for Carlo’s own family. After checking that Carlo doesn’t mind, John tells how Carlo’s mother came to him one Saturday and told him he’d better come back and repaint the children’s bedroom over the chipper. Carlo and his sister Lucia had got hold of crayons and decided to change the colour. Such a job, John says.

He only packed in the painting about two years before the recording. Marie died in 2018. John had promised her he would give the painting up, and then she fell ill. It is a short passage, and he doesn’t dwell on it. Carlo remembers her as a lovely woman.

The Good Companions

Asked what he wanted to be as a child, John says a pilot. It was always a big draw, and it never happened.

It wasn’t for want of means, strangely enough. Growing up in Carrick, his parents had two pubs. One is the Jolly Grog now. The other, directly across the road and opposite where Murtha’s is today, was the Good Companions, and the council bought it from his father and demolished it completely. The Burke’s on Bridge Street was no relation. His father sold both pubs and went into haulage, mostly local work for Leitrim County Council, and the family moved out to the house where Carrick’s Men’s Shed is now, beside Páirc Seán.

The most influential person in his life, he says, was his mother.

“I was there when they bought the pitch”

John sat on the Boyle Celtic committee when the club bought its pitch from Sean Sheerin. Chris Kellen and Frank Feehan were involved in the buying of it, and Paddy Hatter came slightly before. At the time of recording the club was planning a big development of the ground, and John reckoned the weekly 50/50 draw was bringing in very good money. It took over from the Chamber of Commerce lotto, which had stopped.

He refereed matches in the Pleasure Ground for years, mostly during the gala festivals of the late 1980s and early 1990s, alongside Anthony Hatter and John McDermott, the former postman. Paddy Hatter ran the five-a-side there very well, John says. And there was Sonny Regan. John used to get some abuse from Sonny, which won’t surprise anyone. Sonny’s name comes up a lot on this podcast.

“Such a crowd”

John was also on the Heritage Weekend committee and involved in the 1999 reenactment of the Battle of the Curlews at Lough Key, 400 years after the battle. Marie Paul Egan and Betty Mahler were part of it too. The only problem, John says, was that the park got too full that day. The lads from the FCA and Francie Geelan did everything they could.

“There was such a crowd, even we couldn’t believe it.”

There was a pantomime one year as well. He can’t say which year, but it worked out very well and they had a great crew together.

“He only took half the money”

The Royal Hotel is getting a major facelift now, and John has a lot of photographs taken inside it. One night stands out. He and Marie held their 25th wedding anniversary and his 50th birthday on the same night. Their son Richie, only after starting out as a DJ, played for them. The musical society happened to be finishing up that night as well, and came in just as things were winding down. There was a big singing session.

The next day John went back to pay Seanie Simons, who was in charge of the Royal at the time.

“He said it was such a good night, he only took half the money.”

Browned off

When he went for a pint, John stayed downtown: Tom Wynne’s first, then Gerry Mattimore’s, around the bridge. He didn’t go uptown much.

Asked what he’d like to see improved in Boyle, he starts with the bingo, cancelled the night before the recording, and the hall. He’d love to see it used a lot more.

He sums up the COVID years in two words: browned off. He didn’t go out anywhere, and people were afraid of being too close to one another.

The Trinity on Lough Key

Asked at the end if there’s anything Carlo hasn’t covered, John has one more. After the fire brigade, for three or four years, he drove the Trinity boat on Lough Key for Pete Walsh and Bernie, taking the tours out on the lake. He calls it a marvellous experience. Carlo remembers Peter as a great asset to Lough Key, and John agrees.