John Sweetman
speaker
14,352 appearances
33 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 5d ago
John Sweetman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 33 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 8.
Appearances
More than mother and daughter, they were best friends.
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They shopped together, attended mass together, and cycled out to visit Anne's grandmother or spend an afternoon along the wild Donegal coast.
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They were an unusual family in Ballybuffet, with it just being the two of them.
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Annie's first husband died when she was still young.
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Years later, after rebuilding her life, her second husband, Anne's father, suffered a fatal heart attack less than a year after their marriage, when Anne was only three months old.
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But Annie was one of eleven siblings, and the wider family rallied around them.
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Nanny was very house-proud.
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Her daughter's friends often said it looked like a doll's house.
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Always spic and span, with the rooms decorated by crocheted doilies and little vases.
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The idea of missing Sunday Mass simply wouldn't have occurred to her.
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She took no interest in politics, didn't like to miss watching Sunday night's episode of Glenrow on RTE television, and she occasionally went to bingo at the Isaac Budd Hall in Ballybuffet.
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Most of all, she seemed to live for Anne.
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By the time her daughter reached adulthood, she had been raised not only by her mother, but by an entire community, and her home at the edge of Ballybuffet was often filled with visitors.
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One of their most frequent visitors was Anne's boyfriend, John.
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Anne had fallen for him after meeting him at a local disco three and a half years earlier.
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She was fourteen years old and he was eighteen.
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He lived twenty minutes away in Lifford, just across the county from Ballybuffet, but he already had his driving licence and it wasn't long before he was collecting Anne from school in the evenings.
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Like most teenagers at the time, they spent their free hours at dances and discos in village halls across Donegal or over the border in Oma.
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When they weren't out together, John was usually at the Gillespie house.
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He rarely wanted to spend an evening apart from Anne.
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Showing 641–660 of 14,352 · page 33 of 718
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