Some conversations start in a field on the edge of town and end up halfway across the world. This one does both, and comes home again.

Seamus Carr grew up in Boyle in the 1980s and 1990s. He trained as a motorcycle mechanic in Phoenix, Arizona, spent time in New York, fitted conveyor systems across Ireland and Holland, and has been playing guitar around the northwest for the best part of fifteen years. He sat down with us to talk about all of it.

The town before phones

Ask Seamus for an early memory and he goes straight to Stewart’s field. He and the other kids from the street would pull old metal shelving out of the factory, bend it into a rough sledge, and fly down the hill any time there was snow on the ground. One winter they upgraded.

We got a car bonnet. There was two or three of us on it and hurtling down the hill. There’s a small pond at the bottom. We all had to roll off.

His description of Boyle back then is short and certain. It was vibrant, busy, a great town to grow up in. There was no technology, so you left the house in the morning, came home to be fed, and went straight back out again.

The list of pastimes reads like a lost curriculum. Marbles, serious enough that prefects in the Boys School were sent out on shakedowns after windows started cracking, with lads stuffing the big crystal ones down their socks. Conkers, which everyone tried to varnish and everyone cracked. Huts built from whatever pallets could be found. Penny bangers made from caps bought in Christy Wynne’s, the cap folded around a coin and wrapped in Sellotape, with the amount of tape deciding how much smoke you got.

Then there was King House, still derelict, still holding the remains of the old barracks, and still holding the Green Lady. Every child of that generation walked past it at night wondering whether she was looking back down at them.

Balloons, the Gala, and the trailer that moved around town

The hot air balloons came to Boyle in 1989. Seamus was in secondary school, watching them drift past the classroom window in the morning and counting the hours until he could get out to the Forest Park and see them going up again. He never got a spin in one. He is looking forward to the championships coming back to the town this year, and so is his wife Anne Marie, who loves them.

His memory of the Gala festival is the five a side soccer on a summer evening, the wall lined four and five deep with people, and a ring of spectators around the pitch inside the Pleasure Grounds. Not that he saw much of the football. There was tag to be played and streams to be run through.

January 1958, and a bar called The Tumbling

The pub story starts before Seamus was born. His father sailed from Cobh on 11 January 1958, a ten or eleven day crossing with bands playing every night, after an uncle in America wrote home asking whether any of the young fellas wanted to come over.

He stayed thirteen years. He worked in bars, then in the meat plants, and got friendly with a man from Connemara called Stephen Walsh. The two of them bought a pub in Brooklyn. Fifty feet long, twelve hour shifts, a safe in the back room because construction workers came in on a Friday evening to cash their cheques. They called it The Tumbling, on the basis that you walk in but you tumble out.

He came home in 1970, into the middle of a six month bank strike, and landed in Boyle in 1972.

Seamus grew up in the pub, back when families still lived above and behind the business they ran. What he remembers is that it was always busy. Candles on Patrick Street, the factory, Stewart’s, Feely’s. The town was working. There was a jukebox and people arguing over the next song, pool and darts most nights, and impromptu sessions that started out of nowhere. His single strongest memory is of a fleadh weekend in Sligo when a Dublin man sent his relations in for one before they travelled on. They stayed two days. Twenty musicians, a full ceili in the bar.

The pub closed at the start of September 1996, the same week he went to Waterford for the first phase of his training. He came home the following weekend to a house in Abbeytown. The building itself is gone now, which he finds hard.

Phoenix, on a bicycle, in forty degrees

In August 2007 Seamus flew to Phoenix, Arizona to do a fifteen month motorcycle mechanics course he had been eyeing for a while. He arrived on a Saturday night, stood outside at ten o’clock and wondered where the heat was coming from.

The course ran to nine core classes before you picked a manufacturer. Precision measurement first, three weeks of taking engine components apart, measuring them with micrometers and verniers, then checking them against the workshop manual for the bike in front of you. After that came suspension, electrics, everything. He specialised in Honda because their course covered the widest range, from quads to dirt bikes to small generators.

To pay for it he took a part time job in Best Buy and moved to the half seven morning class so he could cycle home, change, and be at work by two. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, plus both days at the weekend. He had no car, so he cycled three miles each way in the heat while drivers slowed down to look at the pale Irish lad on the footpath.

He lived first with a lad from Iowa called Sean, then, after that house went into foreclosure with three months of the course left, with a woman named Carol. She was in her early sixties and described herself as an old Harley chick. Two days after he moved in, she produced a handgun to reassure him that nobody would be breaking in.

Guitars, nerves, and a four year old with no excuses

Music started with Nicky Shannon on drums and a guitar and amp bought off Ronan Davis, which Seamus mostly turned up loud before he had any idea how to play it. His first proper gig was a Haiti fundraiser in the Moving Stairs with seven or eight acts on the bill. He played eight songs at roughly a hundred miles an hour, and Matt Burke told him afterwards to slow it down.

There’s always butterflies. The biggest fight is in your head. Then I put on the guitar and one or two songs in, I’m fine.

The taste has shifted over the years. Metallica has never gone anywhere, but Christy Moore, Paul Brady and Lankum have crept in alongside it.

He lives in Drumshanbo now with Anne Marie and their son Sam, who has just turned four and is at the age where he wants to help and wants to come along. There is a trad class for toddlers in Carrick on Shannon called Traddlers, and there are instruments all over the house. As Seamus puts it, the lad has no excuse.

On Boyle now

What he loves about the town is the people, and having the Forest Park on the doorstep. He is honest about the quiet streets and the derelict buildings, and clear that the same thing has happened to towns of Boyle’s size all over the country. He also thinks there are enough people putting in the effort that it comes back.

Timestamps

00:00 Welcome and earliest memories of Boyle

00:51 Sledding down Stewart’s hill on a car bonnet

02:20 War games in the Pleasure Grounds and the Ninja Club

03:06 Halloween and how to make a penny banger

05:02 Marbles, prefect shakedowns and conkers

06:36 Characters around the town

08:09 The hot air balloons arriving in 1989

10:07 King House, the old barracks and the Green Lady

11:13 The Gala festival and the music trailer moving around town

13:06 St Mary’s and Tom Callaghan

14:38 The Scouts, Ballintrillick and the headless horseman

16:57 A screw in the stew at the regional competition

17:58 January 1958: sailing from Cobh

19:36 The Tumbling, a bar in Brooklyn

20:58 Coming home in 1970 and arriving in Boyle in 1972

22:19 Growing up above the pub

25:55 Darts, pool and roughly thirty pubs in the town

27:26 The pub closing in September 1996

29:03 August 2007: arriving in Phoenix, Arizona

29:51 Inside the motorcycle mechanics course

32:00 Cycling three miles in forty degrees

33:44 Sean, Carol, and the handgun

34:28 Four months in New York

36:59 Music: the first guitar and the first gig

39:47 Butterflies and the fight in your head

41:43 Drumshanbo, Anne Marie and Sam

43:03 Boyle in 2025 and what he would bring back

45:21 The next ten years

Guest bio

Seamus Carr is a trained motorcycle mechanic and a musician. He grew up in Boyle, completed a fifteen month motorcycle mechanics course in Phoenix, Arizona, specialising in Honda, and has since worked in engineering and conveyor system installation in Ireland and Holland.

He has been gigging around the northwest since around 2010, most often solo, moving between rock, Foo Fighters, Metallica and a growing love of Christy Moore, Paul Brady and Lankum. He lives in Drumshanbo with his wife Anne Marie and their son Sam.