Stonecutter Barry Feely owes a great deal to Pope John XXIII. Over many generations, headstones were “the bread and butter” of Feelystone, the family business which has been based in Boyle, Co Roscommon, for more than 230 years. But in the 1960s it was Pope John who provided “the jam” when he decreed that priests should face, rather than turn their backs on, their congregations, causing a flurry of altar refitting up and down the country.
“He made us up,” says Feely, who in 1955 became the ninth generation of his family to grasp the steel chisel – made from recycled gearboxes and half-axles sourced at nearby Roe’s garage.
His memoir, A Life in Stone, launched by writer Brian Leyden in Boyle last night, reveals that the same pope again came to the rescue when the company was tasked with repairing a statue of the 7th Baron Farnham, which has pride of place in the centre of Cavan town.
Patriotic local youths had, after Saturday night pints, smashed the baron’s nose and toes. The nose was such a challenge that Lord Farnham spent four years in the Boyle workshop, during which time he was occasionally dressed in the Roscommon colours and moved to prominent roadside locations, depending on the fortunes of the county GAA team.
“We happened to have a bust of Pope John XXIII – who had a big nose – and our craftsman Tommy Connolly eventually modelled it on that,” Feely says. Hence Henry Maxwell, the 7th Lord Farnham, now stands proudly outside Cavan library – sporting the pope’s nose.
He was 15 when he walked the short distance from the family cottage at Greatmeadow in Boyle to the adjacent workshop, very happy to leave his schooldays behind. “I was dyslexic but of course in those days, that meant I was stupid,” Feely (74) says. “I felt disconnected at school but then I found my way through stone.”
His mother had made an apron out of a flour bag for him when he joined the family business in June 1955. “My uncles Christy and James, and the other men, downed their tools and applauded when I walked in,” he recalls.
A few generations earlier, an ancestor won a contract for the company when Ballaghaderreen cathedral was being built. “We used to have a quarry in Rockingham in the 1800s. He used to travel over to Ballaghaderreen in a cart and jennet and stay for the week.”
A century later, Feely was appalled when asked to dismantle some of the marble altars in churches around the country, as priests responded to the edict that they must face the people. “We plundered our churches”, he says. “Now they are listed buildings but there was no such thing as planning permission then.”
As he strolls through the showrooms, now mostly devoted to granite worktops and fireplaces, and into the factory floor, where a giant computer-operated machine whirred through what was once “a job for six men”, Feely’s face lights up as he enters a room filled with battalions of marble angels and saints.
Many were rescued from churches in the 1960s, while others were more recently salvaged from convents that were shutting their doors. “This is a beautiful piece which was possibly carved in Carrara in Italy and I got it in a convent in Skibbereen,” he says pointing to one hand-carved scene. “My instinct was to save a lot of this work and now it is being recycled in churches around the country.”
Churches are not the company’s only clients. Feelystone has built memorials dedicated to victims of the famine in Quebec, to those who perished in the 1974 pub bombings in Birminghama and to the IRA in Milltown cemetery.
Currently curator of the renowned Boyle Civic Art Collection, which is on show at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin until December 19th, Feely is proud that his factory floor has been of use to such respected sculptors as Eileen McDonagh and Fred Conlon. “We could give them space and also help them handle the huge pieces they were working on. That was before all this phobia about insurance.”
He wrote the memoir while undergoing treatment for prostate cancer last year. “The treatments became an inconvenient interruption to the writing. I think a brush with mortality sharpens the intellect.”
Currently gearing up to write a history about the Old IRA in Roscommon, Feely has corresponded with Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, who impressed him when she visited Ireland in 2011. “I told her she was looking great for 84 and that Philip was going well too. I got a lovely letter back from Buckingham Palace saying ‘the Duke of Edinburgh also thanks you for your kind comments’.”
A Life in Stone is available to buy online at feelystone.com and from local bookshops
