Bernard hit the bullseye when he opened Carlow’s Club D’Art

BERNARD Jennings (68) is liable to break out into song at any moment.

“Singing is a big part of what I do,” Bernard said at the start of our interview. “I’m just after coming from a choir, Mary Ammond’s Community Choir. In Club D’Art, we have a rambling house once a month.” 

Club D’Art is, perhaps, one of the only good things to come out of the 2009 economic crash.

During the latter years of the ‘Celtic Tiger,’ Bernard and a friend bought a plot of land in Pembroke, Carlow town that had a few buildings on its perimeter. They had planned to demolish the buildings and develop the land into apartments. While they waited for the right developer, the land was leased out to the council as a car park.

After the 2009 financial crash, the council could no longer afford to lease out the car park and, as all construction on the island ground to a halt, Bernard and his friend were left with a large mortgage on a plot that had no prospect of being developed. To make matters worse, his friend announced that he could no longer keep up with the mortgage payments.

The bank put the property into receivership for seven years, although Bernard was eventually able to buy it outright for a good deal less than the €1m he and his friend had originally paid for it.

From the time that Bernard and his friend bought the plot, they had used the small cottages on the edge of it to host friends. “We started using it as it was only one room, it was easy to heat. We put up a dart board, as we used to play darts in Dunkirk,” Bernard said.

Dunkirk was a pub on the corner of Pembroke Close and Burrin Street, which closed in the 2000s. Bernard was part of a group of friends who would meet every Monday evening to play darts there, and with the closure of the pub Bernard decided to continue this tradition, so one of the buildings on his plot was christened the Dart Club.

Bernard and his family have long been involved in the arts. His father was the Carlow Little Theatre Company’s first treasurer.

“After a couple of whiskies, he used to think he was Richard Tauber,” Bernard said, and then began singing a rendition of Tauber’s 1929 song You are my heart’s delight – like father, like son.

“My mother sang as well,” Bernard said. “My brother Oliver, he started the Galway Arts Festival and he was instrumental in starting off Macnas (the award-winning theatre company based in Galway). This was in 1978, and at the time Oliver couldn’t drive. So I took off the two weeks for the festival.” 

Oliver Jennings is, perhaps, best known for being the manager of the Saw Doctors and De Dannan.

“I put on a De Dannan concert in the Seven Oaks for 50p a ticket, which is 65 cents now; 450 people turned up and I was happy. I made money,” Bernard said. “That got me involved in being a little small-time promoter.” 

When it became clear that Bernard and his friend were not going to develop the site, Bernard began lending out the heated room that was used for playing darts on a Monday evening to local artists, musicians and theatre troupes as and when they needed it.

Over time, the space became so synonymous with the arts that it went from being known as the Dart Club to Club D’Art, the subtle insertion of an apostrophe an homage to the space’s original use.

The last 15 years have seen the space enjoy a number of upgrades. Bernard installed a stage at one end of the original room so proper concerts and plays could be put on. The room next door has also been renovated and serves as a welcome reception area with a small bar.

Bernard himself often gets involved in different plays and concerts.

“I’ve always been involved in the arts, then I got involved in pantomime. Myself and a solicitor in town, John O’Sullivan – Big John. He has a theatrical flair,” Bernard said.

For ten years, Bernard and John dressed up as a pair of Jamaican cleaning ladies and performed a version of Bob Marley songs with some of the words changed.

“We’d come in from the back of the hall singing ‘No sausage, no fry’ (a spoof of No woman, no cry). We’d be wiggling our bums at the youngsters, and our little set was somewhere between seven and ten minutes,” Bernard said. “It was one of the greatest experiences of my life, making 300 people laugh.” 

Their costumes had padding to create large breasts, stomachs and bums, and involved the pair putting on make-up, which gave them a darker skin tone. The pair dressed up and were photographed in the Irish Examiner the day the Visual arts centre was opened.

“We used to brown down,” Bernard said. “I would love to do it again. If we were going to do it again, we were going to white up because (the Jamaican women) were using special cream because we’re living in Ireland to make ourselves whiter.” 

Bernard is resolute that no-one was offended by their act. “The wokeness … it drives me cuckoo, because it’s funny. I mean, if you’re to laugh at any joke, you can be insulted by it if you want.” 

Inside Club D’art, you can barely see a lick of paint as the walls are covered in paintings, photographs, programmes of past performances and mementos from Bernard’s travels around the world. Inside, one has the feeling of being in a life-size scrapbook.

“We live in a digital age where everything is on our phones and nothing is on the wall. I got the idea for plastering the place with things from a bar in Australia,” Bernard said.

A number of items on the walls are from the many trips that Bernard has made to Kenya over the years. Towards the end of his career as an optician, Sr Goretti Ward, whom Bernard knew as she ran the nursing home Bethany House, where Bernard would go to give the residents eye tests, decided to move from Carlow to Kenya. Bernard kept in touch with her and she encouraged him to come out and visit. 

She was keen for Bernard to give the local residents in the remote part of north-eastern Kenya eye tests, as many of them didn’t have access to any sort of medical care. For each trip, Bernard needed to raise money for supplies and eye surgeries for the patients, so he would raise the money by hosting fundraisers in Club D’Art.

“The first year I went, I was very badly affected by it because the poverty was incredible. My golf bag and its contents is probably worth more than five or six families out there. I mean, all they have is maybe a change of clothes, but they might not,” Bernard said.

Sr Goretti passed away on 1 December at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, but is fondly remembered across Carlow.

Reflecting on the original decision to buy the plot of land, Bernard looked off into the distance and said “big mistake”.

While Bernard has never made a financial on his purchase, from the enthusiasm with which he shows people around it and the joy it has brought people as a space for creativity and play, it has certainly paid dividends in other ways.