Born here, buried in Hartford
Michael Tierney
Michael Tierney was born in Ballylooby on 29 September 1839, the son of John and Judith Tierney. He emigrated to the United States, trained for the priesthood, and on 2 December 1893 was appointed the sixth Bishop of Hartford, Connecticut, by Pope Leo XIII. He was consecrated on 22 February 1894 and held the post until his death on 5 October 1908. In those fourteen years he founded St Thomas Seminary in Bloomfield, St Mary's Home for the Aged, St John's Industrial School, and hospitals in Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Waterbury and Willimantic. When he arrived, the diocese had 98 parishes and 204 priests; when he died, 166 parishes and 300. The diocese knew what it had. Ballylooby did not make a fuss of it.
Bloody Sunday, 21 November 1920
Tommy Ryan
Tommy Ryan played for Ballylooby-Castlegrace and was on the Tipperary team that took the field in Croke Park on the morning of 21 November 1920. That morning, Michael Collins's intelligence officers had killed fourteen British agents across Dublin. That afternoon, the Auxiliaries and Black and Tans arrived at Croke Park in lorries and opened fire on the crowd. Fourteen people died; one of them was Tipperary's Michael Hogan. Ryan went to Hogan on the pitch, tried to lift him, and knew he was badly injured. Ryan was then knocked to the ground, stripped naked, and held at gunpoint. A British officer intervened before he was shot and ordered the surviving players released. Dan Breen had sent word that morning to tell Ryan not to come - he was a known IRA man. Ryan came anyway; he wouldn't let the team down. He lived to tell it.
1813 - a land deal that became a lawsuit
The wall inside the church
When the parish needed to build a new church in 1813 - the previous one too small for the growing congregation - an extra twenty-six perches of ground were purchased from a local landowner named Patrick Burke. Burke subsequently changed his mind about the arrangement, erected a physical wall inside the completed church building, and issued writs of trespass against parishioners who crossed it. The dispute ran through the courts for several years before being settled in favour of the parish. The wall was removed. The Church of Our Lady and St. Kieran was extended and remodelled in 1927 by the Dublin architect Rudolf Maximilian Butler, and now has a hammer-beam roof, limestone dressings, and stained-glass windows. The story of the wall inside a church is the kind of thing a parish does not forget.