Since 1949, without a gap
The Show
In 1949, a committee in north Mayo decided to hold an agricultural show. They picked the August Bank Holiday Monday, found a field, and organised it. Seventy-five years later it is still going, still on the same Monday, and it draws thirty thousand people to a village of four hundred. The Bonniconlon Show covers livestock, showjumping, vegetable growing, crafts, cookery, and photography. It is the largest show of its kind west of the Shannon — a claim that sounds boastful until you look at the attendance and the prize fund. The committee that runs it is local. The labour that makes it work is local. The thirty thousand people who turn up are mostly from somewhere within two hours. That is the whole model, and it works.
The name before the name
Saint Feichin and Kilgarvin
Bonniconlon was Kilgarvin first. The name came from a church Saint Feichin established here around 650 AD — the same Feichin who founded the great monastery at Fore in Westmeath. He saw something useful in this sheltered valley under the Ox Mountains: ancient tracks converging, a reliable water source, enough distance from the coast to be defensible. The church is long gone. Kilgarvin Cemetery remains, with burials spanning thirteen centuries. The Pattern mass on August 15th has been held there since the medieval period. The holy well at Tobar Feichin in Rathreedane townland still receives visitors.
The Rosary Priest went to school here
Fr. Patrick Peyton
Patrick Peyton was born in Carracastle in the parish of Attymass in 1909, the sixth of nine children. His family was farming people. When the time came for secondary school, he came to Bonniconlon National School and stayed with his grandparents in the village. He left before his fifteenth birthday. He later emigrated to the United States, joined the Congregation of Holy Cross, and became one of the most listened-to Catholic voices in the twentieth century — a radio and television priest with an audience in the tens of millions. 'The family that prays together stays together.' His cause for canonisation was opened in 2001. Pope Francis declared him venerable in 2017. The Peyton Memorial Centre is at Attymass, a few miles west. Bonniconlon is where he did his schoolwork.
Founded 1889
Bonniconlon GAA
The Bonniconlon GAA club was established by 1889 — which puts it in the first wave of clubs formed in the county after the GAA itself was founded in 1884. A hundred and twenty-five years in, the club celebrated the anniversary in 2014. In between, they won the Mayo Intermediate Football Championship in 1986 and again in 1997. For a club from a small north Mayo village with a small catchment, providing players to county teams across multiple generations and winning at intermediate level twice is a reasonable century's work.