The Memoirs of Willie Kennedy of Greenhills

The Memoirs of Willie Kennedy of Greenhills

Mr. Willie Kennedy 1999 (Photo: Mr. Louis Fagan)

Willie Kennedy was born in Greenhills Village outside Tallaght in 1917, in a small house that once stood beside the Cuckoo’s Nest.  He lived with his four brothers and four sisters, but at nighttime he and one of this brothers slept in the house across the road in which his grandfather had been born, as their own home was too small.  Although the village of Greenhills was long gone, Willie could still remember many of the families who had lived there in the 1920s.  After working in Guinness for 40 years Willie played a leading role in establishing the first Credit Union in Tallaght in 1969 of which he served as first Chairman. He served as first full time manager there from 1980 to 1989.  He was Honorary Treasurer and President of the National Association of the Mentally Handicapped and was on the board of management of Cheeverstown from 1974 to 1998.

"WD Handcock, in his History (and antiquities) of Tallaght describes Tymon Castle as being between the villages of Greenhills and Balrothery but most people don't know there was a village in Greenhills. At one time there were over sixteen dwelling houses between the Cuckoo’s Nest Roadhouse and the junction for Ballymount. At the end of the last century over 27 families gave their address as Greenhills for the purpose of births or marriages in the Parish of Rathfarnham.  At that time Greenhills Village was probably bigger than Tallaght Village! Many of the family names associated with Greenhills such as Rossiter, Staunton, Kavanagh and Kennedy are predominantly Wexford names and I suspect a lot of the families in Greenhills had come up from Wexford around the period of 1798 after the turmoil down there.

There were a number of Kennedy families in Greenhills since 1775, many not related, though my own family has been here since 1807. My great-grandfather married in 1847, the year of the famine, and lived in a house facing the Cuckoo’s Nest which at that time was a coach-house for people travelling through the area.  Greenhills was mostly a farming community in the early days.  Ambrose Farrell was a big farmer and had most of the land around Kilnamanagh. Many, many families lived in Greenhills, There was the O’ Tooles, Dempseys, Dollards, Corcorans, Kinsellas, Kennedys, McDermotts, Roantrees and Rafters.  The Rafter Family were big dairy farmers and had land all over Dublin: in Ballyfermot, the Coombe, New Street and Mount Pleasant and had a lot of land all over Greenhills and Tymon. They had a yard on Aungier Street in town, facing Whitefriar Street Church and during the winter they would bring all the cattle in there.

One of my earliest memories is of a big fire on Rafter's farm when I was only three or four years of age, and my father’s house nearly going up in flames.  It had only been a one-roomed house, but my father had built a thatched room on to it. It was the night after a threshing had taken place on Rafter's Farm- the whole haggart went up and the corn and hay was blazing away.  A terrible wind blew up that night, a great gale from a south-easterly direction, and all the blazing hay begun to blow over on to our house.  As the night went on, all the neighbours came out, the Allens and all the dairy-farmers living in Rafter’s yard, and they gathered buckets of water to dampen the thatched roof on my father's house.  Luckily, there was a big tree that stood between our house and the fire and a lot of the flaming hay and blazing corn was caught by that. But anything that wasn't ended up caught in the thatch!  

Shortly after the fire my father had the thatched roof taken off and had slate put on instead.  After the fire, there were three theories as to how it could have happened. One was that tramps sleeping in Rafter's barn had dropped a cigarette. Another theory was that, because of the threshing the day before, a spark from the thresher lay smouldering in the hay and it was re-ignited when the wind came.  The last theory suggested that there may have been a connection between the fire and the Civil War, which was going on around then.  The fire on Rafter's farm was around the same time as the Courthouse being burnt down in Tallaght Village and that too was thought to have been connected with the Civil War or the Black and Tans.

The Courthouse was a big red-bricked building, beside the Old Tallaght National School in which I went to school, where the County Council yard is now (1998). I remember myself and my father walking up to mass one Sunday morning and finding the Courthouse burnt to the ground.  


As a child, I would often walk up the Greenhills road, up to Bancroft house to get some milk, or into the village to get some groceries.  William O'Neill had the main grocery shop in the village at that time, up at the top of the village facing the pub on the corner (The Dragon).  A man by the name of Johnny Odlum, who used to go around in a pony and trap worked in O' Neills shop, and it was reputed that he had been a witness to the Phoenix Park Murders of 1882. He had seen the shooting of Cavendish and Burke in the park!  Another family of O' Neills, Larry O' Neill, had the Cuckoo’s Nest when I was a child, and you could get some groceries there but not much, maybe a bit of soap or sugar and some paraffin oil for the lamps.

Stepping-Stones to Clondalkin

A few fields over from the Cuckoo’s Nest was a well that would often flood over during the winter. Now, three or four hundred years before I was born, the boys from the district of Greenhills had to go over to Clondalkin to school in the monastery there, but because the well would flood the path from Greenhills to Clondalkin, the locals laid stepping-stones all the way over, and that area became known as the Clogherauns.  All around Greenhills there were sandpits from which the local men quarried sand and stone.  Half of Dublin was built using the sand drawn from the pits of Greenhills. Where the new motorway crosses the Greenhills Road, that was once a huge sandpit, and the old Tymon lane went above that over to Ballymount, before it was diverted over to the Cuckoo’s Nest in the 1950s. A lot of men from around would have worked in the local sandpits and quarries.

Airton Lodge

A Surgeon, Lentaigne, before the Dominicans came, had owned much of the land around Tallaght. His city residence was what later became Vincent's Hospital on the Green in Dublin. Lentaigne had large amounts of land all over Tallaght but later sold up to the Dominicans. Not far down the Greenhills Road, behind the Priory were two lodges. One was beside the stream that runs behind Gallagher’s Tobacco factory: the Noone Family lived there until one of the daughters married into the Dunnes and then they lived in it.  The other Airton Lodge was further down the Greenhills road. Sean Dempsey the leading Irish Piper lived there. The two lodges belonged to Airton Farm which was where Packard Electric was (built).  The farmyard used to be just where the carpark was.

St. Dominic’s Tallaght Pipe Band

In 1929, as a young lad, I joined Thomas Davis GAA club and played with them in the Under 12s for a few years.  I continued playing until I was 18 or 19 years old, but by then I hadn't the time as I started working in Guinness in town when I was fifteen.  I was playing with the Pipe Band in Tallaght from 1934 until the 1950s when it disintegrated.  I was a founding member of the Tallaght Pipe Band in 1934 and played alongside the Whittys and Kellys from the village and Jack Carroll. Before we had set it up there had been a Fife and Drum band over in Firhouse but there hadn't been a band for Tallaght. We had some success over the years and came second in the first All-Ireland Band Contest held up in Balmoral in Belfast in 1946 and again the following year.

One year when it was held in Iveagh Gardens in Dublin we didn't get placed, after there had been a mix up with one of the adjudicators.  At that time the band competitions were held with the adjudicators ‘under cover’. There would be four adjudicators: two for piping, one for drumming and one for marching and discipline.  He was the only one that wouldn't be 'under cover' because he needed to see what was going on. But he only had a few marks to give so unless the band was very bad his marks couldn't change the result very much anyway! This one year, the draw for the order of playing was made just before the start of the competition and in theory the judges weren't supposed to know what band was playing outside.  So we were about to play when the announcer said "The next band into the arena will be the St. Dominic's band from Tallaght" and everyone looked around and thought “My God! Why is he telling the adjudicators who is coming in next?”  So then the announcer apologised and said “I'm very sorry- I shouldn't have said that! So I will ask that band to retire and we will have them back later in the competition”.  While we were waiting to play, someone said “You can be sure you won't win today, because if you do, people will think you only won because of the mistake! So if you're good or bad you can be sure you won't win today!”  After that we had our minds made up that  we wouldn't win anyway.  Now at that time, it was the habit for the bass drum to lead the band, and he would hold the drum with one hand and beat the drum lightly with the other one.

But that day our bass-drummer, Willie Madden from Ballyfermot said “Well if we're not going to win we might as well lose in style!” and he let loose with the drum and threw his sticks up in the air! We went out with a bang, but we didn’t win that year!

A few years ago, in 1996, I got an invitation from the Royal Scottish Pipe Band to go to Belfast for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1946 competition.  I’m one of the few survivors of the competition left, but I couldn’t go.

St. Dominic's Pipe Band of Tallaght, (with others) circa 1940

A couple of years before setting up the pipe hand in Tallaght I had started working in Guinness- the 1^st of June 1932.  A few men from the district had worked there- Dick Mullally from the village and Ned McCabe and Mr. Redmond from Firhouse. They had all worked there before me, but I was one of the first people to get into Guinness by open competition, straight from the National School in Tallaght. Mr Manning from the village was the Principal for the boy’s school and his assistant was Ms Casey from Edmundstown.  Ms Little, who also lived in the village, looked after the girls’ school with the help of Ms Wogan from Knocklyon.

I was only in Guinness a year when the bad snow came in '33, so I couldn't cycle into work in the morning because of the ice-  I'd have to walk into town and walk back every day.  There was no other way to get into town at that time.  Because I was 15 when I started in Guinness I was considered 'A boy'.  In Guinness' at that time, you were a boy until you were 18 years old.  Then until you were 21 you were called 'A Lad', and after that you were 'A Man'. There was three types of Boys: Boy Labourers, Boy Messengers and Boy Laboratory attendants. I went in as a Boy Messenger in the internal postal service and was there for a few months before being put into the Accounts Department.  I worked in Guinness for 40 years, up until the time I retired in 1972, having spent most of my time there in the engineers department. In 1941, I was asked to join the Internal Fire-Brigade, so after the training I ended up doing a number of weeks full-time service with the City fire-brigade during the war.  I got married in 1940, and moved into one of the little cottages on the Greenhills Road three years later.  The two little cottages facing Kilnamanagh had been built in 1907, on ground given to the County Council by Alderman Flanagan, on the condition that two of his workers got the houses. They were given to the Stauntons and Jim Dunne, my grandmothers' second husband, after her first husband had died young.

At that time, when someone died, they were very rarely taken to the church. They would be waked in the house and would be buried straight from there as there was no such thing as funeral homes then. A wake would be an all-night affair, maybe two nights.  I remember in 1933 a bachelor from down the road died and they went to bury him. They carried the corpse up to the graveyard in Tallaght (there was no hearses at that time), but when they arrived they discovered that the grave hadn't been opened yet, so they just left the corpse in the shed overnight so he could be buried the next day.  On the rare occasions when a corpse was taken to the church up in Tallaght, in accordance with the tradition of the time, on the way to the graveyard the funeral would come down the village and around Cunningham's garden (Esso garage), before going up to the graveyard for the corpse to be buried. The Cunninghams lived there for years; Thomas Cunningham was a character- he played the melodeon at weddings around the district, or would provide the music for a half-set in someone's house. 

At that time there were a number of Dance Halls around Tallaght. Doyle’s Dance Hall was at the top of the village, where the snooker hall is now (1998), and Byrne's Dance hall was up on the Kiltipper Road. There was another Dance Hall off the Old Bawn Road, where Seskin View is now. Up a little slip road about 200 yards, Muldoons had a Dance Hall there for years.  We would often go to the Library in Clondalkin or the Mills in Saggart for a ceili, or Rathmines Town Hall or the Mansion House. You would get to know people from Milltown or Dundrum and Inchicore. People would travel from all over the city for a ceili at that time".

Albert Perris

(Memoirs (Edited) as set down in recorded audio interviews over several evenings, with Albert Perris in the home of Willie Kennedy, Greenhills Road, Tallaght, Dublin 24, in 1999.  First published by Tallaght Welfare Society in “Since Adam was a Boy- An Oral Folk History of Tallaght (Perris, A., TWS, 1999).

Share, like and subscribe