Obituary: Albert Stone, Kilcock, Co Kildare - haulier highly regarded by President and Taoiseach

A marketing campaign objective is to get as many of us to do, or behave, as they want us, to do.

Social, or peer pressure, exert the same behavioural conformity.

In modern life, it takes ad exceptional independent mindset to, let’s say, ‘paddle his own canoe’ . It can be a very lonely journey, especially as most of us require companions to sustain us.

Ireland has well trodden emigration routes to Australia, the USA, Canada and Great Britain, where many never got or took a chance to grow. Albert Stone, was such an exemplary man.

Whoever heard of an Irishman ever visiting Cambodia, never mind, settling, establishing a family, and dying there.

It is a measure of his esteem, in his own community, that it raised c €25,000, crowd funded in 10 days, to have his remains flown home for interment in Kilcock.

Adventures

When Albert Stone in Kilcock closed his haulier service and retired, his plan was to see the world, as a Hairy Biker’. Especially, on roads less travelled, as the Nobel laureate, Robert Frost, put it, that made all the difference. That was a very intelligent and easy decision for a courageous man, who had no fears of the unknown and had no reverse gear. Whereas, most of us are spancelled by fears, Albert’s life was a monument to embracing the unknown. He never saw that common sense that told him to be afraid .

Albert was born in Adare Manor Demesne in Co Limerick. Equestrian skills, took his father to North Kildare, where he settled and the Stone family grew up in Kilcock.

The first phase of Alberts work life was a daily bread delivery man, for Kelly’s Bakery in Kilcock, then one of the biggest bakeries in Ireland.

In the early 1970s, Kildare became the nursery or garden plant production centre of Ireland.

Costin’s Nursery was one of these, from where it supplied the 32 counties and exported to the UK. When Kelly’s Bakery closed, Albert Stone became our face and representative to garden centres across the 32 counties.

He was our ambassador and head of our diplomatic service.

In reality, his distinctive identity was that he got up at 3am and then travelled to the furthermost destination point of his daily schedule and would make a delivery, before the customer opened their premises, be it Skibbereen, Belmullet or Ballymena, Co Antrim.

Ballymena is citadel of pure Presbyterianism, where time keeping is a basic measure of both your word and worth. One owner gave Albert his ultimate benediction. He found his timekeeping was so exemplary, he declared ‘he must be one of us’. With a non-republican name, like Albert Stone, he did not believe that he could arrive so early from the south.

The main measure of his exceptionalism was the feedback that we got from those to whom we made deliveries.

Mr Haughey was a lover of trees. His relief valve, in time of crises, was to plant trees. There were many crises, so deliveries were frequent. At 7.30am in Abbeville, Mr Haughey would consult with Albert, seeking feedback on ‘how his people were feeling’.

Presidential chats

In Áras an Uachtaráin, President Mary McAleese directed her staff, to unload the delivery, whilst she brought Albert, to the kitchen, where she joined him for a chat over cups of tea, which she made for him.

In 1974, in anticipation of a Papal visit and in commemoration of the Centenary of the Apparition. Monsignor Horan, commissioned Costin’s to create a 140 acre park around the Basilica. Albert’s many pilgrimages to Knock, over the years, were predominantly to deliver trees and shrubs, to shelter the pilgrims on that windswept hill.

The late Monsignor Horan had a great affinity for men who got up early in the morning. In his words, ‘they feasted on the worms’.

It was a measure of the esteem that he was held in too, that a fellow Limerick man, once a JCB driver, but now a billionaire, made time for Albert, when he made deliveries to JP McManus.

In his lifetime, Albert bore very heavy crosses, that would have broken others, as a burden too far. Over a decade, he experienced the trauma of being informed of the sudden death of his wife, two sons, and his mother. Yet Albert had the resilience and mindset, to treat such losses as loads that he could carry. Little sigh, and no pity me.

Sequoia sempervirens, the Californian Red Wood is the tallest tree in the world. The local coastal plain native American Indians say, when a notable man dies in their tribe, that the biggest tree has fallen. It is an apt epitaph for Albert Stone. It is a measure to the centimetre of Albert’s true worth and loss.

In Japan, there is a tradition of planting a tree, when a person dies, so that its former life will be reincarnated in new form in the tree.

In April, Albert’s son, Shane, plans to plant a grove of Japanese cherries, prunus serrulata, to commemorate the lives of his deceased parents, two brothers, and his baby son.

John Joe Costin

Costin’s Nursery,

Kilcock