Founder of the Cloona Health Centre in Westport, Sonia Kelly's ideas on health tourism were way ahead of their time, writes DEIRDRE McQUILLAN
SONIA KELLY is fond of wearing hats. Particularly the jaunty berets crocheted by her friend and neighbour Patricia Overton which she sports with zany silk scarves. “Recession fashion,” she calls it.
During a long and unconventional life, she has worn many different hats of other sorts, many of them with colourful stories attached.
A self-confessed deserter from the British army, she settled in the west of Ireland in the 1930s, became in turn a fishwife, a mother, a taxi driver, a BB proprietor, an artist, a photographer, a short story writer and newspaper columnist.
But she is best known as the pioneering founder of the Cloona Health Centre in Westport, whose ideas on health tourism in the 1970s were way ahead of their time.
Small and sprightly with strong, capable hands and a languid drawl, Kelly today looks – and sounds – younger than her 90 years and her sharp mind and vigour testify to a healthy, active life and good genes.
The centre, now run by her youngest son Dhara, still operates on the basic principles she established when it opened nearly 40 years ago. She is now retired and lives close by in a converted stone coach house surrounded by an adoring posse of feral cats.
Born Sonia McMullin, her story is the stuff of fiction – how she quit the army at the age of 21, came to Ireland, married a handsome, easy-going fisherman 10 years her senior called Josie (Jay) Kelly, the youngest of 18 from an island in Clew Bay, and their interminable efforts to sustain themselves and their five children.
“All my relatives were married to army officers, colonels and so on and I was a deserter. Then when I married Jay, it was the last straw. My relations were posh and this was an islander, a fisherman, so I didn’t have anything to do with them for a long time.
“My brother didn’t approve of the romance either and didn’t speak to me for years. He called me Miss McMullin because he was so disapproving. I thought how stupid,” she says with a characteristic offhand shrug.
Romantic it may have been, but times were challenging for the young couple. “Talk about recession now, it was a hundred times worse then. You had to be resourceful or die,” she recalls. “I sold fish from the back of a baby Ford. I started a taxi service. We even made sacks at one point.”
Born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) where her father had a tea plantation, but despatched to England at the age of one, Sonia was a lonely child, brought up by an Irish nanny called Mary Keegan, who taught her to read at the age of four.
When the family took a house in Moyard in Connemara, Sonia went to Kylemore Abbey. “Can’t say I liked it,” she says curtly. “They taught me elocution, posture and music. I didn’t do Irish or religion and only went two days a week with a chauffeur.
“We were obviously quite grand, but my father lost all his money on a doomed film project and we went to live with my grandmother after that.”
She remembers staying with relatives and riding ponies in Easkey “and a lot of messing about and falling off horses” to which she now attributes dodgy joints, but admits without self- pity that “there was not much affection in my childhood, though I had the best of everything else”.
In the 1950s, enabled by a small inheritance from the sale of the plantation, the Kellys gave up the fishing and bought and renovated an old woollen mill in Cloona in the foothills of Croagh Patrick near Westport.
“Jay could do anything with his hands and we figured out how to make the Aran crios and started a weaving business called Irish Craft making crios cushions, hats, scarves, jumpers, waistcoats and skirts, which sold to the US and featured in fashion magazines.
“Jackie Kennedy was presented with a jumper and so was Tommy Wade.”
The business flourished for years, but the Northern troubles finally put an end to its success and it closed down.
When other eccentric plans to house Tibetan refugees in the mill foundered, the idea of a health centre started to take root.
“I was always interested in eastern religions and that was why I wanted to have [the Tibetans] because I could study Buddhism. So when they went I decided to start my own philosophy. Jay wasn’t interested in religion but went along with the whole thing.
“I got in to [Herbert] Shelton , studied the various aspects of nutrition and health and learned how to do massage. I had to employ yoga teachers – we had all sorts – until I learned it myself and wrote a book about it.”
The book, A System of Personal Revolution, was published by the Mayo News and is shortly to be reprinted.
How to breathe, eat and exercise correctly was and still remains the basic philosophy of Cloona today as it did nearly 40 years ago.
The daily routine hasn’t changed that much either; the citrus breakfast followed by yoga, lunch of soup and salads, a walk, a fruit meal, massage and sauna, is still fundamentally the same.
In the beginning, however, getting access to funds was very difficult, Sonia recalls. “I had to borrow the money to finish the mill but no one would lend because in those days women were nothing.
“But I eventually got it from Bowmakers and they used to come here and collect it. When the last two instalments were paid, I wrote and thanked them and they were amazed that anyone would do that.”
She is still very particular about what she eats and lives on a diet of fish, vegetables and fruit.
Her cluttered workroom, decorated with her paintings, family photographs, books and cuttings, and crios cushions, indicates an array of interests.
Her latest oeuvre is a comic novel called Doris – Ecstasy for the Elderly, published by Author House in the UK, about the escapades of an OAP and her madcap encounters with authority.
Never afraid to speak her mind, Sonia wrote for the Irish Farmers’ Journal for 10 years and was a regular columnist in the Mayo News. Jay died in 1990 after an eight-year illness.
God knows what she’ll get up to next, but her many fans never underestimate her. On the dresser in the kitchen is a postcard from one dated July 2005 from Brooklyn.
“Your very stimulating columns have just reached me here. They are very subversive for Ireland. Thank you for reminding me that there are fellow thinkers out there. Above all, keep up the good work – Nuala O’Faolain.”
