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This lane once led to a slaughterhouse where, sometime in the early 1960's,
I witnessed my first and, thankfully, only, killing of an animal. It's strange, but what I remember most is the thickness of the rope that
held the beast.
Amateur Freudians among you will discern all sorts of symbolism there... And when I tell you that that
the small building was once, apparently, a Penal Mass House - the ecclesiastical windows are still visible from the rear of
de Brún's public house - you'll have a psychoanalytic field day.... :-)
The advertised services were available through the door on the right and up the stairs.
Over the years, the premises
housed a wide variety of enterprises. In the 1930's, for instance, Mary Byrne's (the late Mrs Mary Dunne, New Road,
mother of local journalist, Seamus) dress-making business. In 1969, the newly-formed
Portlaoise Credit Union1: in the '70's,
an insurance company and Thomas Coughlan Construction; in
the next decade, the Folio Press, Printers and Publishers and, most memorably of all,
Midland Community Radio (Broadcasting on 260 metres (sic) to the heart of Ireland.
A varied and interesting selection of programmes from 7 am to 1 pm). I have vivid memories of carting armfuls of vinyl
up the stairs where DJ extraordinaire Fergal Carroll and I produced programmes that were certainly varied and, to us at any rate, interesting!
Somewhere in this room I'm typing in, unplayed for a quarter of a century, are cassette tapes of those enthusiastic broadcasts.
I'm going searching for them now....2
1 In 1972, the Credit Union moved to new premises - a house owned by Odlums's Mill and long-since demolished - in Church Avenue. Subsequent locations included the New Road (office opened in 1981), Lyster Square (1986) and, since 2002, the present imposing building on James Fintan Lalor Avenue. 2
Found them! At the risk of boring all but the most ardent of music archaeologists, these are the first three tracks I played on August 7, 1987:
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