How a village got rid of a landlord
The plebiscite of 1939
Newtownsandes was named after George Sandes, who held the lands here through the Land War of the 1880s and was remembered, in the local phrase, as a notorious landlord. There had been earlier attempts to shake the name — a brief flirtation with Newtowndillon after John Dillon in 1886, and a 1916 push to call it Newtownclarke after the Easter Rising leader Thomas Clarke. Neither held. In 1939 the parish priest, Father O'Sullivan, ran a proper plebiscite. The villagers chose Maigh Mheáin — the middle plain — over a Gaelicised version of Sandes. Among the first such votes in the new state. Letters addressed Newtownsandes still arrived for years.
A Listowel fair, a Hollywood film
Maurice Walsh and The Quiet Man
Maurice Walsh was born in Ballydonoghue, two miles from Moyvane, on 2 May 1879. He took the civil service exam, joined Customs and Excise, and was posted to the Scottish Highlands, where he spent decades minding whisky distilleries on Speyside. His debut novel The Key Above the Door (1926) sold a quarter of a million copies. The short story "The Quiet Man" appeared in his 1935 collection Green Rushes — drawn, he said, from a bullying incident at Listowel fair and a fight involving a Kerryman called Quiet Jack. John Ford bought the film rights for ten dollars in the 1930s and made the 1952 picture for a great deal more. Walsh retired to Dublin and died in 1964; the President of Ireland came to the Mass.
Eighteen titles and the first one
The Boro
Moyvane GAA — locally the Boro — won the inaugural North Kerry Senior Football Championship in 1925, playing as Newtownsandes. They beat Faha. They went on to take 18 of them, more than any other club in the division: four in a row from 1936 to 1939, three in the early 1960s, the last one in 2003 against Castleisland Desmonds. A run through the slumps and the booms. The pitch is half a mile from the cross. On a championship Sunday the cars line both sides of the road and the pub afterwards is the parish meeting.
What's in the name
The middle plain
Maigh Mheáin means "the middle plain." The townland it refers to lies a mile or two southwest of the village proper — flat north Kerry farmland between the hills of the Stack's Mountains and the estuary at Tarbert. The choice was deliberate: a name from the land itself, older than any landlord. The Christian Brothers ran a school here for generations. The Sacred Heart church sits on the main street. The Marian Hall does the drama, the bingo and the funeral teas. None of it announces itself. That is the point.