A wet afternoon in Bray. The rain is several notches up from drizzle. This is a day for staying at home and lighting the fire. This is good weather for ducks – and bowls players. Though the skies are a seamless gunmetal grey and the water is dripping off your reporter’s nose as he scurries into Fáilte Park, the town’s bowling club is a hive of competitive activity.
Tony Delahunt wears his 83 years lightly. The soft-spoken auctioneer and farmer resides in Brittas, where he and his wife Pauline enjoy a view of the Irish Sea, just a field or two away from their back door. In happy retirement he has time to look back at a career that has left him with a knowledge of practically every townland in east Wicklow. He now has the leisure to examine the Delahunt family’s role for half a century in promoting an institution which was a magnet for the agricultural community each Monday.
He’s a proud Dublin northsider, raised beside the Royal Canal, a lifelong Bohemians FC enthusiast. Yet Greg Murray has become a valuable contributor to life in Bray where he appreciates the worth of a vibrant community. Through his work as an artist and a teacher, he has made his mark on the town over the past decade and more, a character familiar to hundreds of schoolchildren and a respected presence at the Signal Arts Centre in Albert Avenue.
Asked when he last attended the cinema, Jim Scannell reckons that the show in question must have been ‘Michael Collins’, starring Liam Neeson and Aidan Quinn, which was released back in 1996. Then he considers the matter again and feels that perhaps his last venture to the movies may actually have been to enjoy one of the ‘Batman’ series with Michael Keaton in the leading role. So, it is fair to suggest that Jim is not nowadays a frequent cinema goer: a quick skim through the internet reveals that Keaton retired from patrolling the mean streets of Gotham City in 1992, more than thirty years ago.