THE LONG READ: Tullamore's Bridge Centre: Giving shoppers what they like for 30 years

The big developments of the 1990s, and the last under Irish ownership, were the Bridge Shopping Centre and the new Texas store both of which were completed in September 1995. The equivalent of perhaps 100 typical shops in terms of floor space was added to the Tullamore offering in one month. It was a turning point in the history of shopping in Tullamore and opened a brief period when Tullamore possibly dominated shopping in the midlands. These were the ‘good Tiger’ years for Ireland and for Tullamore with two hotels to follow in the same decade.

The development of the Bridge Centre was part of a major expansion in retailing throughout Ireland in the early 1990s encouraged by tax incentives and the growing economy. This included The Square, Tallaght, Eyre Square, Portlaoise, Longford, Market Cross, Jervis, Market Place, Clonmel and many more. The problem of what to do with the upper floors was solved by building on the Irish passion for cinema and again expanding the offer from three screens in Tullamore to six. The Ward Anderson, Dublin Cinema Group, was already in Tullamore, having adapted the Central Ballroom in Tara Street in the early 1980s. For the new cinema developers tax reliefs combined with greater seating capacity meant that the new buildings were costing nothing.

Ger Connolly T.D.

Four local men were responsible for the shopping boom in Tullamore from the mid-1990s. The first was Ger Connolly who as minister of state at the Department of the Environment and a local TD saw to it that Tullamore got its share of designated areas for development and the all-important capital and rent allowances. The second was Christy Maye, a native of Ballymahon, who had a stake in the town since he bought the Bridge House in 1970; the third was Tom ‘Texas’ McNamara, a native of Portarlington, who opened his first fashion shop in Tullamore in 1981. Both built their new stores in the town centre and McNamara would do the same with his second development at Water Lane (now Main Street) from 2002. The writing was on the wall for the small grocery since the early 1960s. Now it was about size, comfort, choice and price.

The fourth man was John Flanagan who built the new Tullamore Court Hotel which it opened in 1997. Following just two years after the new shopping centres it brought Tullamore into the new century with its 70-bed hotel and great halls for dining and dancing (and buying the clothes of course to match).

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Christy Maye and the Bridge Centre

The Bridge Shopping Centre site was put together over the years 1980 to 1994 and was based on part of the lands of the Tullamore distillery, the old Egan’s Brewery Lane, the G.N. Walshe garage (the tobacco factory up to 1886) and the lands that had been used in the 1960s for broiler chicken production. Curiously Maye and McNamara would come to own most of the former Williams Group lands which stretched from the canal almost to the railway station. The Bridge Centre was the largest retail project carried out in Tullamore up to that time. Even so Maye must have wondered if the project would succeed. In his own colourful words some townspeople told him that a ‘herd of elephants would be running through the place’. Success was assured when Dunnes Stores, agreed to buy a 40,000 sq. ft. unit in the new centre, and thereby open a second store in Tullamore across the river from their former haunt in Patrick Street. As with Church Road in 1989 and Tesco in 2004 that decision provided the carrot for the small retailers to buy into the new centre.

The Bridge shopping mall, costing £12m, was opened in September 1995 by Gay Byrne and added overall 120,000 sq. ft. of retail, office and cinema space in the town centre. Besides Dunnes there were about 20 shopping units on the ground floor, eight more units upstairs, offices and the cinema. The overall lettable retail space was about 64,000 sq ft. The large free car park provided space for 350 vehicles. About fifty apartments were built by McMahon and Walsh Mangan in three blocks besides the car park. In 1996 the post office, which had been in O’Connor Square since 1909, was re-located across the street to a new unit in the Bridge Centre fronting O’Connor Square and largely on the site of the old Treacy butcher shop and part of the old G. N. Walshe car showrooms. This was to make a tremendous difference to O’Connor Square.

The Bridge Centre attracted the new multiples such as Vero Moda. Local pharmacist, Denis O’Connell, expanded his offering in town by adding a large pharmacy store. It was mainly fashion and phones, but Gemma Dunican brought her Kit your Kitchen store from Patrick Street and Ray Quinn his music store from Church Street. There was a good mix of almost all Irish owners with Dunnes presiding over the entire. Valuable tax allowances meant that the new breed of Irish investor was eager to get involved in buying the rents and tax reliefs and thereby help repay the developer the large capital outlay involved. The council too chipped in with rates relief for ten years and until 2006 there were no universal parking charges.

Designated areas for tax and rates relief, 1987-1999

The Designated Area Scheme was first announced in 1987 and while much denigrated by the Irish Times twenty years later, mainly in connection with tax allowances for hotels, seaside resorts and needless housing in the Upper Shannon basin, it did make a significant impact in Tullamore which was largely beneficial. Would the shops have been built anyway without incentives? It seems unlikely. The first scheme covered parts of High Street west, all of Patrick Street and some of Kilbride Street. It helped to revive Patrick Street after the loss of Dunnes Stores in 1990, permitted the Bridge Shopping development and facilitated redevelopment in Kilbride Street including the units known as Cleland food store, medical centres and a Chinese restaurant. One of the first schemes completed was four shop units and apartments known as Kilbride Plaza to the back of a Sean Forrestal development of the 1980s and beside the new council car park off Kilbride Park. It did not include the Quinnsworth supermarket probably for the reason that the shop was in good order and only six years completed. Another part of the town included in the redevelopment zone was a portion of the Tanyard. This led to the completion of units for Tullamore Plant Hire and others. The scheme was too late for the old bacon factory area which became available after 1989 when the bacon factory closed. The Feery brothers acquired the bulk of the site in 1991and engaged largely in renovation of the existing buildings for use by builders’ providers and a small element of retailing.

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The second Designated Area Scheme of 1994 included the Market Square and parts of O’Carroll Street and Harbour Street. It was particularly relevant to Market Square which was in need of regeneration. The shambles beside it had the country market each week and was redolent of its original function as a meat and vegetable market. The tradition was also carried on by Joe Bracken’s fresh food shop of fruit/vegetable/fish and bacon and later McCann’s. The big improvements in the 1980s were on the western side of the square with the opening of the Captain Zoom restaurant in 1983 to the back of the Galvin’s Menswear shop and in 1985-6 a new second connection to Columcille Street with the completion of the first phase of the Gleeson shopping centre. The Captain Zoom restaurant was a bold idea but its location and the recession meant it had a short existence. The year 1992 saw the sale of the old maltings of Williams Waller to developers, P.J Mangan and Gerry Walsh for shops in O’Carroll Street and about forty apartments in the rest of the buildings. The ESB had moved to Sragh in 1998 but the company opened a 4,000 sq ft electrical retail store in the old Texas shop in Columcille Street in October 2001, but this was closed within five years and was converted to a bank for a short time. It was in this area from Kilbeggan Bridge as far as the ACC Bank and to the parochial house that the third scheme was designed to benefit from 1 March 1999. It did not succeed and the old Texas Drapery/ESB shop is now a Dental Surgery (2025)

Goodbye to the newsagent and confectioner

One sector which lost out in the retail changes of the 1980s and 1990s was the stand-alone newsagent. The most notable departure from the scene was Gorry’s shop in Harbour Street which had served as a distribution point and newsvendor for more than 100 years. The other news agency shops to close or transform their offering included Robbins Limited, the Book Mark, and J.J. Horan. Supermarkets were now also newsagents but more importantly this function was combined with the edge of town and garage forecourt offering. Sweetshops also suffered with Bracken’s, Talbot’s and Joe Finlay’s closing – the latter in 2002 after 43 years in business. Mrs Talbot operated her sweet shop in Patrick Street for almost 40 years until the 1990s. J.J Horan’s had been in business as a news agent since the 1920s.

Yet other sectors greatly improved. One was the pharmacies which, while nicely restricted up to the 2000s in terms of new entry, saw new stores at the Bridge and Church Road shopping centres and improvements to existing shops. In volume terms the number of pharmacies in Tullamore has grown from 6 in 1948 to 8 in 2013. Another was the butchers where Tormey (1971), Grennan (1983), Hanlon (1988), Dillon (1989) (in Church Road), among others, all significantly improved their offering despite competition from supermarkets. The famous Paddy Mac butchers closed in 1991. Like the Gorry news agency beside it this was from natural causes/retirement rather than competition. The family was in business since 1912. The number of exclusive family-owned butcher shops has fallen from 11 in 1948 to only four in 2013 and continues to fall as of 2025. In an age of prepared, frozen and pre-cooked foods the boundaries are now much more blurred. Freeman marvelled at Tullamore having a fish shop in 1948. That of Jason Bates for a while in High Street is unusual in having started in O’Connor Square in a casual trading area (albeit only every Third Friday by law) moving into a vacant shop in High Street in 2012. He is long back in Kilbride Park/O’Connell Street near the new Aldi, opened in 2024.

Parking troubles for Church Street and High Street

Nonetheless despite certain sectoral difficulties emerging in the 1990s the overall trend was of more shops being opened not just in the five malls of Church Road, Bridge Centre, Columcille Street (2) and Church Street, but also in the old warehouses off Patrick Street leading to the former Quinnsworth and perhaps in excess of twenty units in the re-developed Kilbride Street. In Columcille Street shops appeared in place of residential houses and again in Harbour Street. Church Street and High Street were a loser from the 1960s because of town council ordained (on the advice of the guards) traffic flows and never fully recovered even with the transformation of the Morris drapery to offices and a mall. High Street gained with the improvements to the Sweeney/Loughrey pub and restaurant, but the main focus continued to be Kilroy’s store. Over the period 2008 to 2013 this part of High Street would take a severe drubbing with the closure of Kilroy’s and the closure of the Loughrey pub in 2013, happily re-opened as the Town House a few years later. Again parking and traffic flows from the mid-1960s, played their part in converting this street from a once prosperous area to almost silence – at least from O’Connor Square to the town hall.

As the decade finished the new Main Street development was already mooted. Tullamore now had between 250 and 300 shops with Dunnes (two stores) and Tesco the main food stores together with Texas catering for a large home and drapery trade. Things would change significantly again from 2000 with the first Aldi in Cloncollog. Out of town shopping had begun and would expand rapidly from 2004 with the move of Tesco to Cloncollog and the new hub/shopping centre from 2007. Main Street had already opened and there is now a trend emerging of a new Main Street from the first Lidl in Main Street in 2003 to the second Aldi in O’Connell Street beside the canal in 2024.

Interesting times

In the thirty years since the opening of the Bridge Centre in September 1995 it has proved its worth and its importance to the town centre of Tullamore. Not only is it for shopping but also for community living. A place to meet, have a meal upstairs, and get all one needs in the superb shops and personal services available. That there is nowhere like it in the midlands is a testament to the vision of Christy Maye whose mission was always rooted in personal service – giving people what they like in an entertaining way.