The Postman – an extract from Harry’s

In this extract from his book, Harry Keaney reminds us of an era when the postman – and they were all men back then – was a key source of news and information in every community.

Paddy Jinks was the postman who came to our house most mornings when I was a child. He was a lifeline to the outside world, long before email and the now regular arrival of couriers with their online-ordered items. It was also before we ‘had the phone’. That did not happen until after I went to America in November 1990 and my mother decided it was necessary as she became increasingly nervous due to my father’s failing health. One never knew when the doctor, priest or ambulance might have to be called.

Two things stick in my mind about Paddy Jinks: He arrived early, and he and my father spent what seemed like ages talking quietly in the kitchen. Before long I realised Paddy’s early arrival was not only about the prompt delivery of letters, it was also a time to share the most recent news and gossip over two mugs of tea (fortified by a dash of

Powers) with a few Thick Arrowroot biscuits. This meant by the time my father had all his farm work done and was cycling to Riverstown or some other destination later in the morning, he was already very well informed.

My first memory of Paddy Jinks is delivering the letters by bicycle.

The letters came from Boyle Post Office to the post office in Riverstown, where they were sorted out among the local postmen. Many years later, in 2012, when I was working for The Sligo Champion, I found myself writing a news story about the end of letter-sorting in Riverstown Post Office.

The article was published on 4th September 2012 under the headline ‘The Last Sorting’. When I wrote that headline I was thinking of the Last Supper, an idea that crossed my mind as I watched postmistress Iris Barlow, her husband Frank and the postmen all having tea and sandwiches in the post office that morning.

This is the piece I wrote afterwards:

Another rural Sligo village has quietly lost another of its services.This time it’s Riverstown, where on Friday morning the mail was sorted for the last time in the village post office.

Now a tradition extending back almost 170 years is no more.

For those who gathered to witness ‘the last sorting’, it was an occasion tinged with sadness, perhaps more so than most for postmistress

Iris Barlow and her husband, Frank. Iris has been working in the post office since she was child, first in her home place onThe Diamond in Riverstown, where her father,Tom Parke, and his wife, Elizabeth Barbour, also ran a shop and drapery.

For the past 27 years, the post office has operated out of the Barlow household, just down the street in Riverstown, opposite the old forge and the entrance to the new Teach Cheoil.

Iris described the end of mail-sorting in Riverstown as “very much the end of an era”, not only for herself, for the postmen and those who worked in the post office, but also for the people of the wider Riverstown area. She said: “I was in the shop when I was two or three. I was sorting letters since I was a child.”

People who, normally, would never feature in a book.

“Out in rural Sligo, the man who cut the meadow and helped you save the hay was a VIP. So too was the man who brought home your turf with his tractor and trailer, the man who bought the milk to the creamery, the hackney driver who brought people to Mass on Sundays or to Knock Shrine between August 15 and September 8, the postman, the shopkeeper, butcher, undertaker, teacher, local doctor, the handyman who helped with a sick

Looking at the postmen, including those who had retired but who turned up on Friday morning last, she described them all as “the best timekeepers” she had ever met. “I will miss them,” she said. However, she emphasised that although mail-sorting will be no more in Riverstown, all counter and postal services will continue as normal. At present, the mail is machine-sorted in Athlone and delivered to post offices such as Riverstown. From this week on, all Riverstown’s mail will be sorted in Boyle by the three Riverstown postmen, Larry O’Beirne,Tommy Gallagher and Glynn Mulligan, whose areas cover a total of about 1,200 houses.

Among the retired postmen who showed up at Riverstown Post Office on Friday morning last were Jimmy Higgins, who retired in March 2008 after 45 years’ service; Tommy Kelly, who retired in November 2010 after 42 years; Padraig Galvin, who retired in February 2008 after 28 years; and Derek Lawson, who retired in 2006 after 25 years. Also present was Paddy McDermott, who served as a relief postman in Riverstown. farm animal when you didn’t call the vet, the women and men who helped in times of need or gave encouragement... these people were not ‘ordinary.’ They were the people who kept the cogs of society moving, often in difficult circumstances.

“They were integral parts of a rich community, all interlinked to create the environment – with its good and bad times – in which people like I grew up, and from which we got our values,” he told the Sligo Weekender.

A ‘divil’ for the detail, he goes to

Following a special presentation of a beautiful statue and flowers to Iris and Frank, there was tea and sandwiches, and reminiscences about old times. Former postmen such as Paddy Jinks, Denis Dowd and others were fondly remembered, while Jimmy Higgins and Derek Lawson recalled when they delivered the mail on bicycles.

With the clock ticking quietly but relentlessly on, there came the time for the postmen to start their rounds. As they set off, one sensed the occasion was more than the end of another mundane week at the post office. Rather, it was a melancholy conclusion to another chapter in the long history of a proud and a close-knit place. Seven years later, in 2019, came another change in Riverstown when local county councillor Martin Baker and his wife, Josephine, took over the running of the post office from Iris and Frank.

Back to when I was a child, to when the postmen were given vans. We called them ‘P&T’ vans, after the then Department of Posts and Telegraphs. Paddy Jinks’s first van was a Renault, painted orange and white, with an L-shaped gear-stick extending horizontally from the middle of the dash rather than vertically from the floor. Paddy also brought more than letters and parcels. As a child, I developed an obsession with walking around and imagining I was driving my own car or van. This fantasy required a steering wheel. For a while, I was satisfied with a sally rod my Uncle Harry had bent into a circle and held in place with twine used for tying down the cocks of hay. With time, I became more ambitious and began to ask Paddy to bring me a real steering wheel. Why I ‘got stuck into’ the postman about this I do not know. Eventually, he delivered, bringing me exactly what I had desired, having got it, I guess, from some old vehicle that had been dismantled.

Later, I became infected with another obsession. Having seen Paddy’s postman’s cap on the kitchen table as he talked with my father, I decided I wanted a cap too.

So I pestered my father to ask Paddy to bring me a cap. After a few months Paddy again delivered. I remember the cap didn’t have the Department of Posts and Telegraphs badge