By Terry Reilly (c)

IT’S hard to believe that during my working life with the Western People I worked with three men who were on the payroll of the paper when it hit the streets around lunch time every Friday - all going well of course with the temperamental old Foster press in Arran Street in Ballina back in the 1920s!

God be good to them, they were Billy Gallagher, who had joined the paper as a 14 year old in 1926, Tommy Battle, Pat Kneafsey and Michael Conmee who had fought in the Great War. They in turn had worked alongside my great grandfather, Terence Devere, his son, Ernest (my grandfather), and his sons, Vincie and Teddy (my uncles).

The Foster press did not slit the pages, so the paper really came in one big chunk of newsprint containing 8 pages, and was known as ‘the tablecloth’, for it had to be spread on the table to be read or slit.

By Terry Reilly (c)

2008

Leo Tolstoy did not have to have to dig too deep into his creative brain to come up with the title War and Peace for his masterpiece spun around life in Russia during the Napoleonic era.

For life, since time began, has be a continium of war and peace, blood, savagery, trickery, corruption, tribalism, a power-and-wealth-warlust that rages on to this very day in many of the world’s trouble spots. And, no doubt, will continue into the future, with the outbreak of peace in one region closely followed by a bloody outbreak in another.

The Romans, Ghengis Khan, the Huns and the Barbarians amongst others gave many innocent bystanders good reason to be afraid. Fortunately, those warlords didn’t reach our shores, but one Oliver Cromwell did and in his ruthlessness put thousands to the sword, and ran our best and bravest from the land and into the arms of European armies anxious to recruit men of valour.

The fighting Irish became as famous throughout Europe as our country was for its saints and scholars.

Of course, Cromwell took chunks of Connaught and gave it to his ironside soldiers as reward for their blood-thirsty efficiency. (That land grab bubbled under the surface for a couple of hundred years before Parnell and Davitt and the Land League movement of James Daly struck a chord that this time would not be silenced).