Mary’s father was called Barney and her mother was called Bridget.

Barney had a glass eye, Bridget was a lovely lady. I got to know them later on in life.

Mary was one of a family of eight.

Mary would have rode her bike from Fork Hill into Newry or at some point in time.She met John Byrne, who came from Ban Road, Tolley Eire, now known as the Auchnacloy Road.Mary and John would have gone to the dances and met up on their bikes for dates and they eventually married in 1961 and adopted a son in 1964.

They lived on the family farm that was left to them by Arthur Byrne to John and they lived along with Nancy Byrne, which was John's sister. Nancy worked in the stitching factories between Rathfriland and Lurgan

Mary, John and I used to drive around the housing estates in Banbridge would grow our own potatoes in the fields and package them up and place them in a thing called a ‘bing’ in the middle of the fields which kept potatoes fresh & free from frost during that little time of the year. So how do you make a bing, you dig a big hole in the ground with a shovel. John did this every year. That meant that the potatoes were all built up into the ‘Bing’.

Then whenever you had them in a triangle or a long triangular shape, you would then cover them with rushes, which we harvested out from one of the other fields - just across the back of the house here that I live in and we covered the potatoes with rushes and then we would put soil on top of the rushes as well. So that meant that whenever the frost came along and hit the soil it didn't get in as far as the potatoes because the soil was usually more than about three inches deep all the way along the top of the bing, which protected it from the surface frost during the year. So we would have the potatoes for sale and we would go to the local farmers and we'd get their meal bags that they weren't using and we would use of meal-bags to go out and hand out the potatoes in the meal bags. We were very, very pioneering recyclers even at that stage. So if you can imagine a car, the boot fully packed, the back seats fully packed and me crawling in from the passenger's front seat on top of the potatoes in the back seat so that John, Mary and me could go round the housing estates and sell our potatoes and that's the way that we used to work until I was the age of 17 and then went out and started to work for myself. But in addition to that, Mary Byrne and I would go and gather potatoes for the neighbours and there would have been troups of people turning up at the house. The neighbours were gathering there, but it was for the year and you'd have maybe 30 or 40 people in the field at once. And the famous Line; “On with a hooker”.

Whenever you had your piece of the potatoes filled and other people were still with taken their time. So you could imagine a drill of potatoes about maybe 100 meters long and you had your section which had maybe about 20 meters long, around five different people in every section. So you had to move at the speed that everybody else was moving at. So it was a quite a competitive structure to work in. So Mary and I used to gather this together as we went through our lives.

As we get older, Mary was a superb person for boosting your confidence and boosting your resilience because she was always saying, “well, what did you do tonight? Or did you sort this one out or did you do well or what happened?” She was always giving you reassurance and a pat on the back for a job well done. So she was your best supporter. The absolute best supporter. Over the years, it was always that way. She was always looking for the best in people. She always, whenever she met a soul, was tittering and having fun and finding something to laugh about. It is not lost on me that someone who only visited Dublin twice in her life had never been to County Clare had never been to Kerry, had been in England once. It is not lost on me at that person formed so many lives and through her kindness, uplifted so many spirits.

She was so content in her world, she was the most patient, contented individual. All she needed was to sit in the front room getting her paper to read. Once a week she would have got a magazine called the Papers Friend or Ireland's Own or something like that. And would happily sit there looking out the window, watching the traffic, and that's how she lived her life in her later years. In the summertime, when it was warmer, she would take a chair to the front door and neighbours would be coming up and passed, up and down the road and they would beep their horn. That would be Mary having her interaction with the public And that would be Mary having her interaction with the public because people were recognised for sitting there. So she was a cheerful, happy woman who lived a full life, a simple life, a worthwhile life.

John and Mary would run the farm on a daily basis and Nancy would drive off to work. And I would go to my school and Banbridge Academy and before Barbara's Academy, I would have went to Tullyari primary school. I remember my first day going to Tullyari primary school. Nancy had got herself a lovely Morris Minor car and John drove the car over and it worked perfect and everything was class and all was good. And then I think he must have left the lights on, because when we went out to drive it the next day, it wouldn't start. So my second day at school, I arrived in the back of a tractor sitting on a bag stuffed with rope, which was designed to stop me hurting myself sitting on the tractor. And then that's how I ended up going to school from the first day looking amazing and the second day looking like a wee farmer's lad.

John and Mary would run the farm on a daily basis and Nancy would drive off to work. And I would go to my school and Banbridge Academy and before Barbara's Academy, I would have went to Tullyari primary school. I remember my first day going to Tullyari primary school. Nancy had got herself a lovely Morris Minor car and John drove the car over and it worked perfect and everything was class and all was good. And then I think he must have left the lights on, because when we went out to drive it the next day, it wouldn't start. So my second day at school, I arrived in the back of a tractor sitting on a bag stuffed with rope, which was designed to stop me hurting myself sitting on the tractor. And then that's how I ended up going to school from the first day looking amazing and the second day looking like a wee farmer's lad.

Videos to remember Mary Byrne