Jim leaves a rich legacy in his adopted Clare
Jim Lyons is pictured in 2006 while serving as chairperson of the Health and Safety Authority. Picture: Mac Innes
Just over a week or so ago on a brisk summer’s day on an elevated rise in Drumcliff Cemetery on the outskirts of Ennis town, we gathered to bury Jim Lyons. A native of Westport, Jim was a man who was adept at carefully considering the important decisions in life and their multiple implications and no doubt would have, with the love of his life, his wife, Madeleine, pondered on the likely location of his final resting place.
A Mayoman through and through who just some weeks before had delighted in the historic Mayo victory in Croke Park, for many years Jim had made his peace with Clare, an adopted county he had come to love, captivated as he was by the many benefits it offered to him, to Madeleine and their family. A phrase from his poem, ‘The Flaggy Shore’, in the funeral booklet, registered his contentment:
It wasn’t Westport to which ‘Coveys’ (as Westport natives traditionally define themselves) have an instinctive and irrepressible loyalty but Clare that became, all things considered, the next best thing to Mayo. While the traditional green and red Mayo flag was carried with the gifts to the altar and reverentially unfurled and carefully held aloft by the celebrant, Fr Tom Fitzpatrick, at Jim’s funeral Mass in a packed St Brecan’s Church in Doora, the Mayo and Clare colours acted as an unspoken backdrop to the proceedings of the day. Clare had become, definitively for Jim and his family, home.
I remember well on a visit to Clare some years ago Jim bringing me on a tour of the Burren - that extraordinary extra-terrestrial, lunar-like Clare landscape - and the way his lyrical description of its delights registered how it had become so consequential for him. It was part of the very weather of his life.
Jim Lyons was born in Westport in August 1938. He attended the local Christian Brothers’ primary and secondary schools and later University College Galway, where he studied for his B.A. and B. Comm. degrees and Higher Diploma in Education (H.D.E.) In 1960, his teaching career began in Inverin, Co Galway a period he later attributed to giving him his lifelong love of Irish. While there he wrote a book for Irish students entitled ‘Blian Leanúna Gaeilge', the first of many publications.
Two years later, he returned to teach in Ballina and Mayo and in 1964 he was appointed Vice-Principal in Castlebar Vocational School and subsequently, in 1967 at just 28 years of age, he was appointed Principal of Ennis Vocational School, where he served for seven years, until his appointment as Chief Executive Officer of Clare Vocational Education in 1975. In the short 15 years that had elapsed since his first day in the classroom in Inverin, he was promoted in double-jig time to the top job. Clare VEC knew their man and didn’t want to let him go. In the process it meant that Jim had become embedded for life in education.
Education was a happy choice - for both Jim and the VEC - as he had found his métier and for 27 years as CEO he excelled in the role. His easy, unobtrusive manner, his low-key approach to problems, his ability to draw together disparate groups and perspectives by clarifying and finding a path through what sometimes appeared as an insurmountable maze and, above all, his unvarying respect for everyone he met were among the many exceptional gifts he brought to his life’s work.
His first great challenge was how to improve vocational education in rural Clare where over the years a system of multiple small secondary schools limited a broader choice of subjects enjoyed by larger schools and the resources and new buildings and extensions that reflected their enhanced status. The rural schools under different management structures and under the control of different cultures - religious and otherwise - were complicated to reconcile but Jim (and other school trustees) were trusted to carry through successfully the conversion of a series of smaller schools into larger more sensible and productive units.
It was for him, a hugely important task, as with Jim and his co-conspirators from other educational traditions, the object was nothing less than effectively and comprehensively improving and embellishing educational opportunities in rural Clare. It was a stunning example of what intelligence, respect for difference and planning expertise could realise and Jim was the beating heart, the key catalyst in successfully delivering the project. For him, education was the key to almost everything and he brought his wisdom and expertise to delivering it - as with the famous advice he gave teachers for dealing with difficult students: ‘Catch them doing something right’.
What helped of course was his reputation not just for extending equal opportunity access to education but his record in supporting worthwhile endeavours in parish and community.
His list of achievements at local levels is almost impossible to quantify: the Burren Outdoor Education Centre; the North-South Co-operation and Reconciliation; Clare Youth Service, Ennis Boxing Club, and even his key role in supporting the Ennis Brass Band who played so appropriately at his funeral Mass.
Later after his retirement from the VEC in 2002, the list got longer: he was chair of the Health and Safety Authority; he served on the boards of Shannon Curriculum Development Centre; Shannon Hotel Development Centre; he took assignments from the Department of Education and Galway University and was awarded an Honorary Masters Degree by the National University for services to education. He was a lifelong member of St Vincent de Paul in Clare; and a founder member of Gaelcholáiste an Chláir.
For Jim Lyons life was always about service and about empowering others to reach their full potential. It was moving to meet many who turned up to his funeral, not because they knew his family, but they needed to honour the man. In the words of one former student ‘Without Jim, the latter part and circumstances of my life could have been much less meaningful’.
Jim Lyons is survived by his wife, Madeleine (nee Hoban), a native of Belderg, in North Mayo and their five children – Mary, Seamus, Áine, Seán and Clare, 12 grandchildren and a wide circle of friends, old and young, for whom he was an oasis of wisdom and love.
May he rest in peace.
