LITERATURE LINK AT ASHFORD HERITAGE CENTRE
REPORTER DAVID MEDCALF WAS GIVEN A TOUR OF THE ASHFORD HERITAGE AND COMMUNITY CENTRE WHERE THE MEMORY OF A WORLD FAMOUS POET IS CELEBRATED WHILE VOLUNTARY GROUPS SET ABOUT THEIR ACTIVITIES IN WHAT USED TO BE A SCHOOL
THE tinkle of a piano comes from music lessons conducted in a back room. Talk is cheerfully intense over the tea cups among the members of group carers gathered in the picture lined main hall.
‘This is a busy place,’ says Sheila Clarke, proud manager of the Ashford Community and Heritage Centre. Yet this busy building, now so spanking clean and smartly presented, was within an ace of being demolished not so very long ago. Look which was built back in 1866. The two teacher school served the village well for more than a century but by 2011 it was rundown, vacant and a danger to the neighbours.
A photograph hanging in the reception area illustrates the low ebb to which the structure had fallen. The photo shows that tiles were dropping off the roof while the place looks dingy and unloved. The problem with the falling tiles brought matters to a head as management of the child care facility next door sounded an alarm. The parish council responded with a decision to level the schoolhouse which had become a liability – only for someone to step in with an alternative plan.
That ‘someone’ was local lady Sheila Clarke, who already knew the place well. She is too young to have attended classes there as a more modern school – the grandly named Scoil na Coroine na Mhuire – became available in 1953 a few metres out the road.
It was then used until 1970 as a parish hall before the population explosion which followed the construction of new local authority housing meant that it was required once more for lessons. The infant classes were taught there for more than a decade until an extension to the Scoil na Coroine campus was completed. Among the teachers who worked in the old building during the dozen years it was brought back into service was Marie Heaney.
She and her husband Seamus had arrived in the area with their two young sons, soon to add a daughter to their family. While Marie worked as a teacher, Seamus was busy composing some of the poetry which was to earn him his Nobel Prize for literature. The late poet’s output included the nine Glanmore sonnets, named after the rented cottage near the village where he drew inspiration in peace and tranquillity.
He became friendly with Sheila’s father, the retired garda sergeant who became known as the Mayor of Ashford as a result of his successful fundraising for the school. The sergeant died in 1981, fated never to see the result of his money-spinning
labours, with the modern extension opening in 1983.
The old schoolhouse once more became available for voluntary groups and Sheila was a leader of a youth club there for a while. The club had 100 members signed up at the height of its development, though facilities were rough and rudimentary.
Moves to upgrade came to nothing and the building fell silent, becoming more and more of an eyesore in gathering disrepair: ‘No one wanted it.’
Her attention became focused instead on the garda station across the street, which was burnt out in an arson attack during 2003. Three years after the fire, a delegation from Ashford headed for Dublin, armed with a petition which had garnered 12,000 signatures. The intention was to convince Government to allow a takeover of the station by the locals and Minister Tom Parlon was persuaded that this would be a good idea.
He told them to set up a limited company and come up with a plan to ensure that the barracks would not become a burden on the State. Ashford responded with a will and a remarkable fundraising drive was undertaken, with a little help from the Nobel laureate.
By then resident in Sandymount, Seamus Heaney and his family maintained a weekend presence at Glanmore where Sheila Clarke paid a call. She brought the great man an apple pie and, as he tucked in, she shared her vision of how the police barracks could become a community centre. All that was needed was money, she explained, enrolling the poet as supporter in chief.
He contributed a first edition copy of one of the sonnets to be sold to the highest bidder and this started the ball rolling, with local artists playing a full part. After a memorable charity auction at Mount Usher in 2007, a sum of €63,000 was in the bank. And then the Department of Justice abruptly pulled the plug, ruling that the garda station was no longer available.
So the money stayed in the bank for four years, with the Revenue Commissioners beginning to ask awkward questions as it remained unspent. And then came that day in 2011 when Sheila was walking through the village. She noticed that work was under way to take down the boarded up old schoolhouse.
‘I saw this man taking down slates but I could see that it was not beyond repair,’ she recalls. She made swift contact with parish priest Father Kevin Ronan who confirmed that the decision had been made to demolish.
There was no time to waste. A call was made with higher authority and the archdiocese of Dublin agreed to a request from the Ashford Development Association Limited. The bulldozers were called off and a 33 year lease was signed, handing responsibility for restoration of the property to the association. The keys were presented on Sheila’s 6oth birthday.
This was a cue for more fundraising as architects Coli O’Donoghue and Tony Behan were called in to oversee the transformation from death-trap to invaluable resource. The four walls of the Victorian schoolhouse were left standing, with a new set of slates on top and much of the delightful original stonework exposed. The floor area was extended with the addition of a freshly built reception, kitchen and toilets, with office space upstairs.
The centre is now run by a nine-strong board, chaired by Matthew Weiss, successor to Paul Olthof who held the position when building was completed five years ago.
Nowadays, the list of organisations using the centre includes not only the carers and the music teachers but also sports clubs, the tidy towns committee, Irish dancers and numerous other voluntary groups.
The place recently proved its worth as a seminar venue, booked by Wicklow County Council for a major event on bio-diversity. The 60 strong turn-out assembled by heritage officer Deirdre Byrne packed the place out. Children attending Scoil na Coroine na Mhuire sometimes take the short walk to carry out project work here.
The end result is very smart, an incomparable improvement on the crumbling ruin from which it sprang. The hundreds of youngsters who received their education here for more than a century up to 1970 are remembered, though the record is incomplete. The boys’ roll covering the years from 1870 to 1925 is available for study by local historians, with some attendance records of more recent times for both genders also surviving.
Some of those named on the roll may have enlisted to serve in the trenches of World War One while others were involved in the republican activity which led to the foundation of the State.
Probably the most famous individual to have studied here is Jim Hegarty, now 75 years of age, who left Ireland as a teenager. He rose through the ranks of the New York police and was the force’s second in command during the horrors of the Twin Tower attacks in 2001.
The walls of the centre are used to present works by local painters, with Susan Webb and her father Kenneth currently on show exhibiting a top class mix of oils and watercolours.
Seamus Heaney, who contributed so much to the development, died in August of 2013 but his family are regular visitors to the area and Marie remains in constant touch. He had offered to preside at the opening before he was carried away by the fatal heart attack. Instead it was left to his fellow poet, broadcaster Theo Dorgan, to cut the ribbon in 2015 on the Ashford Heritage and Community Centre.
But the Heaney presence is certainly not forgotten with Seamus and Marie featured among the photographs on show around the foyer. And a couple of his poems are presented in large writing to greet visitors as they enter through the large glass doors. One describes a blackbird: ‘picky, nervy goldbeak’. The other speaks of the delight of leaving Dublin for a Wicklow retreat: ‘this sudden joy from the sheer fact of the mountains’.
It was never the intention of the board of management to make the building a Heaney centre, however, considering that there is already such a thing north of the border in Bellaghy.
However Sheila Clarke remains star struck by the memory of a man who built a global reputation from his musings in nearby Glanmore and this contributes to her conclusion that: ‘it is different here to other community centres.’