Judy Greene who passed away on Sunday after a long battle with cancer was an extraordinary person, and someone I am incredibly proud to have called a friend for over forty years.
She was a wife, a mother and grandmother certainly, but Judy also was a business woman, an entrepreneur, and uniquely, Judy Greene was a brand!
There are very few people whom I know that arrived into Galway in 1982 with little more than a carry-on bag, and yet within a few short years, her name had become synonymous with Galway city’s success.
Not bad for a girl from the midlands, the best thing about which someone once said was the Galway road leading out of it!
Early years
Judy was one of eight children of Nora (Honora ) and Michael Greene. Born in 1950, she grew up in a busy house with few frills, and a strong work ethic, so typical of the time. Money was tight, but the Greene family had love in spades
Her mother was the youngest of her family, the Tighes, and when she was only three, her father, who worked with the Railway, was tragically killed when he was crushed between two trains. Life was suddenly made very difficult as CIE paid no compensation at the time. His wife Kate let out the first floor of her house in the Strand to supplement her income. Judy and her siblings will always remember the two old ladies, Biddy & Nellie, who lived on the top floor of her grandmothers house when they were children.
This is how her parents met. Her father, Mick Greene, was from a farm in North Tipperary and during the Rural Electrification Scheme he joined the ESB and came to lodge with the Tighe family in the Strand. As they say the rest was history. Mick spent the 1950s working on the ESB ‘Rural Electrification’ scheme, rigging up the powerlines that brought electricity to rural homes all across counties Longford, Westmeath and Roscommon. Hard, physical work, but rewarding too, as the constant flow of bags of turf carrots and potatoes from grateful farmers would attest.
A phone was a luxury, so once a month while lodging in the Strand, he would cycle his Raleigh bicycle down to Tipperary to his parents' farm, a hundred mile round trip, just to say hello to his parents. Is it any wonder Judy used two brightly painted Raleigh bicycles years later as her advertising for her pottery shop.
Both parents were very good at making things. Her father, one time farmer, now Linesman, was also an excellent carpenter, DIY builder and gardener. He considered shop-bought vegetables a crime. Her mother was a brilliant seamstress, baker, cook and gardener. The two parents often competed fiercely over portions of the garden in Irishtown where Judy grew up. She inherited the creative and hands-on talents of both parents…her favourite phrase to a tradesperson who tried telling her something couldn’t be done was, “why not” and she would go on to tell them exactly how to do it.
Judy went to school in Our Ladys Bower school in Athlone, and thrived in that environment. She went from the Bower to college in Southampton which was a route taken by many Bower girls. She studied Art & Design in Southampton and went from there through the UK VSO as a volunteer worker in Botswana in Africa, a newly independent country, but beset by troubles on its Rhodesian border.
The poverty she witnessed there resonated with Judy, but more importantly she saw first-hand the incredible skills of the native potters and textile workers, who despite their poverty, created practical, but beautiful, vibrantly colourful craft goods. By incredible coincidence, one of Judy’s students in the village in Botswana, Veronica, now a grandmother, contacted her just four weeks before she died – the closing of a 50 year circle.
A seed was sewn there in Judy’s mind. In 1979 she returned to Ireland, moved to Cape Clear in Cork and did her pottery apprenticeship at Potaireacht Cleire, an Udaras Na Gaeltachta supported indidgenous Irish pottery company. And then in 1981, with little more than a suitcase, Judy moved to Galway, and the rest is, well, pottery history I suppose!
I don’t know what prompted her to come to Galway, but she saw something in Galway’s nascent artistic community that inspired her to set up shop here. Always confident in her own ability, and despite her lack of funds and business experience, Judy persuaded the bank to give her an overdraft facility of €19,000 and in 1982 she leased the little shop on Cross Street that became her flagship pottery shop for the next 30 years before she moved to her larger premises on Kirwans Lane.
Blossomed
It was here Judy came into her own. Like her favoured flower motifs on her signature pottery, Judy blossomed into a successful business-person and brand.
When she set up shop in Galway in 1982, most of what we now call the Latin Quarter in Galway was derelict. There was hardly a viable business, restaurant or pub on High Street, Quay Street or Cross Street. There was no museum or restaurants by Spanish Arch and Long Walk, just a car repair garage and a few roofless warehouses, and Kirwan’s Lane was a ruinous and dreadfully smelly passageway, the roofless buildings used only as animal pens and slaughter-houses by the butcher trade.
Yet Judy spotted the potential, and stayed and thrived, while most of us sprinted through to get to the brighter lights of Shop street and Eyre Square.
By 2001, Galway city was a thriving, vibrant, young and exciting city, and Judy Greene pottery was its leading iconic brand. Judy had found her niche.
With help from the Craft Council of Ireland and Enterprise Ireland. she had expanded her operations to include a purpose built pottery factory with 40 employees on the Tuam Road, exporting her trade-mark designs to every part of the world, and expanding her shop and studio to her new premises on the now gentrified Kirwans Lane. Her turnover had exploded from a modest €25,000 in 1985, to and incredible €1.2 million in 2001.
Not content to just benefit from the city’s rejuvenation, Judy became an integral part of the city’s success story. She joined the Civic Trust and was instrumental in protecting the city’s built heritage. In 1998 she became President of the Galway Chamber of Commerce.
She helped young designers and crafts people by giving classes for the Craft Council of Ireland, encouraging young entrepreneurs to continue her work, and providing apprenticeships in her pottery business.
She especially encouraged and mentored fellow women craftspeople, and her Kirwans' Lane shop soon became a proving ground for new designers and craft products, effectively Galway’s Kilkenny Design shop, showcasing the very best of Irish craft design. And always, Judy was there, a smiling and welcoming presence in the shop, and at trade fairs across Europe and America.
Judy’s home life, like her business, also thrived. Her husband Paul Fox was her life partner, and simultaneously her business partner. They loved every aspect of Galway life and went everywhere together, to every event, music, theatre, and business in the city. Her family life was made complete by her two sons Brian and Andrei, and her grandchild. Her family, like her garden, was in full bloom.
She loved Connemara, and the flora there, and she was inspired by the misty hues of pink and blue on the beautiful Connemara beaches, lakes, bogs and hills. Those favourite places in Connemara inspired her pottery designs.
Trademark designs
Her trademark brand designs, of subtle bluebells, honeysuckle, hydrangea and fushia were completely contemporary, appealing to both young and old. Despite being in a tourist town, she avoided the shamrocks, shillelaghs and claddagh designs, preferring instead to be on the cusp of the most current and leading European, Asian and American decorative trends, designs and products.
Paralleling Galway’s modern industrial success, especially in the medical device sector, Judy Greene’s pottery became the gift of choice for local companies to give to visiting executives and politicians. Her signature pieces grace domestic sideboards, embassy lobbies and industry boardrooms, bringing a little piece of Galway to every corner of the world.
The late Billy Lawless told me he had personally given several of Judy’s pieces to President Obama and to President Biden, and that there was a beautiful Judy Greene plate on display in the office of the Mayor of Chicago.
Judy loved her sea swimming and that daily dip in Salthill provided her with the strength and health to fight off her first brush with cancer. Her husband Paul described her as ‘an icebreaker’, always ploughing ahead, forging into new areas, despite whatever difficulties life and business presented her with.
I will always remember her bright smile whenever I entered her shop, her lovely midland accent and her hair, hardly ever tamed, as wild and as interesting as her designs.
I remember in 1984 when she and Mary Flaherty, another wonderful Galway designer relaunched a version of the traditional Galway Shawl, and as a sidebar, made the Galway Hooker sweater, in dark blue wool with red-sailed hookers sailing across the front. I wore mine to the bitter end, getting admiring comments for many years at football and rugby matches in Gaelic Park in New York. I loved that sweater, but it went to the Charity shop with some other old clothes and I’d say its still being worn today.
I mentioned her mother’s Singer sewing machine. Just after Covid, she packed it up, and had it shipped to Africa, to a community enterprise set up by an Irish charity, to provide employment opportunities for women entrepreneurs in a tiny African village. The joy on Judy’s face as she told me about how her mum would have been so happy to see it put to good use again, almost a hundred years after it was made, enabling another young woman just like Judy to feed her family and achieve her dream.
Of such dreams are love and prosperity made.
Thank you Judy for all you have done for Galway and for so many other people too. If you have a Judy Greene lamp, or candle holder or oil and incense burner, perhaps you might put it in the window this week, light it up, and tell your children Judy’s inspiring story. You never know, you might just inspire another person to follow in her footsteps. And that wouldn’t be a bad thing, not a bad thing at all.
Codladh samh Judy.
Brian Nolan, Galway Walks.
