Asdee, 14 February 1985
The moving statues
It was a Thursday afternoon. Two small girls — they were seven and nine — went into the Church of St. Mary in Asdee on their way home from school and came out saying that the statue of the Sacred Heart had beckoned them with its hand and that the eyes of the statue of the Virgin Mary had moved. Their parents brought them back. Other children and then adults said the same. By the weekend, the story was on the radio. By the following week, the cars were lining the N69 for a kilometre in either direction. Tens of thousands of people came over the next month and a half. Some saw something. Most did not. The parish priest let people in to look but did not himself claim a miracle. The Bishop of Kerry, Kevin McNamara, asked the faithful to be cautious. By Easter the crowds were thinning. By summer the story had moved on to Ballinspittle. The statues never moved again. They are still in the church.
The summer of '85
Ballinspittle and after
Asdee was the first; Ballinspittle in west Cork was the one that went global. From late July 1985, a roadside grotto on the way out of the village drew nightly crowds of up to ten thousand for a Marian statue people said was rocking and breathing. After Ballinspittle, reports came in from grottos and churches at thirty-odd other places that summer — Mitchelstown, Mount Melleray, Carns, Courtmacsherry. Two University College Cork psychologists later put it down to the optical illusion of staring at an unmoving figure in fading light, the rosary said in unison amplifying suggestion. The country was eight months on from the death of Ann Lovett in a Granard grotto, two and a half years on from the 1983 abortion referendum, deep in a recession with emigration high. The statues stopped moving when the conditions stopped. Asdee was the first crack in the dam.
Jack Walsh Park
North Kerry GAA
Asdee GAA was reformed in 1986 — a year after the moving statues, which is its own kind of village folklore — and the pitch is named for Jack Walsh, a North Kerry footballer of the 1930s. The club punches above its size. John Kennedy of Asdee won three senior All-Ireland football medals with Kerry in the 1980s. Paudie and Éamonn O'Donoghue, brothers from the parish, won two each. North Kerry plays its own county-style championship under the North Kerry Board, which is older than the GAA's official county structure and has never quite been folded into it. On a championship Sunday, the village is full of cars again, and nobody is looking at the church.
N69, Tarbert, Killimer
The road and the ferry
The N69 runs from Limerick down through Foynes and Glin and across the county line to Tarbert and Listowel and on to Tralee. Asdee sits on it, between Tarbert four kilometres to the north and Ballylongford four kilometres to the south. The road is the reason the village exists in the shape it does — a string of houses along a main road, a square set back, a church on the rise. Five kilometres up the road at Tarbert, the Shannon car ferry crosses to Killimer in Clare every half hour. The crossing has been running since 1969. It saves a hundred-and-thirty-kilometre drive round through Limerick and it puts Loop Head and the Cliffs of Moher inside an hour. Most strangers in Asdee are passing through. The village does not mind.