Geraldine Lyons
Interview by Mary Morgan on July 7, 2010
Gender: Female
Birth date: 1925
Area: West Clare - Kilkee Lower
Report date: December 15, 2015
| Time | Description |
|---|---|
| File 1 0:00:00 - 0:03:36 | HOLIDAY IN KILKEE - Since Geraldine was nine months old she has never missed a holiday in Kilkee and she is now 85. She speaks of the bathing boxes-they were 3p to use. She says they looked like the Little Ark which is in Kilbaha. She married Jimmy Lyons from Clonmel. They had four children and they too would come to Kilkee. |
| 0:03:37 - 0:07:42 | CARAVAN PARK - They used to stay in Hassett's but then they got a caravan near the Atlantic/Ocean Cove Hotel. They would pay Mickey O'Brien to empty the toilets. The rent for the caravan was paid to the Mount Charles Estate. They would have to go to the big house to pay their 5 shillings a week. The Christian Brothers would come to the Thomond Hotel. Geraldine and her family would holiday in Kilkee for three months. She recalls a woman from Ennis having an old railway carriage instead of a caravan. She was the first one to stay in the caravan park. |
| 0:07:43 - 0:09:10 | BIG STORM - Geraldine recalls a storm in Kilkee fifty years ago. Caravans were being blown over and washed away. |
| 0:09:11 - 0:11:46 | FAMILY - She says her mother met her father on a day trip boat from Limerick to Kilrush. She thinks the boat was called the Flying Huntsman. Her father was going away to be a protestant minister when he met her mother who was a catholic. He eventually became a catholic. They got a long car from Kilrush to Kilkee. Her grandfather was a Kilrush man and they had relations in Kilrush; the Slattery's, Culligans and Glins. She recalls visiting Bonnie Doon House in the square in Kilrush. She thinks the men there were butchers-Denis, Tom and Mick Slattery. They also had a house in Toler Street. |
| 0:11:47 - 0:13:50 | SCATTERY ISLAND - She remembers her grandfather going to a funeral in Kilrush where they were brought the coffin out on a currach to Scattery Island. She says she heard there were seven churches on Scattery. She knew the last man on Scattery, Michael Milligan. He was killed on a road after coming to the mainland. |
| 0:13:51 - 0:14:42 | SHAWLIE WOMEN - Geraldine recalls women coming to meet the currachs coming in with the mackerel. These women wore black shawls and they would call them the 'shawlie women'. They would carry the mackerel on their heads in enamel basins and sell them in the town. |
| 0:14:43 - 0:16:25 | DAY TRIP FROM KILKEE/SPA - Geraldine would also go on holiday to Kilkee with her grandparents. They would go on a day trip in a long open car to Farrihy Bay for two and six pence. She speaks of the spa in Kilkee where you would leave pennies or sixpence and throw and stone in. If you got a stone in you would meet your husband to be. There would be an old shawlie woman there collecting the money. She says you could drink the water but that there was a stink from it. |
| 0:16:26 - 0:19:00 | CURES - Geraldine speaks of making her own cough bottle. She says if you got a fish bone in your finger you could make a poultice to help it if it got septic. For sunburn she says you could use sour milk. She says there was a pisreogs that if a child had whooping cough you could put it under an asses tummy or you could to take it for a walk in a different direction every day. |
| 0:19:01 - 0:19:35 | POEM - Geraldine recites a short poem about landlord times. |
| 0:19:36 - 0:20:54 | PAUPERS QUAY - She says her grandfather was born in 1848. In Kilkee there was a place called Pauper's Quay. The story was that people waited there with a £5 note for a sailing ship to America. If they didn't get on they stayed there for the next one and half of them died. She says there is a paupers grave in one of the cemeteries dedicated to the people that died there. |
| 0:20:53 - 0:21:54 | BUS TO ARAN - She says her husband was one of the first people to bring transport onto one of the Aran Islands when he brought a mini bus there in the fifties. |