Welcome to our “Resident Spotlight of the Month” series, dedicated to celebrating the remarkable lives of our residents. Each month, we turn our focus to a different member of our community, offering you a window into their unique journey and life experiences.

In the limelight this month is Michael, who has spent the past two weeks with us for respite care.

Michael’s favourite life memory:

“I consider my wedding day as my favourite memory in life. Marie and I had both sides of the family there. The wedding was held in a Gorey church, where Marie was working, and the reception was held in the Arklow Bay Hotel.

In my time, the big thing was that the bride and groom cleared out before the wedding ended – if they could get out. There was always a big danger if you were attached to clubs, as they’d have some divilment for you before they’d let you go home – we all did it on one another!! When you could finally get the car going, it would take a good half hour to break loose and get away from them all.

We went straight onto the honeymoon from there. Our honeymoon started 5 or 6 hours after the wedding. We had an Irish honeymoon, which was the thing to do in the 1960s. We started here, we went up through the north of Ireland and into Donegal. We then went back down through Mayo and into Cork for a night and Limerick for a night. We drove ourselves as we had our own car.”

Michael’s astonishing discovery as a child: 

“We were farmers by profession, and there was always a need for farmers during the planting season. We were planting potatoes and turnips on our land.

I was 12, on my bike, ready to go to school and my father said ‘we want you to folly the young horse as there’s a lot of work to do in a 10-acre field’. I was delighted as I got to stay home from school for the day. There were two other sets of horses working in the field. I was given a young mare, which one of the workmen tired out and settled down before giving her to me, as I was only a young chap. He was follying two horses and I was follying one, all with a roller.

There was one portion of the field that my horse would not cross and I didn’t know what this was so I went over to ‘Big Paddy’ who was the horseman in our farm. I said ‘I can’t get the mare to cross the field’, and joked that ‘my father will kill me if I don’t roll it and do it right’. ‘Big Paddy’ took over and went back 20 yards with the mare, he had the reigns in his hand and once near, he put speed on her and as she came to the area she’d been dodging all morning she jumped up into the air to get across it – the roller went up at the same time too.

We all heard a hallow sound when the roller came back down to the ground. Confused, one of the men said it could had been a water shore. We began digging and finally got down to it. So I ran up to get my father and when it was all cleared we could see a stone 8 foot long and 5 foot wide. Nobody could understand what this huge stone was, so we got help from the neighbours – 5 or 6 lads. The neighbours put ropes around it and my father told them to ‘take it easy’. They pulled it out, and lo and behold when they had removed the stone we could see a grave beneath it. It was a beautifully decorated grave, but it frightened us as there were two corpses in the grave. We didn’t know what to do, so my father went to get the priest who lived across the field – he came with his bible and bottle of holy water and he couldn’t understand it either. My father asked ‘what are we going to do – we can’t tear up a grave’. So, the priest told them to cover it all back up again. The priest blessed the grave and nothing more was thought about it until one morning about three months later, word got out that the D’Arcy’s had found a ‘golden calf’. 

We woke up one morning at 6 o’clock, with three cars in the yard, full of Gardaí. They wouldn’t come to the door but instead were blowing their horns. My father turned to me confused, asking if I had done something wrong in the area. We went outside and there were some people from the National Museum of Ireland. The main chap started reading ‘I declare…’. My father said ‘we didn’t find anything great – all we found was a grave, two corpses and an urn’. ‘Where is the urn’ said the man, ‘where is the urn’. And my father said ‘well it’s inside on the mantlepiece’.”

And so, the urn and the lot went straight up to the National Museum of Ireland for some testing. Over the years, it has been displayed in the museum but currently is not being exhibited. It is believed that the burial dates back to 2500BC.

Michael’s words of wisdom:

Mick jokes “you’d have little use in me offering advice to young people, sometimes they’d listen and other times they wouldn’t! The girls are cuter than the lads – they’d listen to you now.”