After 51 years of trading, Kilkenny’s sprawling Livestock Mart will be torn down this year.  With its central location, the Mart has been a defining element of city life, bringing traders, farmers, visitors, cows, pigs and sheep from all over the surrounding area teeming together under one ripe-smelling roof.  Once the mazes of gates and walkways, the overhead gantries and the auction pens have been bulldozed into history, a gleaming new shopping centre will emerge in its place.

The Mart has been central to the lives and memories of the people of Kilkenny, not only because it was a key source of employment and trading but also because the site was used for every travelling funfair and circus that visited the city.  The breadth of experience which occurred within its crumbling walls covers every element of life and touches all ages. Over the course of the documentary we will witness the transformation from the past days of heaving, life-packed centre of activity, to today’s empty, echoing industrial ruin, and finally to tomorrow’s gleaming twenty-first century shopping mall.