ICA: Ballyhooly guild gears up for 70th anniversary festivities

With just one year to go, Ballyhooly ICA members are looking forward to celebrating their guild’s 70th birthday in early 2018.

The 22-member guild still has one of their founding members, Nora Beecher, a nonagenarian who had her birthday on Christmas Eve.

“She tells us how members often cycled, walked and ran to those early meetings and how they had a lot of interesting guests back then – Mrs Crosbie from the Cork Examiner family, Mr Gerald Goldberg [Cork Lord Mayor from 1977 to ‘78] and two Gaeilgeoirs from Ring,” says guild secretary Eileen Fitzgerald, a member of Ballyhooly ICA for 32 years.