In this little town of ours, there's an energetic man/ Who four or five short years ago, struck upon a plan.
"A cinema," he cried, "a place to entertain,"/ And so was born the well-known Stella Cinema, Borrisokane.
A man called Gerry Slevin wrote the lines as de Valera's 1950s Ireland inched towards Lemass's 1960s. His lines are to Canon Patrick Cahill, whose energy founded one of the two cinemas then serving the small market town in north Tipperary and its population of 720.
As if taking the starring role in Cinema Paradiso, Borrisokane is now the setting for an affectionate new book, Stella Days 1957 - 1967, by Borrisokane man Michael Doorley. It charts the history of the Stella cinema through the eyes of a once starry-eyed boy whose mother brought him to his first movie, Hell To Eternity, on September 15th, 1962. His mother's name is Una, and he was eight.
Both of the town's cinemas closed long ago, soon after RTE stole their limelight in 1961, as in almost every small town. Where the Stella once shone there is now a community hall; the old Rialto cinema in Nenagh is now a hardware store, while Mountrath's once silver screen is today the backdrop for a burger shop.
The impact of cinema on a rural community, which just 10 years earlier had had its first experience of electricity; where the main form of entertainment had been the travelling shows and where the main experience of the outside world came through emigration, was a reflection of the people's "innocence", says Doorley.
"Everybody went," he laughs. "People had their own special seats, and no one dared sit on someone else's. Down the front there were the cheaper `pit' seats, and we used to meander to the more expensive ones at the back while the film was on."
Sunday, Wednesday and Friday were the show nights, when two worked the ticket box, there were two ushers and one person kept the audience in check, with a long stick to poke the misbehavers. Doorley remembers that the young ones at the front tended to stamp their feet between film reels; others shouted instructions and encouragement to actors on screen.
"Every type of film was shown," he says, the top-grossing movies in the Stella's 10 years being the Guns Of Naverone, South Pacific and Little Nellie Kelly.
The defining moment for Stella kids was New Year's Day 1961, when Ireland had its first television station. They "stared in awe at the TV set in Slevin's shop window. It was a gradual process. The Stella struggled on but in 1967 "the tough decision had to be made" and the doors closed quietly in May.
Doorley has had letters from all over the world from others who remember those stellar days.
One, from childhood friend Michael Bourke, now living in Latvia, fondly recalls "Ned Molloy and his battle to keep us in order, especially when the film broke down and we stamped our feet", and "Chris Carroll as she lit up and smoked fags through each film. You could see the red glow," he mused, "as we looked back at the `dearer' seats."