The Clare Champion Clare news, sport, entertainment and local notes
Open in one form or another for two centuries, Keane’s shop in Gort has survived booms, busts, the war of independence, the civil war, the world wars, the dawn of electricity, the online revolution, pay parking and everything in between. Now as owner Colman Keane looks to the future, he recalls a few tales from the past including one about WB Yeats, the shop’s best-known debtor – albeit, he says, that story may involve a “small amount of poetic license”. Of Down and Derry ancestry, the Keane family arrived in the town from Craughwell around 1812. “As Napoleon was retreating from Moscow, we were attacking Gort,” Colman laughs. “Our first establishment was on the Galway Road. We had a cinema there for the silent movies in the latter part of the 19th century. That building is still there, derelict practically, and we moved to Bridge Street a short time later to the site where we are now,” he outlines. Today …
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