In Howth, a pipe band with no place to rehearse hopes to build a new community hall

The Beann Eadair GAA’s two pitches overlooking Howth Harbour were swarmed with kids and shouts on Monday evening.

Closer to the clubhouse, a faint drone and winding high-pitched melody floated through the air.

The shutters were down. Noel Kelly was inside alone, playing a march on his bagpipes, standing beside stacked bar stools and a mop.

He is getting ready for a performance that he will give with a drummer at the World Solo Drumming Championships at the end of October in Glasgow, he says, after the rendition. “I’m in here practising Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays.”

As well as being a member of the St Laurence O’Toole Pipe Band in Chapelizod, Kelly is the pipe major for the St Lawrence Pipe Band, also known as the Howth Pipe Band.

But the Howth band has been inactive for four years, he says. “We’re in a sort of limbo.”

There isn’t anywhere for them to rehearse on the peninsula. Their former space, an old schoolhouse, on the Balglass Road was sold by its owner, the Church of the Assumption.

The pipe band isn’t the only group looking for a space to rehearse, teach or perform in the area, says Kelly. “We’re really stuck for community facilities here. Not just in Howth, but in Sutton and Baldoyle.”

So, he has an idea.

He wants the pipe band to build a new community hall with some council support, he says. “We’d be looking to bring in people who want to make groups for Irish dancing, ballet. There’s also nowhere for the likes of them.”

Leaving the school

The former Howth National School is just below the GAA club’s grounds, on the steep Balglass Road.

It was a school until 1956, and the Howth Pipe Band used to rehearse next-door in Forester’s Hall, a white building now owned by a fishing-nets company, Kelly says.

The school was originally owned by the British Education Board, and it was transferred to the local parish in the 1980s, wrote independent Councillor Jimmy Guerin in June 2018.

In the summer of 2018, the parish had wanted the band to leave the school, because they couldn’t afford the upkeep and so needed to sell it, Guerin wrote.

On Thursday, the school had a “sold” sign at its entrance. The bushes and hedges around the site were overgrown and unkempt, and in the now grassy driveway sat a full skip.

It hasn’t been in use by the pipe band since 2019, says Kelly.

A spokesperson for the Church of the Assumption did not respond to queries sent on Thursday as to why the parish had decided to sell the property.

Kelly says it was sold to a private developer.

On 4 October at the Howth-Malahide Area Committee meeting, Social Democrats Councillor Joan Hopkins asked the council’s chief executive if the property section would meet with the Howth Pipe Band to discuss a potential new site.

They would, said Aoife Sheridan, a council senior executive, in a written response.

After the meeting, Hopkins said she thinks it is important to support the Irish piping tradition. “I was honoured last summer to act as chief for their national contest.”

A family story

Noel Kelly was born into a piping family, he said, in the Abbey Tavern’s main bar, a day after the area committee meeting .

His mother Agnes Kelly, and his father Paddy, were lifelong members of the Howth Pipe Band. “My father was the Pipe Major here, and that’s how they met.”

Agnes began as a piper at the age of 10 in the Emerald Girls Pipe Band on Parnell Square, she says.

“The only reason I joined was because I was at a Patrick’s Day parade in town, and I seen the girl’s band going down, and I loved the sound and the uniforms,” she said.

In 1963, she became the first female member of the Howth Pipe Band, she says. “They had to have a meeting to see whether I was accepted.”

Noel became an official member in 1982, he says.

The band did local events, playing at the blessing of boats and festivals, and the annual Burns Nicht every January, he says. “We also run the East of Ireland Pipe Band Championship.”

Both teach piping, he says, and the schoolhouse was used for lessons as well as practice.

Teaching came to a halt in mid-2018, once the future of the hall was in doubt, he said. “We couldn’t teach because we didn’t know if we had a hall.”

Once the band lost its practice room, it dispersed, says John Lamb, a piper who is now in the National Ambulance Services Pipe Band, but used to be with the Howth Pipe Band. “There’s nowhere for the band to go now at all.”

Need for community facilities

Noel Kelly asks the bar manager at the Abbey Tavern if he can go into the back room, where the Howth Pipe Band is due to perform at next year’s Burns Nicht.

The room has dining tables and seats in front of a small stage.

It could fit 180 people and is the only performance venue in the village, he says. “Howth is being worn down over the years. Everything goes to tourism.”

Cultural facilities are hard to come by here, he says. There is the St Columbanus Hall, which locals have campaigned to turn into a community hall. “But there’s no space there. That’s very small. It’s not ideal.”

Remaining members of the Howth Pipe Band have a different idea.

They want to build a new community hall, one that could be used by different groups, he says.“That’s what we’re looking for at the moment, if we can get off Fingal, a site to put a building on.”

The band would only use it three times a week, he says. “For a couple of hours. So we will be looking to bring in other groups.”

Hopkins, the Social Democrats councillor, says she is supporting them by facilitating a meeting with Fingal’s property department, so that they can identify a site.

The Howth Pipe Band has already raised some funds to create a hall, Noel Kelly says. “We would be bringing in other community groups to help pay the bills, and doing ‘hot offices’.”

They are also looking for a grant from the council to help with some of the construction costs, he said. “What we’re saying to Fingal is, we’re willing to put in a building. We just need a spot to put it.”

Reflecting on the past

A little past 7.30pm in the Beann Eadair GAA clubhouse, Noel Kelly got company.

Among them, Paddy Brown, the Howth Pipe Band’s longest-serving member. He has been a member for 70 years, he says. “I was 22. It was 1948.”

He was a pupil in the old national school on the Balglass Road, he says.

He later performed with the band when the final tram used the Howth tramway in 1959, and was an active performer until his 80s.

It was always a thrill to hear the band play on the morning of St Stephens’ Day, says Francis Devine, a singer with the Howth Singing Circle.

“It was just this huge sense of community, and the obvious pride with which we all held their pipe band,” she says.

Noel Kelly doesn’t know exactly when the Howth Pipe Band dates back to. But, from a photograph taken in 1907, he suspects it may be the oldest pipe band in the country.

“When you see them moving, they are touching something ancient, deep in the core of Irish society,” he says. “It’s an overlooked element of Irish traditional music.”

Towards the end of their discussion, he gets out his pipes to perform a march.

Brown, Devine, and his mother Agnes, are all sat in one of the bar’s booths, bowing their heads, and all tapping their right feet in unison.

The room is silent when he stops. The march, in 9/8, was called “Pipe Major, Paddy Kelly” and written by Alan Tully, the St Laurence O’Toole band’s pipe major.

Tully composed it for Noel’s father, who passed away last October, he says. “It was written just after. We used it a lot at competitions last year.”

“It’s very Paddy,” says Devine. “It’s very Paddy.”