Centenarian promises to stand one for the house

IT’S not easy to rattle Timmy Ryan. Last Friday, the day after his 100th birthday, Timmy’s great grandchildren did their best. Quiet as a mini horde of mice initially, it emerged that the trio were conspiring to blow a few party poppers, which made a fair din but they didn’t shake the man of the house. One of the Knockalough man’s favourite pastimes, along with cross-country running, was shooting wild game. So he’s not unused to the odd outbreak of noise.
His actual birthday, last Thursday, brought a fair bit of excitement with it.
The first thing Timmy had to do was collect 110 birthday cards from Seán Killeen when the postman called. Then his phone started to ring. President McAleese was at the other end of the line giving a buzz to congratulate Timmy. He also heard from Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny.
“He’s sending me a bottle of whiskey he said,” Timmy laughed, sitting in front of the fire in the house he has lived in since 1909.
The President was among the people to send a birthday card, accompanied by a bonus. The financial reward for hitting the century mark is €2,540.
“She won’t let me down,” Timmy said confidently. He already has firm plans for investing the money.
“Well, I’ll go to Kilrush and Kilmihil. I’ve a lot of friends in Kilmihil. I’ve to go there and stand for the house. They know I have the money. You couldn’t get away. They’d be all on top of you,” he maintained.
The third youngest of 12 children, all of whom predeceased him, Timmy went to primary school in Lacken National School. He left the school side of it at that.
“I got enough of it,” he said of the education system. Heading to school from his house, west of the Crossroads Pub on the main Ennis-Kilrush Road, helped Timmy to develop as an athlete.
“We’d run up across the bog with no shoes from once March 1 would come. I had great practice at it because often I’d run up and down,” he remembers.
He ran competitively with Kilrush Athletic Club and won an All-Ireland team title in Belfast in 1938.
At home in Knockalough, he farmed all his life and rarely misses a Kilmihil football match.
Timmy remembers when phone lines were first erected on the road outside his house and the misunderstandings which followed. One neighbour thought that Timmy could hear all phone conversations just because the phone lines were near his house.
“Ah, he said ‘it’s alright now for you. You have the news passing. You hear all the news’. I didn’t know in the devil what he was saying for a long time sure,” Timmy recounted.
Although he wasn’t that keen on fishing, Timmy had a good eye for fowl, while he often trekked to the remote island in the middle of Knockalough Lake.
“There was a castle there. It’s there yet but it’s half knocked,” he noted.
As for the local wildlife, the birds aren’t as plentiful as they used to be.
“The bog was full of every kind of bird. Now you could walk for miles and you wouldn’t rise a bird,” he said. He remembers geese over running Knockalough Lake each November.
“There’d be flocks of them there. It’s a kind of a mystery I suppose,” he suggests with regards as to where they have gone.
Timmy puts his longevity down to life as a farmer and to good genes. His mother, Margaret, lived to 103. A few weeks ago though, Timmy briefly thought that he wouldn’t make the 100 mark. He fell on the ice that had coated the county.
“I thought I was finished. I fell down on the concrete. I couldn’t get up then because when I’d get up, I’d slip another bit,” he reflected before explaining that when he eventually got to his feet, there was no damage done.
“I’d say it was as bad in ’31 or ’32. The roads were blocked. The mail car couldn’t pass or anything,” he said of the weather 70 years ago.
Timmy, who has never travelled abroad, still reads Ireland’s Own without glasses. On the social side, he doesn’t say no to a pint of the black stuff but he knows when to draw the line.
“Very seldom I’d take three pints. I often came home with one only,” he said, adding that two pints was plenty.
A few more party poppers exploded without warning sending Timmy’s great grandchildren into laugher-fuelled hysterics. The drama didn’t knock a stir out of Timmy though. There isn’t much he hasn’t seen or heard at his age. They’ll have to try a bit harder to rattle him.