There Are Places I Remember

John McDonald Bellevue Hill SUN7NOV21

t would be exhausting and more than a little depressing to try and list all the changes currently circling Delgany.

With pretty much every patch of green battling its way through the planning stages, a one-way about to be trialed through the main thoroughfare and a main road about to be widened,  this is a village being shot at from all sides.

If you’d like to find out exactly what the bull ate in this story, you can check out our Delgany news section here.

This afternoon, we sat down with fellow Delganite John McDonald to try and understand what’s coming out of the other end of the bull. And where this might actually leave the village in five or ten years time.

There are, of course, plenty of good people – such as Alice O’Donnell, Patti Schnably Shields and Paul Armstrong – fighting the good fight on keeping Delgany intact, but there’s very little chance that the current development on the old Carmelite fields won’t go ahead in one form or another. By which time Wicklow County Council will have finally completed their goal of stuffing a medium-sized town inside a tiny village.

Not that we sat down with John Mc today to point fingers, or to indulge in any banjo-led banshee wailing about the past. We just reckoned that it might be wise to take stock of a disappearing Delgany at this somewhat crucial point in its history, as just about every landowner around seems to be cashing in their chips.

We had hoped to have loco historian Shay Clear with us this evening, but the town guru proved to be a little camera-shy today. Shame, as he shares a love – and a deep knowledge – of Delgany’s past with young John.

Undeterred, we headed across from the old McDonald family home in the convent field, two fold-out chairs under our arms, to dance at the crossroads…

As we left, John mentioned that he’d just written an ode to his home village – so, we popped it on one of his own images, and here it is.