I started bellringing in 1956 when I was 19 at the Redemptorist Church at the junction of South Circular Road and Henry Street in Limerick. Most of the young lads living nearby were altar boys or in the choir and many were bellringers. For want of something better to do, I went up as well.
It was a popular pastime, partly because it was free. You could go up into the tower and have a skite at night and there would be fags produced.
In those days all the ringers were men. Some years earlier there had been a couple of girls ringing, but that was frowned upon by busybodies. They said you would never know what young fellows might be getting up to when they went up into the tower with young ones, and that was it.
The same restrictions didn’t apply at St Mary’s, the Church of Ireland cathedral. They always had lady ringers.
In the Redemptorist Church there are 10 bells hung on girders. Each one is supported on a large wheel and a rope is passed around it. With each stroke, the bell is balanced in an upright position. The trick or art is ringing each of them in sequence. It’s like playing an instrument, and to make it sound right you have to do it according to an arthimetic progression.
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You could ring for half-an-hour, two hours or three hours. A full peal will generally take about three-and-a-half hours. It helps to have a good head for numbers. It can be quite complicated, but that’s what makes it interesting. You have to remain wide awake and concentrate.
When you are ringing for a long time, it can be very relaxing. It becomes very rhythmic and quite easy if you do it properly.
Ringing bells is sociable and provides you with a platform of friends, not just in Limerick, but around the country and in Northern Ireland and England. Some of us went up to Belfast in October and stayed with some friends who are ringing there.
I have known one or two ringers since the 1950s who have been coming to ring in Limerick. There’s an Irish Association of Change Ringers and it has its main centre in Dublin, at Christ Church and St Patrick’s cathedrals, but there are a few other towers around.
There’s one in Bray; there are two in Limerick; and there is St Finbarr’s in Cork; and one in Bandon. There aren’t many Catholic towers now — most of them are Church of Ireland. Bellringers have always disregarded the religious element. We just ring bells.
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If St Mary’s needed a number of ringers for a particular service, we would all just turn up; and if we needed a few extra ringers in the Redemptorist Church, they would all come along and ring with us.
Ringing would have died out years ago if it wasn’t for the close association between the two groups.
It’s difficult to get people into ringing now. When I learnt, you would not have thought of teaching an older person. The people who were learning were all in their teens and twenties.
Nowadays, teenagers have so many other things to do, they simply don’t have the time, and maybe they don’t want to be getting up early on a Sunday morning.
We have a small number of people who are learning and they are in the twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. I am 74 now and I thoroughly enjoy it. What I find is that most of the ringers are anxious to persuade other people to come to see us, as they might like to take it up.
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It’s not just because we need more people, but because it’s a very enjoyable pastime.