Limerick village says final farewell to post office

IT was, by any measure, a day of emotional highs and lows as Majella Ryan closed the door for the last time on her Knocklong post office.

From last Friday evening, the post office which she had run for 37 years was no more and her customers must now go to Elton or further afield to do their business.

“I am lonely. I have done a bit of crying this week,” Majella told the Limerick Leader from her cosy office where everything was always at hand and customers have always been welcome to rest their bones on the three-piece suite plonked across from  the counter.

“I do love my people, my customers. We have great camraderie. I get on great with them and I will miss them,” Majella said.

She was, she added, embarrassed and humbled by the sheer number of flowers, cards, candles, crystal and wine which were being dropped into her all through her last week. And on the last day itself, dozens of neighbours,  friends and long-standing customers dropped in to wish Majella well in her retirement.

“I am calling on her to wish her well and to thank her for everything she has done,” Michelle O’Carroll said. “We will miss her terribly. She is a big loss to the community.”

It was a sentiment repeated time and time again on Friday, often by people with tears in their eyes as they contemplated a future with yet another service gone and without Majella’s smiling, upbeat and caring personality  at the heart of it.

“It is a huge loss. It has been the heart of the community,” Yvette Meagher said, her voice breaking.

As somebody who does not drive and who needs crutches to get about, she feels the loss very deeply.

“This is the community’s centre.”

“We are going to miss her. She is such a great lady and always very helpful,” said Theresa Houlihan who walked to the post-office each week for her pension. Now, she will have to get someone to drive her to a neighbouring office as she doesn’t drive herself.

“It is fine for me who has a car,” said pensioner Eileen Fitzpatrick.

“But for people who are walking it is difficult.”

“We will always remembers when the post office closed,” declared Shamie Ryan. “Every time we think of the All-Ireland and the Liam McCarthy, we will think of the post office closing.”

The biggest  problem, Mr Ryan pointed out, was not so much the distance to the next nearest post office but  the fact there was no public transport. What are the people living in the nearby sheltered houses supposed to do, he asked?  A round-trip by hackney car could cost anything up to €20, he pointed.

But although the sense of  loss hung heavy on Friday, Majella’s friend Pauline Walsh and  her sisters Colette and Mary along with other friends, had prepared a royal send-off for her. With teas and coffees, sandwiches,  wine and even glasses of bubbly to choose from, the party spilled out into the garden.

“For Majella it is ok,” her life-long friend Pauline said, voicing the widespread feeling that Majella deserved her retirement package. “But for the community, it is not. We do need our post office in our community.”

Knocklong was once home to a bakery, a creamery, a hotel and railway station, along with several pubs, shops and coalyards, she pointed. Now there is now just one shop in the village, a bar and a bar restaurant and Dooley’s Cars are the biggest employers in the area. “We are becoming like a deserted America.”

There was, she felt strongly, little or no support for rural communities. Instead, more and more, people are being forced into towns and urban areas.

Majella Ryan is one of seven postmasters and postmistresses in Limerick and 159  around the country who accepted the retirement package brokered earlier this year between An Post and the Irish Postmasters Union which has spelt the end of post offices in these communities.

Like so many others who held the post, Majella has seen a lot of changes since she took over the job from her dad in 1983. Then, she would have had to empty the post box two, and sometimes three, times a day. And like her colleagues, she kept an eye out for those who didn’t turn up and would ring them or a neighbour to make sure everything was alright.

But Majella’s post office career  is unique in that she has been the victim of not just one armed robbery but three.

The first was in 1993 when she was setting out to bring her son Damien to school. A man, wearing a balaclava and  carrying a gun and who had been lying in wait for her, jumped a nearby wall, pointed the gun at her and  demanded the money that had just been delivered to the post office.

The second time, a car reversed up to the post-office, three men hopped out, one of them with a gun,  and kicked in the post-office door. One of them held Majella against the wall, the second was at the door while the third man stood by the counter. The safe was locked but they took whatever money was in the drawer before making off.

On the third occasion, in 2006, a customer was in the office when a man arrived in, bought a few stamps and left. But then, another man appeared,  dressed iin black and wearing a balaclava, waving a machete over his head and demanding money. (Some media reports afterwards said it was a knife.) The getaway car, with four occupants and a sum of cash from the post office, made off in the Bruff direction but was later intercepted by gardai. 

These incidents, Majella acknowledged, left their mark. “When I came out here every morning, the first thing I would do is look over the wall,” she recalled last week. And she never answered her door at night.

This experience is now, happily,  behind her and a new life of retirement beckons, where she plans to play more bridge, make good use of her new gym membership and hopefully get to travel more. Her burning ambition is to visit Japan but she would love to join Francis Brennan on one of his tours.

Francis, are you listening?