By Peg Prendeville
Welcome back to another year reading the Knockdown News column and I wish you all a very happy and prosperous New Year in 2015. It was a lovely Christmas in the area. The wrenboys were out on St. Stephen’s Day and it is one of my favourite parts of the season. Great to see the Mohernagh batch and the Tenekilla batch. Long may the tradition continue. We had some emigrants home which is always great to see.
It was a very busy time in Knockdown celebrating engagements, births and birthdays. Romance was in the air between Johnny Costello, Turraree and his girlfriend Fiona O’Connor, Ballyguiltenane who got engaged; not only that but Fiona’s neighbour Gary Kelly got engaged to his love, Carmel Barrett from Newcastlewest. Congratulations and best wishes to both couples.
Then we celebrated Shauna Long’s 21st birthday in the Knockdown Arms with a great night of fun and dancing. Congratulations Shauna.
To top it all off we hear the news that Leona O’Grady and Keith Cotter are celebrating the birth of Tommy Cotter born on Monday 5th January, a brother to Jack. There will be noise in their house by next Christmas with two lively boys! Congratulations and best wishes to all. This is Peg and Jack’s 2nd great-grandchild.
Best wishes to Laura Enright, Dromreask, who will be featuring in The Voice of Ireland on RTE next Sunday evening. The programme starts at 6.30 pm. We are all looking forward to seeing it and wishing her well.
We were sad to hear that Patie Geoghegan is spending some time in hospital but all his friends and neighbours are wishing him well.
I enjoyed reading the Athea Journal as usual; there are some lovely articles in it. It is nice to hear that we may still see the Ballyguiltenane Journal on the shelves soon too. I believe that James O’Donoghue is taking care of that and rightly so, I think, to honour his father’s work which he had almost finished before he died unexpectedly before Christmas.
Though it seemed like we had a great year weatherwise – and we had – it will come as a surprise to some to hear that last year was the 3rd wettest year since 2001 with 1722mm falling throughout the year. 2008 and 2010 were wetter. Hopefully we will have a reasonably good year to look forward to in 2015.
Sincere sympathies to the Mullane family, Knocknagorna, on the death of Patrick who died last weekend.