A Sellars tale of near six decades of marriage

“We headed off that evening to Salthill and never got there. We went as far as Moate and I met a first cousin of mine who brought us to the Mullingar Golf Club,” says Albert Sellars from Coole, who is telling the story of his and his wife Deirdre’s honeymoon.

The pair recently celebrated their 57th wedding anniversary with a family get-together in Feerick’s of Rathowen.

Both natives of Dublin, Albert from Garville Road in Rathgar, and Deirdre from Corrib Road in Terenure, the pair moved to Westmeath in the 1980s, to run The Float Pub in Lismacaffrey; they later bought their present home in Coole.

“We met at a dance in the tennis club in Templeogue,” said Albert. “We got to know each other, and my wife used to work in Rathgar in Keogh’s Shop. It was a highfalutin sweet shop, you’d go in and ask for a quarter of sweets, and you’d get a little bag with cords to hold it. She worked there until we got married.

“We were married in the Holy Rosary Church in Harold’s Cross, on July 30, 1966. We had a reception in a hotel at the top of Infirmary Road in Dublin. The hotel is long gone now and there’s blocks of flats there instead.

“We headed off that evening to Salthill and never got there. We went as far as Moate and I met a first cousin of mine who took us over to the Mullingar Golf Club. Now, I didn’t play golf, but he brought us in because the manager of the golf club was a man called John Deveraux, a friend of my brother-in-law, John Madden, who married my sister.

“We managed to go back to the Bon Bon in Moate and stayed there the night, and then travelled on to Portumna in Galway, where my father’s people were from.”

Was it a big change moving from Dublin city to Coole?

“I didn’t notice a big change from the city because every time I got an opportunity I would go and spend a weekend with my cousins in the country, and I worked on the farm in Portumna, but my wife might say different,” said Albert. “My father came from Portumna, and he built the Vocational School in Portumna in 1939, and then he came to Dublin to build houses, he built Fortfield Grove in Terenure. My mother was Cooks Street in Cork.

“I started working back in 1963, I had some odd jobs, and I went to a cousin of mine who had a farm, and I worked there for a little bit. My father used to write to me every week while I was down there, and one week he wrote and said you need to come home, you have an interview on Monday.

“He had applied for a driving job for me, and he had applied for the job in my name, but he was an Albert Sellars as well.

“I went down to Grand Canal in Dublin and it was a driving job for a firm called Hearty Engineering. I got the job straight away and I was with them from 1963 to 1974, and in 1974, I was kind of getting fed up, and I applied to CIÉ as it was called at the time. I became a bus conductor.

“In 1988, the one-man bus came in, they were taking the conductors off the buses, so because of that I was given the option of driving.

“I didn’t just fancy driving around the city of Dublin with a double-decker bus, so I refused. I lived in Whitehall Close at the time, Dublin 12, and my wife and myself, she wanted to get out of the city and we ended up coming down to Westmeath looking for property.

“Deirdre wanted a bed and breakfast, I didn’t care we had, so we bought a public house called The Float Pub in Lismacaffrey.

“It was out the road headed for the Coole direction, and we had that for a few years until 1992, and then we rented a house in Tullynally Castle for a few years.

“In the meantime, I went into a building society in Mullingar and met a nice manager, a decent man, and I got a mortgage to buy this house in Coole, which we called Garville House.

“We never opened the B&B afterwards, we lived an ordinary life and I did some driving for the bus companies all around the district, including J Farrell in Mullingar.

“We had four daughters, Patricia (Tipperary), Carmel (Malta), Ruth (Castlepollard) and Hazel, our youngest, and she lives next door to us.”

Can you tell the secret to a long marriage?

“My wife more than looks after me. Only for her I wouldn’t have lasted this long. I was in the Westmeath Examiner a good while ago after donating 100 pints of blood, but then in 2007, I had a triple heart bypass, and as well as that, in the last two years, I had a kidney removed. There was a growth on the top of it and when they took it out, the quare thing was in it, but they got it out in time.

“Mullingar Hospital are the top of my list with the care that they’re giving me. I used to have a man called Dr Noel Cogan, who I used to see in Castlepollard and he actually arranged the bypass for me. He is a great doctor.

“I made some great friends here, including Martin McMyler, who helped me out on many an occasion, he was like a father figure to me. My own father died in 1975, my mother died in 1982.”

Speaking of how he and Deirdre would like to live out their days, Albert said: “I’d like to live out the rest of my years trouble-free. I’m not an early riser, when I get up I go into the front room and watch the people go by.

“Every morning, my daughter goes into Mel and Colette Dunleavy’s shop and buys the paper, and myself and my wife sit and read, and look at the television and that’s our day. And I’d like to continue like that for as long as I can.”