Bord na Móna Boora, Offaly workers reunite on the company’s 80th birthday – Helen Shaw – Tóchar Stories

It all started with a conversation after a funeral. Seamóg Buckley, a former Bord na Móna worker, got chatting with old workmates, Seamus Barron and Derry Grogan and said ‘let’s meet up for a coffee’. About ten turned up for the chat and Seamóg and Seamus began plotting something bigger – a June reunion of the Bord na Móna Boora workers and a way of commemorating those colleagues who were already
gone.

WATCH: The Bord na Móna Boora Workers Reunion

For Seamóg the reunion is about honoring the friendships people made during the decades they worked together. It’s about “getting the family back together, because we were a family, really and truly, we were a family”, he says. 

When the men realised this year also marked Bord of Moná’s 80th birthday (it was founded in 1946 as a semi-state company to mechanise peat extraction as a national fuel) the reunion took on a bigger dimension – not just bringing together former workers but celebrating the history of the company itself. 

So the word went out to the 200 surviving former workers of the Boora Workshop and they connected with the current staff including Sinéad Culleton-Lowry and Regina Clancy, who run the Boora canteen. They came on board. Sinéad and Regina are the heart of Boora past and present. They know everyone and, on the reunion day, on June 27th, they piled plates high with sandwiches and cakes to go with the endless tea and coffee. “It’s great to see the gathering of all our older generation, and it’s great to see them all coming together “, Sinéad says. She started with Bord na Móna in 1989 and made history in 2021 when she became the first female worker director of the company (now BnM). 

Over one hundred people turned up on reunion day for the gathering at Teach Lea Community Centre, Boora, Co Offaly. For many it was deeply emotional as they had not met in decades. Fr P.J. Hughes, himself a former worker as he started as an apprentice there when he was just 16, offered Mass for the memory of colleagues who had died. Earlier he blessed a monument, oak tree and plaque honouring the workers, past and present, that the reunion group had installed at the entrance to Lough Boora Discovery Park, the former peatlands that BnM has redeveloped as a nature visitor attraction.  

“There are more gone than living. The plaque is very, very important because all the people that worked from around here and further afield, most of them is dead. So that plaque is a very important thing for us today, the people that’s alive,” Seamóg says. For the men and women of Boora Workshop it is also important that this memorial is at the entrance to the BnM Lough Boora parkland so people can see it as they walk in and remember the people and the history of the land.  

The honoured guest at the monument blessing is 90 year old Tom Cannon, the well-respected former foreman at the Boora Workshop, who lives in Boora. “Oh, it was a great place, yeah. Great place, and they had houses out there. Got a house in Kilcormac, one of the Bord na Móna houses in Kilcormac,” he tells me, and when I remarked how well all the men speak of him as a foreman, he says “I never went in for it you know” as it was his own line manager who put him name in the hat for the job and the first he knew was when he got the letter congratulating him. There are several there of Tom Cannon’s vintage, with heads full of stories of times now gone, leaving us with a profound sense of how precious these memories are.  

For Fr. P.J. Hughes, parish priest in Dromard, Co Longford, it is personal. He met some of these men when he came in as an apprentice. “I can’t believe it’s that long ago, 51 years ago, and I spent 13 years here, 13 wonderful years here. It was always like a family, you know, it was just great fun. You looked forward to coming into work here and it was always a bit of banter, but everybody did their work and great friendship… and I still love it here, you know, to meet everybody”, he says.  

Since it is a big birthday for Bord na Móna, and its 80 years of national history, Regina and Sinéad have organised a cake in the company yellow. After Mass there’s live music, gallons of tea and sandwiches and as the evening draws in, trays of hot snacks appear. People just want to talk, reminisce and laugh together. Some are on walking sticks, there’s a wheelchair or two, and there’s a sense of the fragility of time and life itself.  

For Seamóg the gathering is a way to reconnect and stay in touch as the years pass. “We have a book inside and everyone puts their name in that book and their telephone number. At least when I’m sitting at home at night, I can pick up the phone, I can say, “How are you, Jack? How are you, Joe? How are you, Tom?”, he says.  

For the gathering, the walls of the Teach Lea Community Centre are covered in archive photos of people, machinery and Boora work socials over the years. People pause to spot themselves and friends in the images. For some it is overwhelming, as they see so many old friends and colleagues who are deceased.  

For Seamus there’s a more long-term wish – that the stories, memories and lives of the Bord na Móna workers, and their families, will be recorded, saved, remembered and told. He would love if BnM Lough Boora Park would include its origin industrial story in the nature trails and that retired workers, like himself, could be included and used as guides to tell the story of the people, the place and what happened here; connecting the past with the future. We have seen this happen in other places like Arigna Mines where storytelling has become part of the transition from extraction to tourism. The former workers, who often come from families where several generations, men and women, went to work in Bord na Móna, would love to see a showcase of the old machinery restored, one or two pieces, and included in trails and guided walks. That’s something you see in community-led bog restoration projects like Cloonlarge, Kilteevan, Co Roscommon, so the sense of pride and belonging local people have in the past is carried into a future where the once cut bogland is valued for nature, biodiversity and climate solutions.  

“What we would love to do is to tell that story – of the industrial and the human story— there’s a massive human story to be told — people came and settled here, had their families here, educated their children here and all. There’s a massive human story to be told”, Seamus says.  

For more connected stories: 

READ:  Finding a Just Transition for People, Places and Nature 

LISTEN : Sean Craven, Kilcormac Development Association and former Bord na Móna worker