Hannah Scanlon celebrating her 97th birthday with her 3 daughters
Ladies Monthly Night Out
The Ladies Monthly night out will take place on Friday, June 28th at 9.30pm in Brown Joe’s. The proceeds will go to Athea Community Games. All the usual fun and games including bingo, quiz etc. Please come along and enjoy a great night’s entertainment.
Billy Collins, with Christy Roche who is home from Chicago, presenting his Cup to Hurling Chairman Seamus Ahern
Athea Going Strong
A meeting will be held at the Top of the Town on Wednesday, July 10th at 8pm. We want to encourage people living in the parish to attend with a view to becoming involved as a committee member. This includes two social events per year to be organised, one at Christmas and one in the Summer. Please come along to the meeting as we would like to get new people involved who may have new ideas to put forward and all would be very welcome.
St. Vincent de Paul
Anyone wishing to spend a week’s holiday in the St. Vincent de Paul holiday home in Ballybunion in early July is asked to contact any member of the Athea St. Vincent de Paul Society as soon as possible to book a place.
ATHEA PLAYGROUND
On Friday 21st of June committee members made our way to loughill to meet with the committee of their playground. It was a very productive meeting with alot of valid information & ideas.
Going forward we have letters & emails sent off regarding the sites that we are looking at. Our next port of call is to ask YOU THE PEOPLE OF ATHEA what are your ideas?? What would you like to see in YOUR playground??
What are other playgrounds missing that YOU feel would be an asset to the playground in Athea??
We will be sending out surveys over the next few weeks & would greatly appreciate YOUR input into what would make ATHEA PLAYGROUND !!
Athea Community Council Limited
Athea Community Council Limited has at long last finalised the purchase of the premises formerly owned by Pa Connors, C.D. Printing and Connie Herbert on Con Colbert Street. It has been a long haul and a fight to get the final documents. Due to the tardiness and negligence of the solicitor for the vendor we have been unable to do any work to the building over the past five years and at times it seemed as if we would never reach a conclusion. The weight of the Law Society had to be brought to bear to get the job done but at last we can start to make use of the premises. It is a fine, dry building covering a large area from the street back to The Gables car park and has huge potential for developing business in the area. It needs to be made fit for purpose and to do this a lot of work will have to be undertaken.
We can now, however, take advantage of the many grants out there to modernise the premises and bring it up to scratch. There are many possibilities for the building which will be discussed by the Council at future meetings and we look forward to the support of the community in our endeavours. One of the best and easiest ways of giving this help is to support the weekly Lucky Numbers lotto which is paying off the loan on the building at the moment. We are way ahead of schedule but a few extra sales per week will mean we will be able to fund further development.
Do we miss God?
By Domhnall de Barra
Following on last week’s topic and the descent into lawlessness in our times, I thought about Jim Kelly . Jim was the headmaster at St. Ita’s College, commonly known as Kelly’s School, in Abbeyfeale. He wasn’t an overly religious man, as a matter of fact he might have been a bit anti for a long time. If he did go to Mass on Sunday he would insist on going into the women’s aisle at a time when there was strict segregation of the sexes in our churches. He was that type of a man. During my period in his establishment he turned fifty and announced that from henceforth he was going to Mass every day because he said he believed that the first fifty years of a man’s life belonged to himself but the years after that belonged to God. He also said something that was very interesting and maybe is very relevant to the problems we face today. He said “if there wasn’t a God it would be necessary to invent one”. He said that if we didn’t have moral teaching to inform our consciences we would revert to our animal instincts where it was the survival of the fittest and the meek certainly would have no hope of inheriting the earth. Whatever we think about religion and the Roman Catholic variety in particular, it did give us a blueprint for living our lives in a civilised manner.
Yes there are and were many things wrong with the Church that are well chronicled and people were let down in a big way but, nobody was ever let down by the words of Jesus Christ or God. All the Church laws that caused so much suffering to people were made by men, not God. It is worth while going through the words of Christ because they invariably dwell on love and forgiveness as the centre of their message. He had great compassion for sinners and was ready to forgive any transgression if there was genuine regret. He also said “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “love thy neighbour as thyself”. How can anybody argue with that? If we truly loved our neighbour as ourselves we wouldn’t have any wars or conflict and the world would be a very different place. Even for someone who is totally anti religion, these words make sense and they are only little snippets of the total teachings. So, if we take away all that and become a godless society, what is going to stop us from losing our civility and our respect for others. Is this one of the reasons why there is so much crime in our society? Is this why young people will put a gun to somebody’s head and blow their brains out without even a thought? If there is no right and wrong then there is no hope for us into the future. I am convinced that children of today are spoiled rotten. They are given everything from the word go and are allowed to do what they like. I don’t ever want to go back to the days of corporal punishment as it used to be because it was overdone but there is something wrong when a parent can be prosecuted for giving a wayward child a smack on the behind. We have to learn at an early age that there are consequences to actions. If we don’t we will not be able to deal with set-backs when life hits us between the two eyes. I know violence is not the answer to anything but there has to be some deterrent. For those who had the faith it was the prospect of going to Hell after death and I am sure it prevented many a bad deed in the past. That is not to say that non-believers are all wrong, far from it, indeed there are some who are much better living than the average churchgoer but I am not referring to them. There is a hard core of young, godless people, who grow up in what can be described as deprived circumstances without the benefit of moral education, who try to emulate the worst viciousness of the major criminal gangs and see this as a normal way of life. At one time it was confined to the major cities but now we see it in places like Longford and Drogheda, much smaller centres of population. It could erupt in any part of the country as long as there is a demand for illegal substances and gangs vying for the right to supply that need. We are lucky, so far, in this neck of the woods. The young people of Athea are fine upstanding individuals who do an amount of work for charity and voluntary organisations. They are a credit to their parents and their teachers who have moulded them into what they are today. They now will have the problem of steering their own kids through the road to adulthood with all its pitfalls and dangers. That we are a small, close-knit community really helps and the more we work together the better it is going to be for all of us. So, let us take our hats off to the vast number of our parishioners who give of their time, week after week, to voluntary organisations expecting no other reward than the satisfaction of a job well done. The provision of sporting facilities, in particular, is a great boon to the younger generations. Healthy outdoor pursuits keep them active and teach them how both to win and lose and to deal with both experiences in the proper manner. It also gets them away from the smart phones and tablets that contain so much harmful material that can be such a disturbing influence on them. Whether we are believers or not , there might be no harm in having a look at the teachings of Jesus Christ. They are simple, straightforward and make sense. By following even a fraction of them we may become better parents, children, brothers, sisters and neighbours.
I will leave you with a thought my grandmother gave me that has enlightened my thinking over the years: “If you can’t do somebody any good, don’t do them any harm”