The Hawk’s Well Theatre Site

Recently, someone asked me about the site on which the Hawk’s well Theatre is built. This is the story of how that happened. The area between the Lungy, along Temple Street to the Cathedral Car Park was the walled garden of the Church of Ireland Rectory. The present Sligo Social Services Building was originally the Rectory for St. John’s Cathedral in John Street.

As a schoolboy going through the Lungy to St. John’s School, the greater part of the garden was overgrown, the defences never breached by generations of Sligo schoolboys.

In the late 1950s, the Catholic Bishop of Elphin, Vinvent Hanley, purchased the garden and old Rectory. Later, a Peace Park was opened on part of the site, with the house becoming a Retreat Centre for a time. The first event at the new Retreat House was a day retreat given by a Monsignor Conway from Rome, who twenty years later was to become Bishop of Elphin.

In 1970, Sligo Drama Circle launched a “Theatre for Sligo” campaign, to meet the needs of a modern theatre audience. However, an old building or site was an essential first step to progress the project. A small group from outside the Drama Circle, all with good local knowledge, was formed to pinpoint suitable locations around the town. They were: Tom Palmer (Editor, Sligo Champion); Harry Johnson (Business Owner); Dermot Mc Dermott (Borough Engineer). I joined them as convenor. The result was that five possibilities were suggested for the theatre, all in the gift of public bodies. All of these were pursued with vigour, but after two years, no site nor building was found. The project was “stuck”.

At a crisis meeting in the Bonne Chere restaurant, I mentioned that Harry Johnson always claimed that the best site in Sligo was the Old Rectory garden, but it was not considered as a site for the proposed theatre, as the Church was not known to cede property to anyone, and definitely not for frivolous enterprises outside of their control.

The reaction at the meeting was one of amusement at the audacity and naivety of the idea. Nobody gave it any credence except one. Liam Mc Kinney demanded, “Why not?” We had approached every other authority, so why not a Bishop? A letter was written to the new Bishop, Dr. Conway, to ask, with a wing and a prayer, for a site at the Peace Park for our “Little Theatre”.

Within a week we were invited to meet the Bishop in St. Mary’s to discuss the request. At that meeting, Dr. Conway quickly agreed to make a site available for the theatre when we had a viable plan in place, and that we could go public at once on his offer.

Paddy Foran made the brief presentation for the project, with Liam Mc Kinney and Joe Meehan the Drama Circle members that went to meet the Bishop that day. Also present was the Bishop’s secretary, Canon Charles Travers. We may have “brought home the bacon” but there were many twists and turns, even somersaults, in the years that followed, before Opening Night in the Hawk’s Well Theatre on January 12th, 1982.

All of that is another story!

Joe Meehan is a long time member of the Sligo Drama Circle and was centrally involved in the Drama Circle’s “Theatre for Sligo” campaign in the 1970s, culminating in the opening of the Hawk’s Well Theatre in Temple Street, Sligo.