Town
The main feature in Abbeyfeale's Square is a statue of Father William Casey. Fr. Casey was the parish priest from 1883 to 1907 and helped the tenant farmers fight against their landlords. The local Gaelic football team is named in his honour (Fr. Caseys GAA Club). Recently the town celebrated the centenary of Fr. Casey's influence by having a Fr. Casey themed St. Patricks Day Parade.
The May Bank Holiday weekend sees the town host the "Fleadh by the Feale" traditional music festival. The 2007 festival was the thirteenth of these annual events. The International Bone Playing Competition is the highlight of the festival and is held on the Bank Holiday Monday evening on the open air stage in the town square.
The town is known for its extensive musical tradition, notably the Celtic progressive-rock musician Lorcan O'Neill being raised in this town with other exponents of traditional music such as Donal Murphy and Eibhlin Healy both living in the town. Others of notoriety include the striker Denis Behan for Cork City and Republic of Ireland U23.
There was a cinema in the town, but this closed in the early 1990s. The remains can be still seen today.
The town previously had an abbey, located in the centre of the town square, but this has since all but disappeared, and the only identifiable remnants are those used in the construction of the Roman Catholic Church in 1847, on the site of the current boys national school on Church street. Church street as it is now know was originally named Chapel street, as can be seen in old period OS maps of the town. The Geraldine Portrinard Castle (or Purt Castle) is situated about 2.5 km northwest of the town, on the northbank of the Feale.
Phil Danaher, Irish Rugby International (28 senior caps) and Gaelic Footballer (Limerick Senior team, Kerry minor team), also grew up in Abbeyfeale. The family of William Webb Ellis, who 'while at school in rugby with a deligthful disregard for the rules picked the ball and ran with it' and whose name is commemorated in the World Cup, also had strong connections with the town.
Future plans for Abbeyfeale have paved the way for the first new street opening since 1880. The new town redevelopment proposal was designed by Conor Dennison, a local architect who himself is originally a native of Abbeyfeale town.
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Famous quotes containing the word town:
“Keen instruments, strung to a vast precision
Bind town to town and dream to ticking dream.”
—Hart Crane (1899–1932)
“If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town sewers. There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the barroom and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don’t care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)