AJ’s Reviews > Ireland's Master Storyteller: The Collected Stories of Eamon Kelly > Status Update

If two funerals are converging on a graveyard it is a common belief in some places, that the last man in will be the other man's servant for all eternity.

'Which of ye is nearer to heaven,' Father. Yourself or the minister?' 'Oh I'm nearer to heaven,' says the parish priest. 'It's hard to credit that,' says the stonebreaker. 'There you are without a shoe to your foot and here comes the minister in his carriage!'

St Patrick never came to Kerry. How could he when the Cork people stole his donkey. He stood on a hill above Kanturk and lifting his hand he said, 'Beannuím uaim go léir siar sibh. I bless ye all west from me!'

We all spilled out the front door like dirty water out of a bucket, bringing to an abrupt ending Mick the Fiddler's graphic description of the island of Manhattan...

He began to show us places...the Bowery and Chinatown, and he said there was a Kenmare Street in Chinatown -- weren't they caught short for names!

A lot of young people going away at that time looked upon America as a place or state of punishment where some people suffered for a time before they came home and bought a pub, or farm or married into land or business...If you walked around the country forty years ago every second house you'd go into either the man or his wife had been to America.

...the best American wakes they say were in Ireland -- and the best Irish wakes in America!

A clip from 1987 of Eamon telling the story of the Teaman: https://youtu.be/BzP4FM3WqwY

"...on St Bridget's Eve, boys and girls would dress up...they used to carve a face on a large turnip with the eyes and mouth deeply incised. They would scoop out the centre of the turnip and put a lighting candle into it. The sculpted head was fixed to a handle of a broom and stick put across to hold a coat. This effigy was carried from house to house...the light coming through the eyes and mouth..."