Kilkenny Memories: SOS - Social Services are in the red!

The Kilkenny Social Services are in the red! Finances were never as bad and money is urgently needed to maintain and expand what has become the prototype for voluntary social services throughout the country.

Income, including grants, for the year ended September 1973, was £27,092 while the estimated expenditure for 1974 is £39,696.

In the past 11 years the Social Services have grown into a huge organisation now employing 44 people, with well over 200 people contributing their services voluntarily on a part-time basis.

And there are plans to expand further - but money is required.

Now, as the Social Service organisation was formed in 1963 to co-ordinate and, where necessary, supplement existing voluntary services, a special committee has been set up to ’assess, co-ordinate and extend where possible the fund raising activities of the Services’.

Two elderly Kilkennymen whose trades are dying slowly but surely, have brought their skills to the rescue of a State body. As the Board of Works searched for a wheelwright for a Government-kept windmill they persuaded 73-year-old Kilkenny wheelwright Jim Brennan to come out of retirement.

Jim is one of Ireland’s two living full-time wheelwrights (the second is in Armagh). The craft is almost dead.

The wooden wheel was fashioned by Jim Brennan and a namesake John Brennan from the Kells Road, who agreed to complete the work. Blacksmith John shod the wheel at his forge in Evan’s Lane.

It had been almost 10 years since wheelwright Jim worked on a wheel. It had almost been as long since 60-year-old John had shod a cart wheel.

Together they completed the wheel which will be a vital part of the mechanism of a windmill at Tacumshane, Co Wexford. The wheel was made for the National Parks and Monuments branch of the Board of Works who are restoring the mill which is used for grinding corn.

FOR MORE LOCAL NEWS, CLICK HERE

The wheel is almost twice the size of a normal cart wheel. It is six feet in diameter, has 14 wooden spokes and is bound with a steel band. Wheelwright Jim, who learned his craft from a Peter Farrell of Higginstown, Kilkenny more than 50 years ago, was delighted to get the chance to show his skills again.

“I nearly had it all forgotten,” he joked, “but soon it all came back.”