Fascinating career and powerful pen of Padraic
Padraic Neary worked for decades as a precision designer with big employers like Tool and Gauge. The Tubbercurry poet, playwright and polymath tells Gerry McLaughlin about his career and his various ‘obsessions’ – which include writing to newspapers about our changed world
AS POLYMATHS GO, the irrepressible Padraic Neary is up there with the very best. For the multi-talented citizen of Banada is gifted in the worlds of the arts and the sciences.
He is a playwright, a poet who specialises in sonnets, and a letter writer with independent and well-argued views on various aspects of life.
His opinions are certainly not mainstream but they are very well expressed, as befits a gifted wordsmith and original thinker.
He is also a learned man on machinery and specifically toolmaking, a trade he learned in the famous Tool and Gauge Factory in Tubbercurry. Padraic is a precision designer who went on to become works manager of the famous Hanson’s factory in Sligo the 1970s.
He then set out on his own and set up a toolmaking service which employed as many as 15 people at a time in Finisklin. And he was one of the first men in Sligo to use a computer to help the business in the early 1980s.
Padraic was a real innovator and was at the cutting edge of computer technology back in the early 1980s. He continued in his manufacturing business until around 2000, when he went on a different tack altogether. Padraic owned a few acres and bought a few more acres and decided to build 63 houses on the outskirts of Tubbercurry by 2010.
He also used his tool making skills to design a few houses for people. Remarkably, he did not take up the pen seriously until he was 58. He is now a very sprightly and forensically alert 77-year-old who has written four plays, including an award winning one-act production.
By his own reckoning he has had around 700 letters published in the national media as well as many in the local media.
His themes are many. A recurring one is his deep and genuine concern at the way he perceives the growth of technology and over-production is enslaving many millions of people throughout the world. Padraic’s fertile mind likens it to a return to feudal times when the very few ruled over impoverished masses. He believes that unless something is done a new era of serfdom is due to strike the world.
But he has great faith in the benefits of advances in technology, such as those that produced vaccines in the fight against Covid-19.
Only for this welcome breakthrough he believes that 30 to 40 million people would now be dead from the disease. On the phone you are struck by his constant energetic mind, his passion for his beliefs – he calls them “obsessions” – and his effortless ability to summarise complex matters into pithy, well-rounded phrases.
He has been deeply involved in his community. He was chairman of a committee to restore St Brigid’s Hall in Tubbercurry in the early 1980s and was a driving force in the revival of the
Old Fair Day in Tubbercurry in the mid-2000s.
Padraic has also been closely involved in blood donation services in his area for many years.
And he has been very closely connected with drama in Tubber, including the Phoenix Players.
He finds writing plays and poems a great release and very therapeutic and continues to write prolifically.
His son Philip Neary was a gifted Sligo senior footballer until injury curtailed his career. His grandson Seán Neary captained the Galway minor hurling team to an All-Ireland title in 2018.
PADRAIC WAS born in Banada in 1944. His father John was a postman. His mother was a native Irish speaker called Teresa O’Flaherty from Inisheer, one of the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway.
Padraic grew up with both Irish and English in the home.
He said: “My father was postman for the area the year I was born.
“My mother came to Banada to work in the area. She then went to Aughamore so their courtship was conducted at long distance. My father used to cycle to keep in contact.” “I recall growing up in Banada with great joy and with great affection.
“I was an only child, but four siblings following me passed away, which was heartbreaking.
“I used to see my mother in tears as a child but did not know why until years later.
“Some of them lived for a while and I remember seeing twins. They lived for a few days.”
Padraic’s mother and father had great resilience.
He said: “We lived in a very remote part of Banada. Most people would say we lived in the bog, and I would find that hard to disagree with.
“I remember the wonderful freedom of going almost anywhere you wanted and the great love and care I got at home.
“It was a great time to grow up. I went to a convent first and then the boys’ school in Banada, which still exists. “Jim Durcan and the famous Seán Owens taught me, and he was and is a great man.
“He is responsible for much of the development in and around Tourlestrane village with the Peace Park over many years.
“He is a very interesting character and I have great respect for him. If anyone is a legend then
Seán certainly is one. He has not slowed down.” “Seán gave me a great interest in English and History and poetry as well, which never came to fruition until I retired myself practically. “I love poetry and especially the poetry of Yeats. I find great solace and great therapy in the world of words and the imagination. “It is a great chance to express yourself. I write poems that rhyme, and they are not always universally welcomed by the literati.
“I take great joy in getting words to rhyme that mean something. That may not be in vogue at the moment.
“I brought out two collections of poems some years ago, ‘Beneath The Bridge’ and ‘Bog Of Idreal’ – the latter is the old Irish name of the place I was born and reared in. “I am not sure what it means but it is a lovely word and in the old documentation of the landlords it was called the Bog of the village Idreal which amalgamated into Banada.
“I always loved Yeats. I remember as a child winning a competition for reciting ‘The Lake Isle Of Innisfree’ at An Tóstal in Curry. I cherish that medal.”
Padraic did not play Gaelic football, but he was a keen handballer in Banada.
He said: “I liked the handball and it was very popular in those years.” Padraic won a scholarship to St Nathy’s College in Ballaghderreen as a boarder in 1957.
Padraic said: “It was tough, but of its time. The corporal punishment was
pretty severe at the time, but it was severe everywhere.
“They gave us a great education and we were mixing with lads from all over the place.
“Summerhill took quite a lot of the lads from the north Sligo area.
“I had a great friend in John McKeon who was from Cul an Choill. He went on to work for the government in economics.
“I was privileged to be in St Nathy’s with the great Roscommon footballer Dermot Earley, who went on to become head of the Irish Army.
“Another was Noel Conroy, who was Commissioner of An Garda Síochána for a period.
“Sligo had good football teams back in the 1950s and 1960s.
“But in my first year in college I was struck with rheumatic fever and rest was the great cure at that time.
“There was an epidemic that time. I remember on my 14th birthday in 1958 not being able to move in the bed.
“We had some good teachers there and some were wonderful men. Others were the opposite but generally they were pretty good.”
“I have no bad memories of it but I was not happy at not being allowed to do honours maths in the Leaving Cert. “I always had an aptitude and got the county scholarship in maths.
“But in my particular year in the college, the teacher decided that none of us were good enough to do honours maths, even though we complained bitterly to the principal.
“I always regretted that. If I had done honours maths my life would probably have taken a different direction altogether. But I look back on my life with great joy.”
And within a week Padraic was employed by Tool and Gauge in Tubbercurry.
HE SAID: “I knew nothing about them, and it was a summer job and gradually learned what they were doing. They weren’t making shovels or hammers or spades.
“I became involved in the design aspect. Third level had been an option, but it was expensive at the time.
“The Gallagher brothers set up Tool and Gauge in the 1950s and I always considered it to be the foundation of the smart economy in Ireland.
“Very few people know what tool making does. It is the section of industry that designs and produces the equipment that makes everything else that is made.
“It is a highly complex and highly demanding industry, but all economic success is based on its products.” Padraic said that he has two great heroes in life.
He said: “One would be Henry Ford of the cars who considered tool making the aristocrat of industry. And the other man I have great time for is Steve Jobs, who died a few years ago. He considered himself a tool maker for the world.”
What made Tool and Gauge so special?
Padraic said: “They were the very first company in the country to produce what I would call highly technical equipment.
“They made moulds to enable mass production to take place and made tools that pressed out metal parts. “When I look back on old films of the1960s and 1970s I often see used the first phone handpiece that departed from the old heavy black one.
“I was involved in the design of the product in Tool and Gauge for the tool that was used in the Delta Phone in 1966.
“They were green light phones and used all over the world. Tool and Gauge made the tooling that produced those phones. The phones were actually made by ST in Britain.”
When Padraic joined Tool and Gauge first, they employed around 40 people. He said: “They were mainly guys who learned their trade in the UK or were Irish guys who went to the UK and came back.
“Martin Keaveney was there, and he had his own company later and he was the very first tool maker to be trained in Ireland.
“It was the introduction of technology – prior to that most of Irish industry was craft based.”
“We as Irish designers and tool makers could hold our own with anyone in the world.”
The pay was good at the time and Padraic started as an apprentice at £2 5s a week for 45 hours, and 7s was stopped for the stamp.
As he progressed, he found himself earning much better money because there was “unlimited overtime”. Martin built a house in 1970 and he applied for a mortgage. His salary for the previous year had been £2,100. He said: “That averaged out at £40 or £50 per week, which was great money.” At its peak, Tool and Gauge employed around 70 people.
Padraic said: “The industries in Tubbercurry were phenomenal and it was not fully appreciated. At one time they employed around 500 people, which was phenomenal for a town of just around 1,000 inhabitants.
“They came from all over and the town was humming.”
Padraic worked in Tool and Gauge from 1962 to 1970 and was chief designer for the last three years. He then went to Hanson’s in Cleveragh, in Sligo town.
Padraic said: “Dan Hanson came to Ireland in about 1967. He located in Sligo because he knew he needed a tool making company to keep him operating.
“Hanson’s made weighing scales and bathroom scales.
“He had no design facilities in Sligo, so I was sort of seconded to him.
“I got to know him well and in October 1970 I went to join the company as a designer. And in two years I became works manager.”
In those halcyon years, Hanson’s employed around 300 to 350 people. Padraic said: “It was pretty hectic, but I relished the job, and Hanson’s was very important for Sligo.
“We were making something like five million scales a year.
“Hanson’s were a huge part of Sligo and I love to meet up with people from Hanson’s and from Tool and Gauge. There was great camaraderie in both places.
“Although Dan Hanson appeared to be very demanding, he allowed me to have my head and get on with the job and bring in ideas on faith.”
Padraic spent nine years in Hanson’s in 1979 as he always had an aspiration to set up his own operation.
He said: “With Oliver Cawley, a former Tool and Gauge employee, I set up a tool design operation.
“We were located originally in High Street, and we built an office in Finisklin which is now a creche.
“We were designing tools and products for a lot of the companies that were manufacturing in the area.
“It was not a great financial success but technically I was delighted with it. “We went off on a solo run in the 1980s and we had the first computer aided design in the region.”
Padraic was at a computer exhibition in Birmingham in 1981 and he became “besotted” by the potential of computers.
He got a group to together to buy a state-of-the-art system.
He said: “It was delivered to Finisklin in February 1983.
“It was a big machine, and it had a main frame computing system as big as the old telephone kiosks. It had three terminals or work-stations coming off that.
“Its RAM was 2MB, which is about what you would have in your toothbrush today.
“The biggest problem was that there was no dedicated software for the stuff we wanted to do. So we spent the next 17 years trying to develop our own software.
“We had as good a software as was around, but the problem was that there was so much computing around it that half the time there was no hardware to process it quickly enough.
“When we fed in the design information for the different parts the computer would give us the details of each piece with all the machining dimensions and all the information necessary.
“That only became a reality in the early 2000s.
“We had 17 great years of development in computers and employed up to 15 people at a time.
“Our company was eventually taken over a Manorhamilton company that makes the motors that control operating wing mirrors in cars.
“They make about a third of the world’s usage of those products. They learnt their trade on our computer system.
“I had seen the potential of computers immediately.”
MOST PEOPLE have no concept of just how powerful computerisation is, according to Padraic. He said: “The prime example at the moment is how technology has been able to develop and manufacture and distribute the vaccines for this pandemic.
“If this pandemic happened 20 years ago there would probably be 40 or 50 million people dead.
“The advance of technology is phenomenal, but sadly we are not handling our enormous success very well. “We are trying to operate it with an economic system which evolved to cope with failure and shortage and excessive work.
“We need to develop an ideology which will reap the full benefits of technology.
“We are living in a world of great abundance but there is less and less work. We don’t have a philosophy that makes use of this.
“We have turned technological genius on its head and people are more vulnerable and insecure now
for generations. This is because we have not learned how to cope with overproduction. The world is grossly overproducing.
“That ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal had 22,000 containers. That is only one of about 50,000 ships that constantly traverse the world moving cheaply-made products into situations of gross oversupply.
“A lot of businesses are failing and a lot of them can’t compete.”
“Local commerce is actually being obliterated. And society is suffering greatly.
“The buzzword is growth, and that means producing more and more. “And it was very applicable when the world could not produce enough of anything.
“But it is absolute lunacy to continue with that philosophy in a world that is overproducing greatly.
“Go into any shop and look at the sheer amount of goods that are available. That is good for the consumer, but what happens when the consumer has nothing to consume with? What happens when their incomes are decimated?”
“That will happen because work is being decimated and by extension incomes.
“They talk about this new panacea now, which is remote working.
“Some jobs are suited to this, like conveying information. But there is a lot of other work that cannot be done from anywhere. And that work will more and more be located in the cheapest locations in the world.
“I find it more than tragic that we are turning the best time there ever was to be alive into some of the most miserable times for a lot of people.
“We have the ability to have enough for everybody, even the very rich and the very greedy.”
How can that be achieved?
Padraic said: “It needs different thinking on employment and on production.
“Producing to a level that is necessary and consumable is far better than grossly overproducing and polluting the world with unwanted material. “We are losing the need for human involvement in production – it is reducing all the time.
“I read about an Amazon store in Britain where when people go into it, they just walk through it and they have the option of filling a trolley or stamping particular products.
“When they come out, the trolley will go straight through and there is no check out or anything.
“All has been electronically monitored and all they need going in is a good credit rating. All that is done without anybody at all in the store. “I see now locally we have automatic checkout machines.
“That is where we are going, and we are going to lose a lot of employment. “There is nothing wrong with losing the need to work provided everybody has a secure means of earning their living.
“Whenever I write to the papers that is what I say, and they are not popular views.
“Small local communities are being decimated and nobody wants to talk about it.
“I have sought for about 13 years to get this item mentioned on the Joe Duffy Show and on RTÉ current affairs programmes.
“I have been totally rejected and sometimes with great hostility. “I don’t have the solutions to the problems of technology and poverty, but the solutions will only come when we have a serious discussion on how technology has changed economics forever.
“Economics should be there to serve the people rather than the people serving the economic interests of some. “I started writing the letters on this subject after I retired.”
Padraic left Finisklin in 2000 at the age of 56, and his fertile mind soon took him in a very different direction. He said: “After that it was rather peculiar as I ended up building some houses as a contractor.
“I had bought a piece of land behind my own house on the Charlestown Road in Tubbercurry.
“When the building boom emerged, I found that toolmaking and design had faded, and it was not as useful in the area. So I decided to build 63 houses on my own land.
“Ard Aisling Estate is the estate that I built on the Charlestown Road. “I bought about four and a half acres on top of my own piece of land. So I had nine acres. The whole project was finished by 2010.
“I formed my own firm called Apt Construction. It was a play on the word Pat.”
THIS WAS a big departure for Padraic, but he put his skills as a designer to good use and designed some houses himself. He said: “I sold 60 houses and have kept three. I managed to get out before the crash, but I did not make huge money on it. It was difficult towards the end.
“I am retired now about 10 years.” Meanwhile, Padraic has been heavily involved in community work in and around Tubbercurry.
He said: “I was not involved in the original Old Fair Day in Tubbercurry as it had to be dropped when the Foot and Mouth arrived in 2001. It did not run for the next few years.
“I was involved with the Chamber of Commerce in Tubbercurry, and they asked me to help out. So, I took on the job of re-starting it in 2004.
I was in charge for three years and it took off well. It was a continuation of what had been done before but on a bigger scale.
“We had street drama, busking, people dressed up and there were a lot of exhibitions of old crafts, threshing and butter making. We had country and western bands.
“It was internationally regarded as a major festival until this pandemic took over.”
In that period, Padraic helped make a film called The Old Fair Day Conspiracy with Tom Walsh.
Padraic said: “It was about the Fair Day. The first year that I ran it we had a thunderstorm right in the middle of it, a downpour, and all ran for the pubs. “And then the story went around that this was a conspiracy to get people into the pubs.
“I wrote most of the script for the film. I was also acting in it and we had a major launch for the film in Tubber. It is still shown occasionally.
“It is quite interesting and informative. I played myself and Tom Walsh was the main ‘conspirator’. Peter Davey was the hero of the film. He used to be with the Blue Raincoat.”
Padraic has also been involved in various other community projects. He said: “Seán Owens got me involved in many projects in and around Banada and encouraged me in my poetry.
“I was involved for many years with St Brgid’s Hall in Tubbercurry. I was chairman of the committee to restore the hall.
“We had to repair the roof. That went on for 15 years and we ended building a sports extension as well.
Padraic has been closely involved with drama in Tubbecurry for many years.
He said: “I have written five or six one-act plays.
“I get my inspiration from talking to people or remembering stories I heard and all that sort of thing.
“I had a little play last year that won the one-act confined section in Tubber and Ballybofey.
“It was called Trapa Tony, a play on Trapattoni, the ex-Irish soccer
“My letters are mostly about our failure to appreciate how technology has changed economics forever. We need to come up with a new ideology”
manager. It is a black comedy about the tables being turned on a mugger who tried to rob an old Italian man one night in his remote hovel.
“I wrote another one about the Gaelic chieftain in the Curlews.
“Two young motorbikers stop off and one of them used the chieftain’s horse’s leg to relieve himself.
“And then they sit down smoking joints, and the chief gets off the horse and challenges them for the insult. “I have four or five one-acts and two or three longer ones. When I write, I write in bursts.”
Padraic started writing poetry at 58 and he has now written about 200 published poems.
Padraic wrote a poem about the statue of Yeats being knocked over in the words of Yeats
He said: “I have written about the Bridge in Banada, and the wars in the Gaza Strip and a whole range of things. I am attracted to sonnets, the 14-liners. I once wrote three sonnets in an evening.”
Meanwhile, Padraic took up letter writing seriously around 2010 after years in the very different world of technology.
He said: “The first letter that was published in a newspaper when there was a second referendum on Masstricht.
“I have a bee in my bonnet about how we need to make better use of technology.
“I find that some of my views are extraordinarily unpopular and newspapers are quite reluctant to publish those views. They are certainly not mainstream.” But Padraic has now had as many as 800 letters published in national newspapers – not bad going for a man with unpopular views.
He said: “The letters are mostly about our failure to appreciate how technology has changed economics forever. “We need to come up with a new ideology to complement the extraordinary technological advantages we have had in recent years.
“We should settle for sufficiency and not always be looking for more.
“I believe that a new feudal society is developing where actually all the wealth and sources of wealth are getting into the control of vast multinationals.
“They will make the decisions on how we live and the rest of us are being pushed into a modern-day serfdom.
“Companies are becoming all-powerful, and governments are helping in this situation.
“Most of our country has been handed over to Brussels anyway.” Padraic supports Brexit and Britain’s decision to leave the EU. He said: “I think the original
EEC was the most wonderful idea initially. It helped the economies of independent states to co-operate and to work together to keep the peace in Europe. “But that has evolved into the economic community in Europe which is taking more and more political power to itself. It is extinguishing the whole concept of nationality. “That is a terrible thing for Ireland and the human race because the human race is very tribal. Allegiances were always to family, village, community and so forth. Now we are told that all of that has to go.
“There are stories that Britain has been foolish commercially, and that may be true, but there are other things to consider. Some people place a higher value on freedom to make their own decisions ahead of fiscal gain.
“In Ireland we are swamped in bureaucracy from Europe – people in B&Bs are not allowed to give their guests their own eggs for breakfast. “Europe is almost strangling us in red tape, and I think we were shamelessly used by the EU to try to batter Britain into submission.
“If a more conciliatory approach had been taken to the Brexit decision, I believe Brexit would never have happened.
“There was only a small number in favour of Brexit in Britain and if they had got some small concessions, I think the decision would have been reversed.
“But no – the decision was to go gung-ho for Britain and to destroy it as much as possible. “Some of decisions made in the negotiations on Europe’s behalf were beyond stupid.
“There was one programme where some of the EU negotiators were laughing and joking because they had Britain as a colony for ever more. That was on television and published.
“And all they achieved was to get an 80-plus majority for Boris Johnson to make sure they departed.”
Padraic added: “We are living in great times, but we have no control over the explosion of information on social media that sometimes destroys people. “Regulations should have been brought in to control them. “They are doing huge damage and the bullying that goes on is immense and then you have the defamation of Arlene Foster as well.
“But in a different way, I know that Donald Trump was a very divisive US President but it is a horrific thing that a private multi-national company can decide to wipe him off all communications. We are supposed to have a democratic right to express views.”
On a happier note, Padraic finds writing poetry a great source of therapy.
He said: “It is wonderful therapy and, being retired, it is wonderful to have an obsession that you can fully concentrate on.
“At present I am trying to put together something about my adventure with technology, even if it is only for my own children and grandchildren. Everyone needs a passion.”
PADRAIC married Loretta Phillips from Carracastle in Mayo in 1970. They have three children, Tony, Philip and Marian. They must be very proud of this most energetic, creative and stimulating of local legends – who is certainly his own man.