Congratulations to Fr Liam Belton on his Golden Jubilee

Ballinteer and Meadowbrook Parish Newsletter, Sun. 25 May 2025

Fr Liam Belton served in our parish from 1998 to 2004. After eleven years in Greystones, in 2015 he was appointed Parish Priest and Moderator of the Pastoral area of Dundrum, Ballinteer and Meadowbrook.  The photo below was taken at the Jubilee Mass in Ballinteer on the 14th June.

The Irish Catholic, 26 June 2025, p.15

On Sunday 28th June, Fr / Canon Liam celebrated another Mass, this time in St Mary's, Barndarrig, Co. Wicklow, in the parish where he grew up. 

Photo from Facebook page for St Mary's, Barndarrig

Here too, then, let us offer Fr Liam  our thanks and congratulations for all he did among us and among so many before and after us during his fifty years as a priest.

Butterflies on mid-summer's eve

 

Driving through Newcastle yesterday, at the lights after the petrol station I saw someone painting on what I now know as a 'junction box' (for more on this, see here, for such 'street art' in our South Dublin Council area, see here, and you might also like to visit the Irish Butterfly Website here ). As we all have noticed over the past number of years, these boxes as well as electrical ones display some very eye-catching scenes. Isn't it lovely to see colour used creatively at the heart of ordinary life, as we walk or drive hurriedly by, our mind focused on the task in hand?  I parked my car further up and came back to have a word with the artist.  Young Tamara has been living in Newcastle now for four years with her family and is doing the art work she loves for Newcastle Tidy Towns. I took the first photo while she worked, and the second when, returning to Saggart in the evening, I saw the finished product. The butterfly looks like it's taking flight for the lovely flowers in the wildlife garden behind!

It's a red admiral and, coincidence, another has alighted on the front page of the current issue of the Far East, the magazine brought out by the Columban Missionaries we all used read long ago in the 50s / 60s!  

Ave atque (heu!) vale, Veritas. Hello and (alas!) Goodbye, Veritas

A reflection on how seldom I go to town now obviously, but I was taken completely aback when, getting off the Luas from Saggart recently in Lower Abbey Street, I saw no familiar Veritas sign winking at me, as it were, on my arrival in the city. Yes, I knew about the closure of their branch in Tallaght Square Shopping Centre on the 17th May last year (see here) and now here I was seeing (and believing as best I could) their HQ in Dublin gone for ever. In fact, it has been closed a good while, since Friday, 10th January. It opened in 1928 (read its history here). How many times over how many years was I inside, browsing away and buying too, of course! A lectionary was my last big purchase (for a certain church). So what a shock!  

Round the corner, as you know, brings you up Marlborough Street to the Pro-Cathedral. Dublin's seminary, Clonliffe College, closed in 1999.  Last Sunday a 'Lay Ministry Appeal' was publicized by the diocese. Signs of the times -- times changing so fast.  But, in this Jubilee Year of Hope, we try to remain hopeful that change, finally, is for the better.  After all, "To live is to change," said St John Henry Newman -- who knew Dublin well from living here in the 1850s.