Sr Patricia Moloney
Interview by Bríd MacNamara on October 21, 2012
Gender: Female
Birth date: 1922
Area: East Clare - Feakle
Report date: December 6, 2015
| Time | Description |
|---|---|
| File 1 0:00:00 - 0:01:27 | BACKGROUND - Sr Patricia was born on 17/03/22. She is from Feakle. Her mother, Margaret Hynes, (Greta), was from Scariff. Her parents had a shop. She says across the road from the shop were the famous Sparlings who were protestants. She says the Sparlings' shop was more like a supermarket. |
| 0:01:28 - 0:04:25 | HER GRANDFATHER'S DEATH - Her mother's father died very young. He worked on the canal boats between Shannon, Feakle, Killaloe and Limerick. One night he was filling up the boat in Killaloe and he slipped getting into the boat and drowned. Her mother and grandmother used to have to make ends meet. Her grandmother had a grocery shop. She describes the shop. There were nine in that family. Some of the children went to aunts and uncles. |
| 0:04:26 - 0:07:34 | WORKHOUSE - Her mother went to England and trained to be a nurse. She came back home and was working in the old workhouse in Scariff. Her father was from Feakle. He would come to Sparlings' to do his shopping and she thinks they met then. She would hear how poor they were in the workhouse. She vaguely remembers listening to her elders talking about the Bodyke evictions. |
| 0:07:35 - 0:09:45 | BIDDY EARLY - She says that Biddy Early lived just outside the village in a hut. She says she was called a witch because she had cures and she speaks of her blue bottle. She says people respected her out of fear. She says she would not have gone near her house. |
| 0:09:46 - 0:11:47 | FOOD - Sr Patricia remembers he food she would have eaten as a child. She speaks of making the black pudding. Her aunt would kill a pig every year and they would put the bacon up into the roof and the smoke from the kitchen fire would cure the bacon. |
| 0:11:48 - 0:14:00 | FAMILY SHOP - Her parents had a shop in Feakle and a farm at the back. They always had three cows and would sell the milk in the shop. They would have the milk in buckets and neighbours would come in with tin cans for the milk. There were three her family. Her brother was William Moloney, (John's father) and her sister was Mai. Her sister married Smith in O'Callaghan's Mills and she had a shop there. She speaks of her sister's shop. |
| 0:14:01 - 0:16:30 | HURLING - Sr Patricia says that everyone hurled in Feakle. She speaks of the ash trees from which the hurleys are made. She recalls a man from Sixmilebridge making the hurleys and leaving them in Mai's shop for people to collect them. They came from all over Clare to buy them. She speaks of the new primary school and the hurling field attached to it. She says Feakle was one of the top hurling areas of Co Clare. |
| 0:16:31 - 0:23:12 | THE HOUSE - Sr Patricia describes the house they lived in. She says it was a new house with an old thatched house bedside it. It was willed to her father by an uncle in America. They found coins in the dust of the old house when it was knocked down. It had been a bar and the money had been dropped between the floorboards. The new house was two houses together. Their living room was called 'the room' and people would come in and sit there and she recalls when they had a gramophone in it. She recalls listening to 'Mo MhúirnÃn'. There was no electricity in the house before she entered the nuns. She entered in 1940. They had tilly lamps lit by gas. Before that they had oil lamps. She recalls the picture of the sacred heart and a picture of John Kennedy saluting his father's coffin. They had a range in the kitchen. |
| 0:23:13 - 0:25:16 | SCHOOL - Sr Patricia went to the primary school in Feakle and was going to go to the Mercy nuns in Loughrea but instead went to Kiltimagh Co Mayo. |