Sirs,

I enjoy an occasional trip down memory lane these days. I’m sure it’s got something to do with my turning fifty at the end of the month. Either that, or my recent reunion with old class mates. We were commemorating, if not celebrating, the fact that we had now truly reached middle age.

What we knew as “the teck”, probably better known to your readers as The Community College, was the common bond we shared. However having delved through some old photograph albums, in search of pictures, which might have been of interest to my fellow two score and ten year olds, I came across some old photos of the town. God was it really thirty three years since I left ‘The Briggan’?

The last time I looked at that dirty old town, I was glad to leave it. After all, what had it to offer? I was eighteen, had my Group Cert and my Inter and Balbriggan was a “has been town”. A town run by the church and schools, a hand full of town fathers. A population who, if they did not know you, well you had to be outsider. A cliché of the time was “Everybody knows everybody, and everybody’s business.”

Ok, there were still some remnants of it’s booming industrial era. An age which saw a textile industry, feed and house the bulk of families. Well those who weren’t into fishing. At eighteen I had enough. The fields and yards around Hampton Mills on the Market Green gave plenty of excitement and fun as a kid, but it was time for greener pastures. The clanging of those infernal weaving machines still ring in my head. I can still see the workers covered in cotton dust, with fragments of linen and threads dangling from their cloths. Shouting at each other as they knocked off, half deaf from the constant droning of the looms. Didn’t they do the same as Gallon’s Mills on Mill Street. Christ they even named the street after the industry, how bloody original. Still if you could afford it, you’d never be stuck for bed linen. Then there was Stephenson’s on the sea banks. You know I must have been fifteen before I was told what they made over there. It was all very hush hush. So what, if they made women’s under things. I was never going to work in a “knickers factory”. Then of course there was the daddy of them all Smyco’s. The largest employer in the area, where families had worked since the nineteenth century. Oh yes they displayed their Gold medals and awards. Proudly engraved and etched around it massive two blocks of hideous Victorian eyesores, bridged by an enclosed medieval looking gantry. No family there, not a hope in hell of getting a job there, even if I wanted to.

For years, I would walk down the cinema lane. You know, between the cinema and Brennan’s Drapery shop. Opposite the cattle market run by Gavin & Lowe where a market took place every Thursday. Jesus, Dublin Street reeked of cow shit for days. The Munster and Lenster Bank on the Square stayed open late on Market days. No carpets on the floor then. Understandably so I suppose.

There was a little office on the right of the entrance of the cattle market, later occupied by “The Dozor” For three pence that’s 3d in the old money, you’d get the neck shaved off ye and the obligatory “Short Back and Sides” Its’ a small wonder any of us who endured his artistry had a head left by the time he finished. Still it keep the head lice at bay, I suppose, and was great value, until those dreaded words from the Ma came condemning you to your quarterly scalping, with ‘THE DOZOR’.

Crossing the canal, swans to the left, and McKeon’s grubby farm yard down in the hollow to the right, on my way to “The Nash”, St., Peter and Paul’s national school to you, I’d come onto to Clonard Street. Just there, at Molly’s. What was her name? Malone comes to mind, but I can’t be sure. Surely Balbriggan hadn’t got its’ own, anyway she wasn’t a fish monger’s daughter or was she? They had a sweet shop at the top of Quay Street. I digress. The reason for mentioning Clonard Street leads me to Burrows. Burrows what went on in there no one knew, and I wasn’t about to find out until years later. They were embroiders, and very renowned in their field too, no messing. But they were in the industry all the same, and that was not where I saw myself spending the best years of MY life. No sir thank you very much. Still there was one option open to me if I was going to discount a career in Textiles or fisheries and no it is not working the land. I would work for Wavin. Yes Wavin, the new kids on the block, for the new kid on the block. Manufacturers of the worlds best PVC pipes. This was the only chance on my staying in this town. All I had to do was slap in the auld ‘Application Form’ and “when do you want me to start?” I left Balbriggan on receiving a very polite, ‘thank you but no thanks’.

So here I am back after thirty three years. Taking a stroll down memory lane. Visiting the auld haunts. God but this place last changed.