Come with me into the meeting room of the Fermoy Toastmasters Club in the local Youth Centre on the beautiful bright sunny evening of Tuesday, May 24th, for our final gathering and AGM of the current season. Yet there was no sense of winding down marked by a very large attendance and an atmosphere humming with enthusiasm and the pure unalloyed joy of friends joining together, relaxed, convivial and happy in each other’s company. A significant and most welcome innovation was the enhancing presence of members from our sister club in Mallow, the incoming Educational Vice-President Helsa Giles and Michael Cronin who came to participate with us in this very special celebration of the arts of communication and personal growth in mutual goodwill and enjoyment.
After proceedings were called to order by our President John Sherlock, Michael Cronin assumed the role of Toastmaster or chairman who steered the evening along with all of his ebullient wit and ready cheer and quick pithy asides that greatly added to our shared enjoyment. Jerry Hennessy gave us a sparkling topics session in which among so much else Eilish Ui Bhriain was asked as to whether a woman’s mind is always clear because she always keeps changing it, to which she made the brilliant reply that so many women remain steadfast and purposeful in the course of their lives in pursuit of what they want to achieve for which she won the Best Topics Award. John Kelly further commented on the importance of being happy to be yourself in all aspects of life. ‘Just as I am now happy to be among dear friends in Toastmasters’, he observed. How many times John illuminates our meetings with his genial words of wisdom and truth as only the very best and dearest of friends can do.
We were treated to three very diverse and immensely rewarding speeches, beginning with Fanahan Colbert who told of how his years in London fired his interest and imagination with the richness of England’s long, sometimes turbulent, occasionally magnificent and endlessly fascinating royal history. We were brought very skilfully and gently on a potted tour tracing the royal succession over the past five centuries from the rise of the Tudor dynasty to the present Elizabethan age of the present Queen who has surpassed even Victoria as Britain’s longest reigning sovereign and whose own regal journey still happily continues. Her remarkable visit to Ireland in 2011 was an immensely significant occasion towards bringing about reconciliation and cordial relations between these islands. Encompassing concisely and very effectively such a vast and rich tapestry within a few brief minutes was indeed a quite extraordinary achievement.
Mairead Barry sat before the meeting and with book in hand read a selection of her favourite poems, beginning with the late Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney’s ‘When All The Others Were Away At Mass’, evoking Sunday mornings of his early childhood when he had watched and helped his Mother prepare dinner, capturing the innocence and love of such happy memories in all their simplicity and delight that warm the heart for a lifetime. Her next choice was ‘Quarantine’ by Eavan Boland, portraying a young man and woman found together in death along a roadside during the terrible years of the Great Famine, bearing on their shoulders all the toxins of a hard and bitter history. Then the mood instantly lightened with verses from the quirky, idiosyncratic and exuberantly funny pen of Paul Durcan with his ‘Making Love Outside Aras An Uachtarain’, setting a moment of youthful passion against the staid complacent blindness of De Valera’s Ireland. By sharing with us her great love of literature and boundless enthusiasm for life, Mairead brought together poems of such power and diversity that allowed us to see the world through the poet’s eye with a new clarity and vividness.
Our final visitor to the lectern by Trish Neilan who spoke on the theme of The Cloud, beginning with the roiling cumulous masses that so often crowd and darken the Irish skies: coming from the usual cloudless conditions of her familiar desert region of Mexico, the variety and majesty of our cloud formations she finds endlessly fascinating. However she then broadened her talk to embrace the invisible Cloud of cyberspace where almost all human knowledge including our own personal records, files and photographs are kept, pointing to the dangers of so much information held in remote and unaccountable insubstantial global electronic memory networks while also praising its versatility and the sheer vastness of its storing capacity. On balance, Trish held that The Cloud does not cast a shadow over our lives but brings us the light of convenience and choice, optimism and progress.
All of these speeches received fine, helpful and positive evaluations from Kevin O’Neil, Michelle O’Brien and Johanna Hegarty.
Before settling down to the business of the AGM, we enjoyed a most convivial tea break enhanced with delicious apple and rhubarb pastry tarts brought to us by the kindness of our President John Sherlock. Afterwards in an example of one of the purest forms of democracy there is, the officers of the outgoing committee rendered account of their stewardship throughout the past year. General satisfaction and pleasure was expressed by all at the very successful and happy place the club has reached and which holds out such bright vistas of achievement and happiness for the future. Warmest appreciation was expressed to John Sherlock for his relaxed, kindly and pleasant affability throughout his Presidential year which contributed so much to the growth of the club and the immense pleasure of all of our meetings. Meetings so well and skilfully organised with unfailingly stimulating and entertaining programmes put together by Eilish Ui Bhriain whose commitment and dedication to the club and genial friendship is something for which she is universally held dear by us all. With grace and honour, the chain of office was then placed on the shoulders of Eilish to mark the carrying forward of a great and vibrant local tradition.
The new Committee was then elected:- Eilish Ui Bhriain, President; Educational Vice President and Meeting Organiser, Kevin O’Neil; Treasurer, Johanna Hegarty; Membership, Fanahan Colbert; PRO, Kevin Walsh; Secretary, Jerry Hennessy; Sgt-At-Arms Padraig Murphy and Tim Fitzgerald, each holding the post for a half-year term; Immediate Past President, John Sherlock. The new line-up represents a good combination of the experience and wisdom of older members with the fresh thinking and creative energy of those who have recently joined us.
With heartfelt gratitude for all who have made our season so wonderful and so special, we now look forward to our summer break and may it be a time of rest and enjoyment, of renewal and fresh inspiration for all as we look forward to our next season in early September. Wishing all our friends and supporters a wonderful summer.