ON Wednesday next in The Falls Hotel, Ennistymon at 6pm, Flan Garvey, who served on Clare County Council from 1985 to 2009, will launch his self penned book, Inside Minds North and South.
The book depicts his role in initiating the twinning of Clare County Council with Newry and Mourne District Council in 1988.
Mr Garvey recalled a talk he gave to the twinning group in Ennistymon to mark the 21st anniversary.
“I said imagine a man like me, a teacher, giving examples to others, sitting down watching television and being delighted when I saw that British soldiers had been killed. That’s kind of unforgivable and I thank God I got time to get forgiveness.
“A great friend, Tom McLean said to me afterwards that he was thinking exactly the same from the opposite side. ‘We were both wrong, Flan’,” he said, and we shook hands.
The retired school principal vividly recalls attending a July 12 Orange Order parade in Kilkeel, County Down in 1990.
“It was hot stuff. It was so hot that the night before, Henry Reilly, an Ulster Unionist councillor, said to me, ‘will you do me a favour and not march tomorrow in Kilkeel?’ He said that his life and mine would both be in danger if I did,” Mr Garvey recalled.
“On the night of the official twinning meeting, a councillor, George Graham, welcomed the people from ‘a foreign country’. I spotted him coming down the street marching with his sash and the hat. I left the footpath and shook his hand. We became great friends as a result of that,” he recalled.
By Peter O’Connell
A native of Ennis, Colin McGann has been editor of The Clare Champion since August 2020. Former editor of The Clare People, he is a journalism and communications graduate of Dublin Institute of Technology.