The lovely Comeragh mountains are visible from pretty much anywhere you look when in Co Tipperary’s county town, Clonmel. The Suir river runs through Clonmel itself: two assets of natural beauty any town would surely be happy to have. It’s population in the last census in 2022 was 18,369.
During the time I spend in the town (a few weeks before Tipperary’s historic All Ireland hurling victory), every person I talk to eventually comes out with an identical statement: something they collectively confess they learned in primary school. “Clonmel was the biggest inland town in Ireland.” The first person I hear it from is estate agent Pat Quirke, whose family have occupied the same premises on Gladstone Street for decades.
“But while we are the county town, we are definitely not the biggest inland town any more,” he says. Quirke, who has spent his entire working life in Clonmel, points out that the town always had a good percentage of a transient population. “We had multinational organisations here early on. Digital. Boston Scientific. There’s a big engineering footprint in the town. There was a large influx of people from outside the town as well, who lived and worked here. Unlike a lot of other Irish towns, we had immigration long before they did. From the early 2000s, we had Lithuanian, Polish and Indian people.”
A transient population has meant the rental market in Clonmel was long the strongest of any town in the county. He fetches a ledger which has handwritten entries, and consults the records within. In 1989, he tells me, it was IR£270 a month to rent a four bed in the town, and IR£140 for a three bed.
RM Block
Quirke consults the ledger again. “To buy in 1989, a four-bed bungalow was £55,000 punts, a three-bed semi was £31,500 and a four-bed detached new house was £54,000.”
And today? “There’s been a 10-fold increase. The average is €300,000 for a three-bed second-hand house. And all the while, new properties are getting smaller, as are gardens, because higher density development is favoured. That’s when anything gets built.”
I’ve noticed that the former Clonmel Arms Hotel now, partly demolished aside from some striking facades, has left a literal huge absence at the centre of the town. The hotel itself closed in 2005.
“Clonmel feels abandoned at the moment by people who should be trying to develop the town,” Quirke says. “I see no initiative to further develop the town centre.” He points out the empty Market Place shopping centre, which I had walked through to get to his office, noticing several shuttered units as I did so. “People got a deal on rates for 10 years, and then the exemption ceased about 2009, and shops started shutting down one by one. It was very shortsighted.” He shakes his head. “Then what happened? Permission was given for the Showgrounds, an out-of-town shopping centre. Why not redevelop something already existing?”
It’s true that there are several vacant premises in the town centre, but it’s also true that those that are operating have plenty of charm. Many lovely original shop fronts still exist. The paint shop, Power & Co. The double-fronted J Hickey “Fancy Bakery”. At Bob Fitzgerald’s Hardware, the pavement outside has a display of everything you could possibly need for your garden without going to a generic out-of-town outlet: lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, compost, flower pots, ladders.
At Martin’s well-stocked Fruit and Vegetables shop, there’s a chalkboard sign outside saying Dungarvan strawberries have arrived. “They can have more Vit C than oranges!” the board declares. Inside, I find a stand with Blanco Nino tortilla chips, and realise they are made in the town. The chips are new to me, so I buy a large pack of Chilli and Lime to try them out. (Two days later while on holiday, when I produce the bag along with some salsa, family members devour the chips in under five minutes.)
The striking West Gate archway at the end of O’Connell Street has a stone plaque set into it, marking the fact that novelist Laurence Sterne was born in the town in 1713. Sterne went on to write The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, often described as the first modern novel.
When I go to take a picture of the plaque, I realise my phone is missing. I retrace my steps and find that a customer at Martin’s had handed it in to the shopkeeper, after finding it by the Blanco Nino stand, where I had set it down during my happy deliberations on which chip flavour to choose.
At The Hub, a large cafe and deli, I meet Michelle Aylward and Noel Buckley. Aylward is the chief executive of Co Tipperary Chamber of Commerce and Buckley is chair of the town team. There are 600 members across the county, and 100 in Clonmel town. I ask them if people ever make a point these days of formally referring to Clonmel as “the county town.”
“No,” they answer in unison. “But growing up, it was known as the largest inland town in Ireland,” Aylward says.
“Something we were all told at school,” Buckley adds.
“There was always investment in the town,” Aylward says. “This town, with its rich agricultural hinterland, became a centre of commerce before the Famine when the Quakers settled here. The Grubbs were one of those families. They helped the Irish during the Famine. They invested money back into the community. The river Suir was the town’s highway prior to mechanised transport.”
“In the 1980s, the unemployment rate was at 38 per cent in many towns in Ireland, but in Clonmel, it was 17 per cent,” Buckley says, citing companies such as Digital, Bulmers and Clonmel meats.”
What about the town now?
“Town centres are changing all over Ireland, “Alyward says. “There are a high number of vacant properties in Clonmel town centre now; 17 per cent. There about 10 people living on O’Connell Street, but the ambition is to have 60 or 70 people living on the street again.”
The town has a regeneration officer, who is currently looking at how to develop and update vacant spaces over shops. This process is deeply complicated by modern planning regulations.
What does Clonmel need to survive and thrive in 2025?
“People in the town centre,” the two agree. “It needs to be a place where people come to socialise with each other,” Buckley says.
Sligo, for instance, has long made much of its connections with poet WB Yeats. Has Clonmel looked at how they might highlight the town’s connection with Laurence Sterne?
“No,” Buckley says. “But maybe it will now. Clonmel was making so much money until the crash, it didn’t need to think about attracting tourists.”
Clonmel has an island in the centre of the town; Suir Island, where a camper van park has been established in the past year, Buckley tells me.
Later, I cross the bridge and walk around Suir Island. Sure enough, there are a number of campervans parked at their designated spaces, close to all the town’s facilities.
Marie McMahon is the managing curator at the lovely Tipperary Museum of Hidden History in Clonmel, and has lived all her life in the town. “Growing up, we always knew we were the county town. There was always a sense of pride and identity. We knew we were the largest inland town in Ireland. We weren’t a city, but we had a big heart.”
The museum opened in 2000, and was the first such custom-built county museum in the State. It focuses on items local to Co Tipperary.
“We have 20,000 items, with about 1,000 on show,” says McMahon. At the time of visiting, she is in the process of setting up a social history exhibition on the 1980s, with its terrible fashion and great music. The exhibition includes a special tribute to the late Vincent “Fab Vinnie” Hanley. A Clonmel native, Hanley scattered rare stardust upon Ireland’s recession and emigration era of the 1980s by appearing on Music Television USA.
We stop at a glass case. Inside is a thick hand-knit white woollen jumper, striped with green, with “Tipperary” in yellow stitched across the chest. “This is one of the museum’s most popular items,” McMahon explains. It was “allegedly” worn at some point by Tipperary Gaelic footballer Michael Hogan, who was shot dead by British forces at Croke Park on November 21st, 1920: Bloody Sunday.
Outside the museum, there’s a bronze statue of the late tenor Frank Patterson, who was born in Clonmel in 1938. “It is given in loving memory by his many friends and admirers in the United State of America and Canada,” an inscription reads, along with another which says the plinth was provided by “Clonmel Borough Council.”
Joe Ormonde works as a chauffeur for small visiting groups of tourists, mainly Americans, with the rest of the cohort composed of Canadians. “Anything from two to six people. I pick them up in Dublin and drive them around.” He’s currently driving five women friends from Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas around the south and southwest. Ormonde has lived locally in his original family home all his life, and seen the town change significantly over time.
“All the shops in town were full back in the day. Clonmel was thriving. Now some of them are vacant. Moroney’s has just closed. [A shoe shop in a landmark building on O’Connell Street, established in 1908, which ceased trading this summer.] I used to buy shoes there. Shops are critical for a town. Clonmel was a very thriving town. It has lost some of its county-town clout, but local politicians and councillors wouldn’t want to admit that.”
“There were four nightclubs in Clonmel in the 1980s and now there is not even one,” he says. “The Clonmel Arms hotel. The Minella Hotel. Barry’s on the Main Street. Danno’s. You could hardly get in the door there, it was always mobbed.”
According to Ormonde, more than 20 pubs have closed since the 1980s. One of them is the atmospheric, but derelict, R O’Donnell’s Select Bar on O’Connell Street. Might it be a business opportunity for one of Ireland’s newest residents, the American former talkshow host Rosie O’Donnell?
Next week: Rosita Boland visits Carlow
