‘I love gardening. There’s great therapy in the clay’

LOCAL HEROES: In a new series focusing on those who give so much to their local communities, AINE FAHERTY visits Patsy Sheridan and wife Sheila in Robinstown whose year-round voluntary work has kept the quiet village looking beautiful for over 30 years

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Anyone travelling through Robinstown will have noticed how beautifully kept the communal areas are. Credit for this for the last 30 years, goes to local legend Patsy Sheridan who has tended to this patch with great pride.

“You’re always on your hands and knees, people would say to me,” says Patsy of the many who stopped and chatted with him over the years. Patsy’s voluntary work has been year-round when he mowed grass, scraped and cleaned the roads and kerbs, levelled and kept hedges neat and tidy, made flower beds and sowed bedding plants and perennials like daffodils that will spring up soon and for years to come.

Patsy has been living in one of the 69-year-old terraces in Robinstown for 55 years, which is how long he is married to his beloved wife Sheila.

When they moved in, he explains that there was a rough and ready green area that wasn’t arable across from the row of 8 houses – and there were a lot of Ash trees that were subsequently taken away.

“People started to keep the area in front of their own house, but then it all looked different,” he says.

“So I took over the work.” But it has never been a chore to Patsy. “I got pleasure out of it. I would be on my hands and knees and digging and cleaning up the weeds and a wee robin would hop beside me and have his worm and disappear and come back and he might be there with me for the whole day,” he marvels having great affinity to nature and birds. “I love gardening. There’s great therapy in the clay.”

Patsy who is the second eldest of 14 children, credits his father Patrick, a Cavan man, who died when Patsy was 34, for gifting him his love of gardening. “We had a big garden and a small garden at home. The big garden had half potatoes and the other half was barley or oats and in the small garden, there was every veg that you could mention in it. He looked after the garden and I was always by his side. I loved him. He was a great father.”

His mother Margaret Sheridan, who had 79 grandchildren, 149 great grandchildren and 20 great, great grandchildren, died just last December, a day after her 100th birthday. “She got to blow out the candles on her cake,” he says fondly. “She was a great woman, we miss her.”

Home was an old stone cottage just a mile outside Robinstown in Retaine. “We had no electricity, a dry toilet, an oil lamp, a candle, an open fire with a bar across for the kettle and pots. A very humble way of life with horse drawn mills out in the field. Everyone had time for each other though,” he recalls.”

There have been many changes in Robinstown since he finished school there at aged 14 in 1959 when there were only 12 cars in the parish of Dunderry and the two village shops and pub in Robinstown were at the heart of the community. “It is a naked kind of a village now, no pub or shop and no atmosphere with just the school and the chapel.”

While Patsy didn’t visit the pub very often, he misses it for the social outlet that it provided for the community.

“People got to know each other there, you could meet people, and everybody needs people. People were delighted to see each other and as they say, have the bit o’ craic.”

Patsy has always enjoyed chat and camaraderie and says he had an abundance of each while working on a bread run in Spicers for 31 years, where he made some great friends. He worked as a landscaper and gardener before retirement and as a farmhand in his early years. He also kept his own animals in fields at the back of his house and elsewhere, “not for the money that was in it but to see the animals thrive.”

Patsy speaks warmly of his and Sheila’s family of 4 boys, 3 girls and 15 grandchildren who live in Meath, Westmeath and Leitrim. “We have a great family,” he says. “We have been blessed.” Through the ups and downs of life, Patsy has always reverted back to his love of nature and animals and his deep religious faith. “If anyone has anything going on, they should really work over the clay. There is healing in the clay,” he says. “People should do more of it and teach children early on about the benefits.”

Patsy’s tenure as the gardening king of Robinstown has recently come to an end as he has decided to hang up his shovel and spade. For Patsy who just celebrated his 77th birthday last weekend, it wasn’t a case of wanting to slow down, but having to due to some ongoing health issues including an aneurism in his stomach, along with a hernia and heart trouble.

One thing is for sure, Patsy with his zest for life and his tidy workmanship, will be a hard act to follow round Robinstown.

Do you know a Local Hero we should profile? Aine.Faherty@meathchronicle.ie