A hard-working family man, Eric Roche of Skeaugh, Callan, was a great friend to all

I was in the final puffs of my daily programme of 7,000 steps on Saturday, January 7 when a great friend slowed and wound down the window of his car and just said quite simply, as if he was telling me the result of a race or the time of a match, ‘Eric’s gone’.

Psychologically, I was hoping that I wasn’t too late as I whispered to the skies ‘Good luck kiddo, I hope she has the kettle on for you’. The ‘she’ was the love of his life, Frances, who had gone ahead of him on All Souls Day some 11 years ago.

We had been friends for a very long time, a friendship that was nurtured when Eric, Frances and the children returned from London around the same time as Kitty, our kids and myself in the early ’70s. We hadn’t known each other but we were very familiar with the GAA and the GAA family in London. It didn’t take too long for our friendship to blossom.

This obituary is somewhat more poignant than usual for me, given our friendship over many years. Eric was the first-born of Danny and Kitty Roche who resided in Prologue. He was predeceased by his brother Marty and sister Bea Donovan and is survived by his two sisters, Mary Walsh in Windgap and Pat Anderson in Freshford.

Like all youngsters of the ’50s and ’60s, Eric’s boyish carefree adventures had him swimming in the Kings River, raiding orchards and defending the historical Moate against Cromwell’s armed forces. He loved the cowboy films in Egan’s Cinema. He and his cousin Anthony Roche would sneak into the cinema with their own inimitable brand of subterfuge.

All was quiet until the ‘bad lads’ started shooting at the ‘good lads’, whereupon the two cousins couldn’t resist taking their cap guns out from under their geansaí and shouting their own scripts of ‘he’s behind you’ or ‘bang, got ’em’ encouragement to the ‘good lads’. Their feet wouldn’t touch the ground as they were caught by the scruff of the neck and ejected out the front door.

He loved visiting during the balmy summer months with his mother’s farming family, the Whytes in Coolnamuck. He was a wonderfully qualified carpenter, having received a much-valued four-year apprenticeship in the workshop of the iconic Carroll’s Joinery factory in Ballintaggart.

London
Still in his teens, Eric decided to emigrate to London even though the management of Carroll’s offered him full-time employment, having been mightily impressed with the quality and attention the young Roche had displayed during his apprenticeship.

He joined the thousands who ‘took the Maud’ from Dun Laoghaire to England in search of a better lifestyle than that afforded at home during the hungry and depressed late Fifties and early Sixties. It certainly was a case of the far-off hills being greener.

Work was plentiful in London. The lifestyle was a welcoming partner. He found a GAA club in North London. Life was better in the ‘big smoke’ than in small town Callan. Of course, he missed Callan, but needs must, and London was the place to satisfy such needs. Gainful employment was plentiful - carpenters were badly needed in a London that was well pockmarked by relics of a world war that had reduced the great metropolis to its knees. And Eric was among many Irish men and women who answered the call.

Eric’s domain was centred around the Irish settlements of North London, Kilburn and Cricklewood. It was probably responsible for the idiosyncratic characteristics that manifested themselves late in his life. He was his own man. He did things the way he wanted to do them.

In quoting Benjamin Franklin, who said that ‘nothing is certain except death and taxes’, his son Conor made the point that his Dad subscribed to both sentiments up to two days before he closed his eyes. With Eric, cash was king.

It certainly was the king in the Crown in Cricklewood or outside the Parish Church on Quex Road after the last Mass on a Sunday.

Eric married Frances in the month of March, 1966. Three of his children, Fiona, Dan and Steven, were born in London before Frances and Eric upped sticks and returned to Callan, where they bought a house in Skeaugh. Eric and his brother Marty, who had also experienced life in London, worked together on the many building sites in Kilkenny on their return.

Eventually, with his friends Barry Ronan and Bernard Connolly, he started his own company, Meadow Homes, towards the end of the Seventies. However, a bank-induced recession hit hard in the early Eighties - many enterprises were forced to close their doors, including Meadow Homes.

Life was tough, but Eric was intuitively smart and clever. He was a great reader of the opening and closing of doors syndrome, and he had a solid, stoic uncompromising woman beside him. They were a good team. Eric lived by the mantra that if there was a problem, there always had to be an answer - the trick was to locate it. How often did I hear him pre-empt a problem with the prefix ‘now there is a problem, but the trick is…’

Being a highly skilled carpenter, Eric saw the ‘trick’ in timber. A hurling man all his life, even when he was away from his beloved John Lockes and Kilkenny, he hit on hurley-making. As all hurling people know, the manufacturing of hurleys is a very specialised craft. With no pun intended, his father Danny (God rest the great man) and I would knock timber at weekends, cut them and clean them before getting them planked.

While Eric’s skill and skills improved, the procreation of ash became increasingly more difficult and time-consuming. However, Eric located a lad who was knocking and planking good ash up the country and so a far more logical solution to an ever-increasing demand could not have been found. Eric Roche Hurleys was born.

Popular
Eric Roche was a ‘Calln’ man (Callan people never pronounce the second A) to the marrow of his bones. Popular and hugely obliging, if he couldn’t do you a good turn a bad one never entered the scope of his mentality. His many contributions to the necessities of his beloved Callan were many and unrecorded. He was hugely involved in the John Lockes GAA club from its beginnings with the Park Development in 1975 to the time he became ill.

He will be missed by a wide range of people, some he probably couldn’t name. Of course, his children will miss their Dad. As Conor eulogised: ‘He was a great Dad who never failed to do his best for us’; Fiona, Daniel, Stephen, Conor and Mairead will have nothing but funny, loving, beautiful memories of a man who never spared himself when it came to doing his unconditional best for their mother (God rest Frances) and them.

His sisters Mary (Walsh) and Pat (Anderson); his brothers-in-law Tom Donovan, Pat Anderson, Tom Dunne, Louis Dunne and sister-in-law Breeda will all have grand memories of the man from Callan. His 12 grandchildren will miss Grandad, while his daughters-in-law Eva, Eileen and Helen, sons-in-law Ciaran and Mike, will also have their father-in-law in high regard.

A huge number of relatives, friends, neighbours and GAA acquaintances paid their final respects to Eric as he reposed in Molloy’s Funeral Home on January 9 and 10. A guard of honour flanked his removal to the Parish Church as Fr Liam Taylor officiated. The Church Music was delightfully presented by organist Michael Hayes and soloist Claire Henriques.

The removal to Kilbride Cemetery was also flanked by a huge number of the John Lockes GAA club. Eric would have been very proud of that. He will be missed. I will miss him.
- BH