‘It’s one of those things ... anybody can make a mistake’

“They said on the radio we were a sleepy little place.”

A customer was engaged at the checkout of Shanahan’s Centra in Borrisoleigh with a neighbour as the community yesterday morning began to square up to the controversy which had placed the small north Tipp town (population circa 2,000) near the top of the day’s national news list.

Whatever about the decision of local school owner, manager and patron Pádraig O’Shea to refuse enrolment to a pregnant teenager at his privately owned St Joseph’s College, nobody was going public against the man regarded as a community “figurehead”.