The Memoirs of Bill Finnegan

The Memoirs of Bill Finnegan

Born in Firhouse in 1921, Bill Finnegan lived in Killakee and Colbert's Fort before settling in Maelruain's Park, Tallaght. The son of a farm labourer from Ballycullan cottages, his mother was a McNally from Old Court.  After spending ten years driving lorries for the local quarries, Bill begun working for CIE in 1947.  Although the final tram left Tallaght in 1932, Bill at almost eighty years of age, could still remember the names of the drivers and conductors.  He played for Thomas Davis G.F.C for many years and was celebrated locally as one of the finest players to ever represent Tallaght.

I was born in a little house down in The Alley, in Firhouse behind Morton's Pub.  When I was a child there was a number of little houses down The Alley, but they're all long gone now. They were built on a slope down beside the river, and if you walked straight in off the street, you would end up in the bedroom.  You had to go down steps into the kitchen. A number of families lived in The Alley- the Whites, the Keoghs and Kellys all lived there at one time.  I was only a young lad when we left The Alley, after my father bought some of Lord Massy's land, when it was being divided up and sold off by the bank.  My father agreed to buy forty acres of Massy's property up in Killakee for £500.  We had twenty-five cows up there and would milk them every day- sell the milk door-to-door for a penny a pint.  The trouble was, in the bad weather with the frost and snow on the road, (and we had winters at that time!), you couldn't get down to sell the milk. You could go a month without selling a drop. There wouldn't be a shilling in the place!  So we held on to the land for four or five years until my father was beat by the repayments.  £112 pound is all he owed, when we left Killakee.

When I was up there as a young lad, the way it was with school: you only went to school of a wet day, because there was so much work on the land.  Every young lad was the same.  People got very little schooling then. There was a little village on the top of Mount Pelia (Pelier) at that time. 'The Rabbit Doyle' and his wife and daughter lived there and 'The Dote Kerwin' and his mother; ‘The Swank McDermott' and his mother and father. 'The Swank' was the gamekeeper for (Lord) Massy's Estate- a Scotsman he was.  They all lived in the thatched cottages on the top of Mount Pelia and as a lad, I would deliver the milk up there every morning.  Those little houses were very old even then.  They must have been built around the early eighteen hundreds.

(Lord) Massy had all the land around there in the early days. Lord Massy was a director of the Bank of England, and one of the first trustees of 'The Irish Sweep' along with Capt. Spencer Freeman and Joe McGrath. Lady Massy and the two daughters worked in 'The Irish Sweep' and lived in the gate-lodge up there until the 1940s. Massy had beautiful gardens and orchards and the tourists would come out during the summer to see them.  The staff from all the big factories like Maguire and Paterson, Guinness, and Powers would come out during the summer on excursions.  One of Massy's tenants, Maurice Fox had tearooms and a ballroom up in Killakee House and crowds would come out of town for that on a Sunday.

The Gardens of Lord Massy's Estate

When we came down from Killakee in the year of the congress- 1932, my father gave his milk round to Jingler McDermott and when Jingler died years later, it's said he left over fifteen million pounds! He died a very, very wealthy man.  A man who worked on the trams, Christy Broe from Templeogue, had brought up Jingler.  Now when Jingler was young, he became a dairyman and bought himself a motor bike with a sidecar and two ten-gallon churns. That's how he started off, but he ended up a multimillionaire. He bought the Jobstown Inn at one time and put a brother of Christy’s into it to run it for him- 'The Phantom Broe', an officer who had been in the British Army and had come home after the war. The Jingler only had The Jobstown a wet day and he sold it.  Later in life he married a girl who worked for Kavanagh’s of Templeogue, but because he was so old he hadn't any children or family, so I don't know who he left all his money to!

The Jobstown Inn was closed-up for much of the 1930s as was most of the pubs around Tallaght at that time. Only two of pubs stayed open throughout the 1930- The Convent (Dragon Inn) and Mick Delaneys over in Firhouse.

Porters (Aherne’s) in Old Bawn, Kennedy’s (Old Mill) on the corner; The Cuckoo’s (Nest) and Molloy’s were all closed up for a time in the ‘thirties.  There was no population in Tallaght at that time and money was scarce.  The price of a pint was only six-pence but men wouldn't have it to drink.  Ordinary men wouldn’t know the inside of a pub until a Saturday night and then he would only have two, maybe three pints. You wouldn't get two pounds, a man's wages out of a pub at that time.

John Kennedy and his wife had the pub on the corner (The Old Mill).  John’s brother Andy had The Embankment and I used to give his sister a lift into work, a clothes shop on Capel Street.  I remember John very well, one leg is all he had, so he had to go around in a horse and trap.  John and the wife ended up losing the pub, because their son Seamus, was a bit of a wild man- fond of the dogs and the drink.  He had gone off to Canada, but every now and then he would return and start squandering the profits, so eventually the bank repossessed the pub.

Tom Burke started working there in 1945, the day the Americans dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. He was only about 15 years old at the time.  Mrs Kennedy took Tom on to give a hand, and he was there about two years when the bank repossessed the pub from the Kennedy’s and put him in charge.  It took him a few years to clear the debt but when he did the bank gave him the option of buying it out.  Tom worked very hard in that pub, seven days a week.

Paddy Porter and his mother had the pub in Oldbawn in the 30s, but it only had a six day licence, as had Mick Delaney’s and Mitchell’s Pub in Rockbrook.  One of Mick’s uncles, Bobby Delaney had The Cuckoo’s Nest at one time.

I was only 15 years of old when I started driving lorries for a living.  My uncle had three lorries of his own so that’s how I became interested in them.  I worked in Mick O' Brien's garage, beside Flood’s Public House in Terenure, until the war broke out in  1939.  I went into driving Lorries full time then until I went into CIE in 1947.  There was a lot of men on the lorries in Tallaght at that time. There was ‘Hairy’ Lawless, Jack Smullen from down Pig Lane in Templeogue and Tom Watkins.  Tom had two or three lorries.  One was a big six-wheeled Morris Lorry. My Uncle had an Albion, a Thornycroft and a Fiat.  Most of the quarrying at that time would be done during the summer months,  for the spraying of the roads.

There wasn't the money spent on roads then so there wasn't the capacity for work in the quarries during the winter. I used to drive to the stone crusher on Kennedy's Corner.  McCreath, Taylor & Company had that there for years. The men would draw local stone from the quarries in Woodtown or De Selby.  Dudley Dolan was the manager up in Woodtown Quarry.

Quarrymen at Oldbawn stone crusher, Circa 1920s. Up to 300 men worked in the local quarries. Stone would be transported by lorry to the stone-crusher at Oldbawn Bridge for breaking

I went into CIE in '47, the year of the second Big Snow. Nothing moved for three months with the height of the snow. It was frightening to the world!  When the snow cleared the army had to come out to Tallaght to bury the cattle, there were that many dead. 

Ned Finnegan with his lorry in Colbert's Fort, 1950

I started driving buses with Tim Sullivan (His father had been one of the Tram Drivers in Tallaght in the early days),  along with Christy Preston, Christy Sweeney, Anthony Heron and Jack Breslin. Christy Preston and Anthony Heron lived in Colberts Fort, by the aerodrome.

There were two types of tram that came to Tallaght before they ended in '32. One was called ‘The Large Player'.  It had an engine on each end of it, so it wouldn't have to turn and could hold about twenty people. It was like a single-decker bus.  ‘The Large Player’ would run from Terenure to Jobstown.  The other tram was a Ford Model T- 'The Match Box', we called it.  That would only run from Terenure to Tallaght and could only hold eight or ten people.

I remember one Sunday night the conductor, Jimmy Jones, got killed on the tram. I know it was a Sunday night, because we were going to school the next morning, and it was the talk of the town. There was a 'siding' at one time, where the supermarket  (Old H Williams) is now in the village, for the trains to pull in. It was coming out of the 'siding' when Jimmy Jones fell down the stairs and ended up between two of the carriages.

Saturday 19th September, 1931

When a person died at that time, there wasn't so much of going to the chapel. The person would be waked in the house and the priest would come over with the candles and say the De Profundis and the prayers for the dead over the body in the house. It was your moral duty to go to a wake, so the house would be packed, it would be like a wedding!

I was lucky in a way of life, considering I got no education.  I can’t remember when I didn’t drive.

 Albert Perris

(Memoirs (Edited) as set down in recorded audio interviews over several evenings, with Albert Perris in the home of Bill Finnegan, Maelruain's Park, Tallaght, Co. Dublin in 1999.  First published by Tallaght Welfare Society in “Since Adam was a Boy- An Oral Folk History of Tallaght (Perris, A., TWS, 1999).

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