It takes a village...

Foynes' shop in Butlersbridge closed for the final time last Sunday afternoon

Some institutions don’t appear at first glance to be overly important. They don’t come with plaques or postcards, or have histories written in gilded gold. Instead, they simply get on with things - open each morning, switch on the lights. They remember your name, the usual order, and your children’s fondness for penny sweets.

Then, one day, they close. A stitch in the social fabric that often saved nine, pulled one last time.

On Main Street in Butlersbridge, Foynes’ village shop shut its doors for good at 2pm last Sunday afternoon, February 1. As Paddy Foynes turned the key in the scuffed brass-handled lock, his wife Patricia beside him, they were embraced again and again by family, friends and the appreciative locals the family had served so diligently over the past 25 years.

A quarter of a century of early mornings and late evenings; of newspapers waited for and kettles boiled. Twenty five years of conversations that started nowhere and ended everywhere - time spent but rarely measured purely in profit. It was always the people that mattered. Community over commerce.

“I'll miss them the most,” shares Paddy, his wife Patricia nods solemnly from beside a rank of now empty shelves, right before the pair are inundated by dozens of well-wishers at their shop door - bottles of bubbles and hearty handshakes all round.

Before “the shop”, Paddy worked in the Derragarra Inn, back when the roof was still thatched, turf burned in the hearth, a donkey and cart sat on the flat roof, and the past hadn’t yet become nostalgia.

Patricia, meanwhile, spent many years with Connolly Brothers in Cavan Town - another local institution.

When the opportunity came for them to have something of their own, they took it, thinking it might tide them over - for a while at least.

There has been a shop on Main Street in Butlersbridge - next to St Aidan’s Church and close by the iconic heavy grey stone four-arch bridge - for more than 70 years. The ownership has changed, but its purpose never did.

‘Bit of everything’

“We sold a bit of everything- groceries, coal, briquettes, bits of hardware,” Paddy tells the Celt.

Before the Foynes put their name above the door, there was Margaret McPhillips. She received the keys from Martin Fitzpatrick and, before her, were Martin’s parents, Annie and Seán - “Annie’s”, as it was known. She had inherited the business from her grandmother, Kate. Earlier still, Cissy and Jimmy Murphy stood behind the shop counter, and before them was the Dunnes, and before them by Molly O’Rourke going all the way back to 1951.

“It was always a family shop,” recalls Paddy, a lifelong resident of the village.

“We've seen a lot of changes over the years. A lot of people come and gone. When we opened, the bypass had just come in. Before that, everyone passed the front door.”

When the new road opened, the traffic trailed off. But life remained, and the shop endured. Foynes’ was there for the forgotten litre of milk, or the emergency teabags and biscuits with surprise visitors settling in back at home.

It also became a drop-in centre of sorts. Parcels were left for collection, and messages got passed on with ease - an analogue way of doing things in an increasingly digital age.

Paddy still remembers when the Celt was delivered by hand. How on Thursday nights the shop couldn't close until the papers arrived with Vincent Bartley, and the five or six regulars who'd stand around, talking about “everything and nothing”. Always waiting patiently.

“Because that’s what you did,” recalls Paddy.

After Sunday Mass, or on pension Fridays people collected their money from the post office across the road before drifting in - as much to catch up as for the groceries.

“Everybody met everybody” at Foynes’ says Paddy, smiling warmly, his eyes softening, voice cracking slightly.

Life’s milestones were often marked with a quick visit to the village shop too. From football days to Communion Sundays and everything else in between- the rhythm of rural life played out in small change and small talk.

And then there were the children.

Tiktok, the floss and what does 'six-seven' mean? Everyday was an education for Paddy sat behind the counter.

“They kept us young,” he laughs.

'Paddy's Bags'

Fridays could be chaos, but in the best possible way. Kids poured, faces flushed, pockets burning. Paddy made up his own bags of penny sweets - a euro’s worth of joy - and somehow, without any marketing or erstwhile strategy, they became universally known as “Paddy’s Bags”.

The name stuck because the place stuck.

This week, many of those children - some now older, or perhaps parents now themselves - made posters and drawings, or dropped in cards for Paddy and Patricia. Thank-yous in crayon and ball-point, proof, if any were needed, that Foynes’ shop mattered in ways no balance sheet could ever capture.

Paddy and Patricia’s daughter Ciara was just nine when her parents took over. After school, she'd go straight down with her sister Aisling.

“It wasn’t a job - it was just part of growing up,” she recalls. “The shop, the people, the village. You don’t realise it at the time, but it becomes part of who you are.”

For 25 years, seven days a week, Patricia opened in the mornings, with Paddy covering the two to eight shift.

“Today is emotional,” admits Paddy, though he suggests tomorrow will be even harder. “Tomorrow we'll wake up and there's no shop to go to.”

Though retirement is imminent, the couple have are no big plans - yet. Maybe travel some, when the “notion” takes them. There'll always also be their duties as grandparents to keep up with.

Patricia describes the luxury of choice as bittersweet.

When any village loses its only shop, the loss counts as something that can’t quite be named. The consolation is there are plans in place for another store to soon open further up the road, in the premises formerly occupied by Con Smith’s pub.

But what affects Patricia most is the sound of the door closing for the last time - and the spontaneous applause that follows from the 100 or more who gathered outside on the street to thank the couple and wish them in the future.

“The support this past week has been unbelievable,” she says. “Cards. Kind words. People calling in. You never realise it all until the end.”

“It started as a job,” reflects Paddy. But it soon became a vocation. “It became a family. We’re so grateful to everyone who supported us over the years. That’s what we’ll carry with us.”