Although, I am sure he would chuckle his famous chuckle at the notion, the late Billy Horan brought more wonder to the homes and families of South Mayo than Walt Disney ever managed. For a few hours every week, his work brought the people of his place to a standstill, sat at the kitchen table, papers spread wide, fingers thumbing through the district notes detailing the beautiful structures that make up community life.
For seven decades, and when his teaching day was done selflessly imparting Shakespeare and Byron to rascals like yours truly, he would sit down with the writing pads and write the district notes, documenting the deaths and marriages and football scores. He would write of campaigns for the betterment of his native place; of who caught the biggest trout on Mask and what visitor had come home from the States in the past week. His match reports brought the exploits of the few to the many, capturing for the record the exuberant joy of local sport.
In a way this tribute should be on behalf of all local newspaper people, because his work meant that local newspapers have lasted as long as we have. Such notes are the meat and drink of local papers, my colleague Colm Gannon recalls that his first foray into the career saw him typing out Billy's handwritten notes for the Mayo News.
For most of my childhood, the population of Ballinrobe stayed constant at around 1,272 people, only fluctuating on a day when a few lads might have hopped on the bus to Galway, but it is fairly certain that every one of those names featured in the pages of the newspapers he wrote for. A map of our existence in this life has been drawn because of a point scored here, a community games race won there, a turkey won somewhere else.
Nowadays, people see little wonder in their names and images spread out there for the world to see; but back then, getting your name in the paper was a major event. If your normally initialled name saw you placed third in the local community hall raffle, you walked the streets with the head held high, sure that everyone was talking about you. Such was the impact of Billy's work.
I still treasure some cuttings of a game where I scored a few goals against Tooreen in an U14 match, and so do many others as technology allows us to reap the benefits of Billy's work with most newspapers now archived digitally.
I had the added pleasure of having Billy as my English teacher in secondary school in The School Formerly Known As Ballinrobe CBS, an institution I attended for so long, everyone assumed I was the principal. Here in wet wintry days, with draughts blowing through the windows over radiators that were too hot to touch, we existed in a lukewarm world of sniffles as Billy, impeccably turned out as always, gave us an appreciation of Frank O'Connor, Yeats, and Shakespeare.
What he taught me was the limitless possibility of words to shape what you want to say. I loved too his use of sarcasm. In an era when a skelp around the head was permitted (and used by others ), Billy preferred to use a putdown using local parlance. I recall one day he chastised some classmate for being more of a Brose Walsh aficionado than a Duran Duran one.
Seeing the wonder in the rough, Billy wrote material that mattered to real people, setting in print forever their achievements, their memories, and because of this, the words will live forever. As he makes his final journey through his beloved Ballinrobe today, the attics of the town, weighed down by scrapbooks filled with this work, will nod a gesture of appreciation.
Communities like ours cannot afford to lose a man of his stature. To his family Michael, Liam, Elizabeth, Sarah, Maurice and their extended families, my sympathies on their loss, coming but a year after their wonderful mother Ina passed away.
Farewell, my friend. You have left a mark on this part of Mayo that will never fade.
