FURTHERMORE
By Gerry Moran
We all love a good story and here’s a great one. It came to me from Mike Kelly (see below) the founder of the marvellous Young Irish Film Makers.
In 1985 two boys from Darndale in Dublin, Keith Byrne (10) and Noel Murray (13), made headlines around the world when they hopped on a Dart and ended up in New York, escaping authorities in three countries.
Keith Byrne said he and his friend went to the US because he wanted to see his favourite television star, BA Baracus, of the famous A-Team TV show. Their adventure started when they went out to play before dinner time, Keith said in an RTE radio documentary: “My mum said, ‘Don’t go far, your dinner’s nearly ready’. I said, “I won’t.’ But they did. They took the Dart to Dun Laoghaire and snuck on to a ferry for Holyhead.
Emboldened by their success they avoided the ticket checkers and got on a train to London. Eventually they wound up in Heathrow with nothing but a few coins in their pockets that they’d nicked from a charity fountain. They asked a passenger where his plane was going and he told them New York. They told the ticket checker and security that their parents were behind them and boarded an Air India plane.
“The plane was only half full so no one came near us,” Keith said. The ease at slipping past authorities was very surprising considering that two months earlier an Air India jet had blown up off the southwest of Ireland, killing 329 people. Keith Byrne recalled being unable to eat a very hot curry and watching the Bond film A View To A Kill.
Their journey ended when they left JFK airport and asked a policeman for the way into town. They were taken to a police station and immediately became the centre of attention. Later they were put up in a hotel suite with security guards and fed like lords. Their exploits made the front page of the New York newspapers.
Keith Byrne and Noel Murray [pictured with Keith left] are now in their 40s and live in Darndale, Dublin.
Mike Kelly
There are so many strings to Mike Kelly’s bow that I, who has known him pretty much all my life, was not aware of. Apart from founding Young Irish Film Makers (during which time he encouraged the art of Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart and Ross Murray leading to the founding of the acclaimed Cartoon Saloon) he also started Kilkenny Youth Theatre.
Around 1966 Mike, along with the late Con Downey, helped start schoolboy soccer in Kilkenny and within a year became an International Selector with the Under 15s.
Mike left school, St Kieran’s College, at 14 because he was, according to himself, a bit lazy, a bit of a dreamer and a rebel. Thanks to the late Fr Gerry Joyce he learned to work with young people and got his first job as a cinema projectionist in Stallard’s (now Zunis).
Six years after leaving school Mike got a job with a boys club in Brunswick in London, where he got his degree in theatre and helped the boys make a small movie which won a competition worth £1500 with the BBC.
After Brunswick, Mike’s great friend, Stephen Murphy, now manager of the Fr McGrath Centre, invited him out to Bondi Beach to work with the street children of Sydney. After two years Mike returned to Kilkenny and started Young Irish Film Makers. Several of the young people involved with Young Irish Film Makers went on to be nominated for Oscars, performed on Broadway and the West End, wrote scripts for Pixar, the BBC, RTE and French TV. And all of this originated on the site of the former orphanage on the Waterford Road.
I believe that in this, Mike Kelly’s 80th year (and looking a youthful 65) the Freedom of the City would be a fitting way to honour this modest man who has done such unspoken, wonderful work for the young people of Kilkenny.
