If you’ve walked the Old Head of Kinsale loop this past year, you will have passed by the McCarthy family farm and Old Head Milk shop. If you’re a daily milk drinker then undoubtedly you will also by now be a regular customer. The Atlantic ocean offers a spectacular backdrop to the cows contentedly chewing the cud on the green pastures a stone’s throw from the shop – you won’t get much closer to the ‘from farm to fork’ (or in this case ‘from farm to bottle’) experience than this. Happy cows lead to happy customers and the rich creaminess of the pasteurised, non-homogenised milk from the McCarthy herd and the consistent footfall since the coastal farm shop opened last July is testament to this writes Mary O’Brien.

The 39-acre dairy farm on the Old Head has been in the family for generations – inherited from the Dempsey’s – and today is run by Gerard McCarthy and his son Stephen. Originally operating as a dry stock and tillage farm, Gerard and his wife Anne transitioned into dairy in the mid-1990s when new entrant schemes made it viable, starting modestly with just 14 cows. “Times were very different back then,” notes Gerard, reflecting on a time before milk quotas were abolished in 2015. That regulatory change allowed the herd to expand significantly and today the McCarthy’s milk around eighty cows.

For years, the natural rhythm of a busy dairy farm meant early mornings and long days, with both Gerard and Stephen also working off farm – Gerard as a general builder and Stephen as a carpenter.

“We were burning the candle at both ends,” says Stephen, who was eager to spend more time with his young family.  The solution came in the form of a farm shop, an idea sparked by similar successful ventures in the UK and Northern Ireland.

After researching equipment and visiting other farm milk shops, the family took the plunge in 2021 once approval was granted from the Department of Agriculture. Stephen and Gerard designed the layout of the shop and started building, making a sizeable investment into vending machines and a top-of-the-range pasteurisation system. The result is a sleek, user-friendly operation that bridges traditional farming and modern convenience.

With Stephen’s wife, Louise, the creative force behind the initiative, the farm shop, which opened at the end of July last year, has transformed their operation.

Behind the scenes, raw milk travels via pipeline from the milking parlour’s bulk tank across the yard to a dedicated pasteurisation room – an immaculate space with resin floors and stainless steel fixtures. There, the milk is heated to 76-78 degrees Celsius, cooled through regeneration, and chilled to 4-5 degrees before storage. Every batch undergoes rigorous testing: antibiotic checks pre-pasteurisation and phosphatase tests post-pasteurisation to ensure harmful bacteria are eliminated. “It’s spotless,” says Stephen of the room, where data loggers track temperatures for Department of Agriculture compliance.

Front of house, customers find a self-service experience designed with sustainability at its core. Glass bottles – €3.50 for a litre, €2.50 for a half-litre – are purchased once and returned for refills, eliminating single-use plastic. The milk itself, pasteurised but non-homogenised – €2 for a litre and €1 for a half-litre – retains its natural cream line. “If you leave it settling for a couple of hours, you’ll see a layer of cream sitting on top,” explains Stephen. “Give it a shake and you’ve got that fuller consistency.” The difference from standard shop-bought milk is immediately apparent – parents frequently report that children who refuse milk at home will happily drink the McCarthys’ creamy offering, often enhanced with flavourings available via an honesty box.

The shop also serves freshly ground coffee and hot chocolate – milky and delicious due to the creamy milk – and has outdoor seating, which is particularly popular with beach-goers and walkers exploring the Old Head loop. “We get a lot of walkers,” says Stephen, noting that even on quiet winter mornings, half a dozen cars might fill the car park on a nice day. The family atmosphere extends to the business itself: daughters Amelia (6) and Shóna (4) have their own jobs, emptying bins and stacking bottles, while Louise manages the decor and daily cleaning.

The operation remains deliberately local. Unlike supplying the co-operative, which they still do with the bulk of their milk, the shop requires customers to come to the source. “We kind of want to stay around here,” says Stephen, explaining that delivery would add unsustainable complexity.

Instead, they focus on the experience: fresh milk drawn from cows grazing with ocean views, served in a spotless facility where the connection between land, animal, and product is tangible.

As the McCarthys look ahead, possibilities include school tours and expanded community engagement, though for now, the business remains focused on quality and sustainability. With the cows just metres from the vending machines, Old Head Milk offers a genuine taste of place, bottled fresh by the family who raised it.

At the end of last year Cork County Council informed the Bandon Community Allotments group that their lease would not be renewed beyond 2027 due to the land being zoned for housing.

“It’s been a devastating blow to the town,” says Bandon Community Allotments Chairperson Adrienne Murphy. “Over the past 16 years we have built strong partnerships within the community and run many activities and workshops here so the impact of losing the Allotments goes way beyond the individual plot holders.”

Started in 2010 on Cork County Council land behind Coláiste na Toirbhirte off the Bandon Bypass; following the sale of the original site to the Department of Education, in 2019 Bandon Allotments relocated to an alternative site nearby provided by the Council. Today the Allotments, which has charitable status, is an established group of 37 members with a number of local community groups also benefitting from use of the space.

Cork ETB Further Education and Training Service has been delivering courses there for the past five years and West Cork Development Partnership (WCDP) has been using the Allotments to facilitate wellbeing activities for marginalised groups under the social inclusion programme (SICAP). WCDP also hosts workers at the Allotments under the Tús initiative, a community work placement scheme for the unemployed. Bandon Education and Action Group (BEAG), an initiative that has been commended for its commitment to biodiversity, recently created a small tree nursery and leaf mould system on-site, which shows the wider value of the allotments as a hub for environmental projects.

Throughout the world, green spaces like community gardens and allotments are recognised as offering numerous advantages, not only for the gardener, but also for the community, yet today Ireland has one of the lowest number of allotments and community gardens in Europe – only 2,500 compared to Denmark’s more than 60,000 allotments, a country with a similar population to Ireland.

Interestingly, back in the 1940s Ireland had far more growing spaces, with up to 40,000 allotment sites across the country. In Bandon, land in Town Park, Kilbrogan was divided into allotments for people of the surrounding area during the ‘Emergency’, with four ridges of potatoes assigned to each family. Locals remember playing on the uneven surface created by these ridges up to a few years ago. There were also allotments on the grounds of the town’s cottage hospital in the 1940s.

Today, for areas like Bandon, which have experienced significant and diverse population growth in recent years, spaces such as the allotment gardens are crucial in meeting the needs of the community.

During the period 2002-22, Bandon’s population grew by 59 per cent, a higher-than-average population growth across all age profiles. The 2022 Census also showed that 24 per cent of the total population of Bandon were born outside of Ireland (non-Irish citizenships) which is significantly above the national average of 16 per cent.

According to the West Cork Development Partnership, which runs SICAP, some new communities, especially those with limited English, struggle to integrate into the local community.

Providing funding to tackle poverty and social exclusion at a local level, SICAP has been renting one of the allotment plots to facilitate wellbeing activities on the programme, which has had a hugely positive impact on marginalised groups in the town. There are four disadvantaged SAs (small areas) in Bandon equating to approximately 14 per cent of the total Bandon population.

Research has shown that the benefits of allotments are far-reaching beyond providing fruit and vegetables. These include mental and physical health, community resilience, social connection, experiencing nature, and a culture of sharing knowledge and produce.

Community Development Worker Damien Quinn, who works as part of the Social Inclusion and Community Activation programme under the WCDP sees the Allotments as a microcosm of the wider community of Bandon.

“For many in Bandon, this space is a vital source of social connection,” he says. “Often it can be so hard to break down walls and barriers between people and the Allotments provide a fantastic space for fostering integration and developing connections between communities that might not otherwise mix.”

Damien has seen firsthand the impact the Allotments has on people from disadvantaged backgrounds. “I work with many people who struggle with drug use, social media addiction and solo parenting and I’ve seen the conversation change once individuals are exposed to the Allotments. This environment has a strong social purpose beyond the gardens.”

Dana Orosan from Romania and her family have been renting a plot at Bandon Allotments since 2020. Dana keeps chickens there and grows enough vegetables to feed her family through the summer months and to make jams and pickles for the winter. Within walking distance of their home, Bandon Allotments has become a wonderful social space for the Romanian family, helping them to integrate and make friends in the local community.

“We see our sameness rather than our differences here,” says plot holder Ann Conwell, who invested her savings into her plot after retirement. Ann suffers from depression and says being a member of the allotments has been hugely beneficial to her mental health.

Janet Pearson suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and joined the allotments after her doctor recommended gardening to improve and maintain joint mobility. Today she’s not only a plot holder, but the site manager, involved in everything from mowing grass paths to taking in fees to salvaging materials. “It’s a wonderful space that means so much to so many,” she says.

Eddie Collins grows plants for the Bandon Tidy Towns Group on his plot. As a retired person living on his own, he says “it’s been a wonderful way to make neighbours”.

The community is made up of many nationalities and people from all walks of life, which is reflected in each growing space.

Sharon Tonner says it’s a peaceful space where every plot-holder shares knowledge, skills and personal stories, as well as produce, throughout the year. “The continued existence of Bandon Community Allotments is essential in our growing town where green space is scarce and immersion in nature is a privilege.”

While in the UK the Small Holdings and Allotments Act 1908 places a legal duty on councils to provide allotments if six or more residents request them, here in Ireland supportive legislation was only introduced a few years ago under the The Planning and Development Act 2024.

Section 48 of the Planning and Development Act 2024 requires every planning authority in Ireland to prepare strategy relating to creation, improvement and preservation of sustainable places and communities. This must include objectives for the reservation of land for use and cultivation as allotments and prescribed community gardens.

Social Democrats councillor Ann Bambury has spoken up for the group, calling on Cork County Council to actively support the Bandon Community Allotments group in securing an alternative permanent site.

“The Bandon Community Allotments have delivered enormous benefits for the town, and it is vital that we do everything we can to protect their future,” she said.

She stressed that supporting the allotments would represent a relatively low-cost intervention with long-lasting positive impacts for the town.

“By supporting this project, the Council would be demonstrating a clear commitment to community wellbeing and sustainable development in Bandon.”

“We’ve been guardians of this land of 16 years,” says Adrienne. “I think the Council has an obligation to find land for us.”

“When you intensify living space with little green space available for the public to congregate, you create ghettos – the rate of isolation goes up and crime follows,” says Community Development Worker Damien Quinn. “Social profit can’t be monetised. You can’t just look at the Allotments as just a garden where 30-odd plot-holders are doing things, you have to recognise the positive impact it has on the broader community.”

Bandon Community Allotments is currently looking for land to lease in order to continue to support community members who do not have access to private gardens, maintain partnerships with local organisations, and promote biodiversity and sustainable living in Bandon town.

At the time of going to print, Cork County Council had not yet responded to the question of what is being done by the authority to help secure an alternative site for the group.

While his academic background is in archaeology and anthropology – he holds a PhD in  archaeology and has taught at university level for over two decades – it was Dr Schindler’s  interest in food, diet and subsequently health that prompted his research into primitive  technology and experimental archaeology, relating to how food is actually made.  

“Almost every prehistoric technology for three and a half million years had something to do  with food, either allowing us to get food, process food, store food, share food or  redistribute food,” he says.  

Dr Schindler is convinced that using technologies to transform a raw material into  something that’s safe and nourishing for our bodies is literally what helped make us  human.  

It was this realisation that directed his research into ancestral and traditional diets – a  journey that transformed both his and his family’s relationship with food.  

While filming ‘The Great Human Race’ for National Geographic, Dr Schindler lived for  periods using prehistoric technologies, sourcing and preparing food as early humans might  have done.  

“I realised that there’s so much incredible traditional knowledge still today that can really help transform and inform our modern approaches to food and they’re disappearing very quickly,” he shares.  

This life-changing experience reshaped the direction of his work. Taking his family with  him, Dr Schindler travels around the world, living with indigenous and traditional groups  and learning about their food traditions.  

From being taught how to make mursik (ash yogurt) – a fermented milk product – in Western Kenya to getting instruction in how to harvest and prepare insects for a meal in Thailand, Dr  Schindler began documenting this knowledge to redefine how we connect with food.  

“We are incredibly disconnected. Our food chains have never been longer than they are  before,” he explains. By removing some of those links and improving our diet, Dr Schindler believes that we can reclaim our health.

Ireland entered this chapter of Dr. Schindler’s life during a sabbatical year spent living at Airfield Estate, teaching at University College Dublin, and conducting global research – a period during which he also wrote his book ‘Eat Like a Human’. He describes his time in Ireland as transformative, shaped in part by his work with experimental archaeologist Aidan O’Sullivan and the Centre for Experimental Archaeology and Material Culture. Equally influential was his time with Jason O’Brien, founder of Odaios Foods, whose deep interest in hunter-gatherer societies helped inform the creation of a luxury food business rooted in ancient grains and high-quality ingredients.

“I fell in love with Ireland and its food traditions,” he shares. “When you start looking closely,” he adds, “you see that Irish food traditions were incredibly informed.”  

Oats are one of the clearest examples. For generations, oats in Ireland were soaked  overnight before cooking. This practice reduces phytic acid and other naturally occurring  compounds that interfere with mineral absorption. It also makes oats easier to digest.

“Even going back a very short time in Ireland,” Schindler notes, “oats were always soaked. That wasn’t a preference – it was just how you prepared them.”  

The widespread use of instant oats, eaten without soaking, is a modern departure from  that knowledge. It reflects a broader shift away from process – the steps that once made  food work properly in the body.  

Butter tells a similar story. Ireland has one of the oldest dairying traditions in the world and there is a good chance butter originated in Ireland possibly as long ago as 6,000 years. For almost all of that time, butter was fermented.  

That fermentation process produces vitamin K2, a nutrient essential for bone health and  for directing calcium to where it belongs in the body. It also plays a role in how the body  uses vitamin D. In a northern climate with limited sunlight, this mattered.  

In other words, the diet worked. So it endured.  

Milk reflects the same long familiarity. Ireland has one of the highest rates of lactase  persistence in the world – the ability to digest milk into adulthood – a genetic adaptation  linked to thousands of years of reliance on dairy.  

“Traditional cultures,” he explains, “developed methods to make milk more digestible by  replicating outside the body what infants naturally do inside it. What we used to do in our  stomachs, we now do in a fermentation tank when we culture dairy into yogurt, kefir, butter, and cheese.” Just as cows rely on fermentation in the rumen to break down grasses and birds effectively pre-ferment grains before digesting them, humans learned to ferment sauerkraut and make sourdough bread.  

Even the potato, often treated as the simplest of foods today, was handled with care in the  past. Potatoes contain natural toxins, particularly concentrated in the skin, and any potato  showing green indicates wider toxicity.  

“That green isn’t the toxin,” Dr Schindler explains. “It’s a warning.”  

Peeling potatoes and discarding damaged ones was once routine. It was not excessive  caution, but learned behaviour.  

Dr Schindler doesn’t suggest that traditional diets were perfect. Rather he explains how in  the past there was a deep understanding of how to make limited food sustain people.  

Modern food systems, he believes, have loosened that connection. Ingredients arrive  quickly, often eaten out of season, with little sense of where they came from or how they  were once prepared.  

He points to maize as an example of what happens when food travels without knowledge of its processing methods. In the Americas, corn was traditionally treated through nixtamalization, a process that unlocks nutrients such as niacin and prevents deficiency 

disease. When corn travelled without that knowledge, a disease called pellagra followed. This disease was seen in Ireland after the Famine when the country relied on corn supplied from the United States as a relief ration.  

Foods today promoted as ‘superfoods’ would once have been eaten sparingly and  seasonally.  

Spinach is one example. It is rich in oxalates, natural compounds that in large amounts  can contribute to kidney stones and joint inflammation. Traditionally spinach would have  appeared for a few short weeks in spring. Today it sits on supermarket shelves all year,  often eaten daily in smoothies and salads.  

“I’m not saying don’t eat spinach. Just look at how often you eat it,” advises Dr Schindler.

Almonds are a similar story. Harvesting almonds by hand limited how many a person could  consume. Modern almond flour, almond milk and snack packs deliver quantities never  previously encountered. “For people sensitive to oxalates, like me, that can cause real  problems,” he says.  

Dr Schindler believes that modern diets have drifted away from the understanding of what  makes food nourishing, with speed and convenience replacing proper process.  

While he is not calling for grand changes out of reach to busy families, he suggests small  acts like soaking grains, choosing real butter and buying food closer to its source.  

“You don’t need to change your whole life,” he says. “You just need to start noticing food  again.”  

Speaking about the course, Dr Schindler said: “In a world dominated by ultra-processed  convenience, the most innovative food solutions might come from the oldest diets. This  course is about bringing those ancient lessons into modern kitchens, farms, and markets  in ways that respect culture, support sustainability, and create real economic  opportunities.”  

‘Food Heritage in Action: Turning Tradition into Sustainable Enterprise’ runs for 10 weeks,  commencing April 1 2026, and is open to domestic and international participants with full  details available at: www.ucc.ie/en/ace/food-heritage/.

“Smile, breathe and go slowly, says Charlie Stevens, quoting the famous Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, as he sums up his own life learnings. Charlie Stevens, 78, first sailed into West Cork in the summer of 1975 on a test run before a planned sailing trip around the world. Over 50 years later and he’s still here writes Mary O’Brien, after shaping a lasting legacy on these shores: Charlie was one of the first to introduce yoga to West Cork and the driving force behind the foundation of An Sanctóir, the purpose-built yoga centre in Ballydehob that has become an integral part of the local community and celebrates it’s 30th anniversary this year.

Born into a middle class family in Surrey – his father a surgeon, mother a dance teacher – Charlie ran away from the pressures of his parents’ expectations as soon as he was old enough.

After dropping out of school at the age of 17, he travelled for a while, before moving to London where he found work in a Notting Hill antiques store by day and as a DJ by night – at the famous ‘Tiles’ Mod music venue on Oxford Street. ‘Tiles’ was part of London’s vibrant underground scene hosting many bands that later gained fame, including Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, The Who, and Led Zeppelin and the Bee Gees.

It was an exciting time in London. The streets were flooded with anti-war demonstrations and civil rights movements and the dance floors pulsed with a new energy, fuelled by music that pushed boundaries and a desire to break from the past. Charlie remembers the sound of pockets of pills being emptied onto the dancefloor. ‘Purple hearts’ (a combination of amphetamine and barbiturate) were a popular mood-enhancer among Mods in the 1960s.

Charlie’s journey with drugs began with marijuana before he moved on to psychedelics like LSD, promoted at the time by figures like American psychologist Timothy Leary as a tool for expanding consciousness and spiritual awakening. “We wanted to open the ‘doors of perception’,” he says. Around this time Charlie was introduced to yoga and the teachings of Krishnamurti and Zen Buddhism.

Germany’s first large-scale discotheque ‘The Blow Up’ opened in Munich in 1967 and Charlie’s reputation as a DJ saw him offered a job there. He recalls introducing Deep Purple and The Equals who were big names at the time. After spending a few months working nights and living out of a hotel room, the young DJ decided this lonely existence wasn’t for him. Although offered an attractive opportunity in the music industry in Denmark, he decided to return to his life in London.

The travel bug had however bitten and the young Mod decided to leave his career in antiques behind for the delights of Morocco, where he spent a number of months smoking hash and eating oranges. The dream ended abruptly after he came home one day to find his girlfriend in bed with his friend.

Down and out back in London, Charlie ended up squatting in London’s west end. It was a time when squatters became ingrained in London’s social history. The city was full of young creatives and hippies living on a shoestring, housing was scarce and there were a lot of neglected council houses and flats. Charlie moved into a dismal flat in the east end, where he remembers replacing a light bulb in the corridor only to find it stolen the next day. “All of my friends had moved on, it was difficult to find work, and life was pretty miserable,” he shares.

In a fortunate turn of events, after selling their tennis court, Charlie’s parents decided to pass the proceeds of the sale on to their offspring. Charlie’s share was £2,000. “It could have gone on drugs and rock ’n roll but instead I invested in a friend’s boat and sailed out of London on the ‘Nell’,” he says.

Watching the water turn from brown to blue, as he sailed down the Thames, was very symbolic for the young Charlie. “It felt like I was leaving my ‘low life’ in London behind,” he shares.

Out in the open sea, the beginning of their journey almost marked the end, after the novice sailors got into trouble in a gale and had to be towed to safety by a lifeboat. “It was one of those times when death was more than tapping on my shoulder,” he says.

After finally reaching Devon safely, Charlie was fortunate enough to find work as an extra on ‘The Onedin Line’, a BBC television drama series set in 19th-century Liverpool, that ran from 1971 to 1980.

He spent the next two years on the ‘Charlotte Rhodes’ in Dartmouth where most of the outdoor scenes of ‘The Onedin Line’ were shot. He looks back fondly on this fun time in his life, recalling a shoot in June that was supposed to be in the middle of an arctic winter. “It was a roasting hot day and I remember wearing swimming togs under these huge fur coats and boots with icicles stuck on our beards and sweating profusely.”

After a few years in Dartmouth, during which he met his future wife Sue (they are now divorced) it felt like the time to move on.

Charlie bought out his partner in the ‘Nell’ and started a new chapter of his life with Sue. Dreaming of travelling around the world, the couple first sailed down to Cornwall where Charlie spent a month detoxing from drugs and alcohol. “I ate only grapes for 30 days, which amazingly worked!” he laughs.

With Kinsale marked on the map as the ‘shakedown’ before the big trip, Charlie and Sue and another couple set sail on their grand adventure. But like so many ‘blow-ins’ they fell in love with West Cork and their path changed. “The first thing to greet us was a shout from another boat saying ‘Welcome to Kinsale’,” says Charlie. It felt more like an invitation than an arrival. In those days you were supposed to hoist a yellow flag for customs, but when there was still no sign of customs after two days, Charlie went ashore to find the harbourmaster. Greeted with the words ‘Ah sure, don’t worry about it,’ Charlie was charmed and decided to stay awhile.

The summer of 1975 was blessed with sunshine and, after sailing the coves and harbours of West Cork, the couple decided to winter in West Cork. The other couple headed back to England, leaving Charlie and Sue alone on the boat. Soon after, they sold the boat, bought a cottage in Ballydehob and settled into life here, marrying in 1977 and having two children together.

Charlie soon found work skippering boats for holidaymakers. A keen yogi, after spotting an advertisement for a yoga teacher in Clonakilty, he chanced his arm and applied for the job. “I was the only applicant and got the job,” he says.

After training with The British Wheel of Yoga, Charlie started yoga classes all over West Cork, going on to complete yoga teacher training. There were no yoga centres in Ireland at the time and while travelling around the country giving workshops in “cold community halls and classrooms”, the seed of an idea planted in Charlie’s mind. “I had the idea to form a yoga centre in West Cork,” he says.

The ambition was to open a centre that didn’t identify with any particular style or way of being. “It was to be a place that would be available to everybody in the community,” adds Charlie.

Finally, after years of fundraising, the enterprise board awarded a grant for the yoga centre, which was matched by a bank loan. “I can still picture the bank manager in Bandon saying ‘we need more than golf and Guinness in this country’” shares Charlie.

His marriage in trouble at the time, Charlie met his future longterm partner Marianne Gabriel while training his first group of yoga teachers in Ballydehob.

“It was a great time but also a very painful time,” he adds. Charlie and his wife separated just after An Sanctóir opened.

The next chapter of Charlie’s career journey began when a friend gifted him some psychotherapy sessions. His interest sparked, he took a higher diploma in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy at UCC and went on to do a Masters in Integrative Psychotherapy. In 1999, Charlie and Marianne set up Contemporary Yoga, a yoga teacher training school, which they ran together for over a decade. All the while, Charlie was continuing his training in counselling, adding the Family Constellation Method to his psychotherapy practice.

In 2009, he moved in with Marianne in Bandon, running his practice from their home. He went on to qualify as a clinical supervisor for therapists, which is his main occupation today.

“I think the most common problem I’ve seen in my years of practice is that we override our true nature, saying yes when we mean no, and getting caught in patterns from childhood,” he says.

While the method is unproven and somewhat controversial, Charlie is a great believer in the Family Constellation method. “I’ve seen that it works,” he says. “The method can be used, not only to see the possible resolution of hidden family dynamics, but also to explore issues such as systemic causes of illness, blockages in business development, relationship to money or those people with whom you struggle.”

Throughout it all, yoga has been a gift. Charlie still practices every day and feels as flexible and strong as ever. Turning 79 in a few months, he says he doesn’t have an ache or pain in his body. These days, he follows his own advice and moves more slowly, making space for the things that bring him most joy. He loves freeform dance, joins a weekly music session at DeBarras, continues to run workshops with Marianne, and still sees a few clients in his practice. “It’s never felt like work,” he says. “I’ve always just done the things I love doing.”

Retired pilot Charlie Coughlan pictured at this home in Rosscarbery

While his academic performance at school was poor, Charlie Coughlan, or Captain Charlie, as he later became known by, demonstrated a very high mechanical aptitude since he was knee-high. He was a late-starter as a pilot, only gaining entrance to the Aer Lingus pilot programme, age 20, after his father sent in the application form on his behalf.

“I used to maintain his car, so he knew I had it in me,” shares Charlie. Following a job at John Atkins and Sons in Cork City, Charlie joined Aer Lingus in 1962 as a temporary traffic clerk at Cork Airport, working for the weekly sum of £6 10s or €8.23.

After being accepted onto the pilot programme – he got 98 per cent in the mechanical aptitude exam – Charlie spent 11 months in the Air Corp at Gormanston, Co Meath, before completing his 200 flying hours in the Chipmunk, a single engine tandem-seat primary trainer aircraft, in order to gain his commercial licence.

The first commercial aircraft Charlie flew for Aer Lingus was the twin-engined Fokker F27 Friendship aircraft, one of the most successful European airliners of its era. He quickly graduated to the Viscount, the first turboprop airliner to operate a passenger service, before moving on to the Carvair, an unusual aircraft that flew both passengers and cars, followed by the Boeing 707 and then the Boeing 747, nicknamed ‘Queen of the Skies’. 

After becoming a captain at the age of 37, Charlie graduated to the BAC One-Eleven, Boeing 737 and finally the DC-8, known for its spacious cabin and speed.

Respected for his confidence and calm, particularly in tricky situations, there wasn’t much that phased this pilot during his 40-year tenure.

He describes a hijacking incident at Shannon Airport during a flight scheduled to carry lamb carcasses to Libya.

As the crew prepared the aircraft, a man who had slipped past cattle drovers on the ramp climbed aboard, pressed a gun into the systems pilot’s stomach, and ordered him to close the door.

“Thinking fast, the systems pilot told the hijacker he needed to retrieve the key from the cockpit,” he shares. Charlie immediately radioed for help, calmly announcing, ‘There’s someone out here with a gun’. After confirming the message had been received, Charlie suggested the crew escape through the lower 41 hatch – accessible by pulling forward the jump seat behind the captain’s chair – which led down into the electronics bay and out onto the ramp. Once the crew evacuated, the hijacker was left alone with the running inertial navigation systems, each worth half a million and at risk of overheating if the aircraft lost power.

While Charlie and the others pushed to be allowed back aboard to pull the circuit breakers, the immigration officer in charge refused, insisting on waiting for the army.

“Eventually the officer decided to take matters into his own hands, marched out and shouted, ‘Hey you, get off that f**king airplane!’” laughs Charlie.

“The hijacker surrendered immediately, waving his gun and yelling ‘Freedom for black Africa’.

“It later emerged he was a barman from Six Mile Bridge, who had been on the batter for a few weeks, carrying only a cap gun bought on his way home,” continues Charlie. “He spent the next six months in a sanatorium sobering up. I’m not sure he would have been given that second chance anywhere else in the world!”

On another flight from Shannon to the US, Charlie had to deal with a bomb scare. Descending the plane to 10,000 feet to match the lower pressure of the ground before landing – a step that’s necessary to equalise the pressure in the cabin and allow the doors to be opened safely – Charlie flew back to Shannon as fast as possible. “There were alarms going off because of the speed,” he recalls. “Ironically our biggest dilemma was, from a religious point of view, whether or not we should inform passengers about the bomb scare,” he adds.

The crew eventually decided not to make an announcement because of the panic it might cause and, after the aircraft reached Shannon safely and was isolated, the bomb turned out to be a false alarm.

In 1966, Charlie was charged with flying the Carvair, a since-retired air ferry. “it was very unreliable,” says Charlie, recalling how on two nights in a row in the same region, an engine failed on two separate aircraft.

On another occasion, when Charlie was flying from London to Dublin, the hydraulics of the aircraft overheated and the cockpit filled with smoke. “It was a very frightening experience,” he recalls. While the hydraulics were too hot to be handled, Charlie did manage to turn them off using a pen. “It was melting from the heat,” he says. He turned the aircraft around and landed it safely in London.

Another time, when he was a co-pilot on a Boeing 707, the aircraft flew into a flock of starlings just after take-off from Dublin. “There were over 60 bird strikes on the plane and the birds flew into two of the four engines,” he says. Luckily they were able to land safely back at Dublin Airport within minutes.

Charlie remembers how the ‘redcap’ – the guy on the ground who supervises departures – told the captain, ‘We’ll have another aircraft ready for you in an hour.’ “The captain just shook his head and said, ‘I think we’ve had enough for one day.’”

In 1962, Flying Tiger Flight 923, an aircraft transporting military personnel, ditched in the North Atlantic after a catastrophic engine failure, resulting in 28 fatalities and 48 survivors.

Charlie was standing on the ramp at Cork airport when the survivors were landed by Royal Air Force helicopters.

He remains in awe of the extraordinary achievement by the Flying Tiger’s pilot, Captain Murray, to make a controlled emergency landing in difficult conditions.

“It happened at night, way out in the Atlantic,” says Charlie, “yet so many survived.”

One of the passengers, Fred Caruso, was so delighted to pull through that he changed his name to O’Caruso, became an Irish citizen, and bought a house in Glengarriff!

In the eighties, Charlie was one of the pilots charged to fly 8,000 Ethiopian Jews with Trans European Airways from Sudan via Brussels to Israel under ‘Operation Moses’ – the covert evacuation of Ethiopian Jews (known as the ‘Beta Israel’ community from Sudan) during a civil war that caused a famine in 1984.

A co-operative effort between Israel, the US and Sudan, although thousands made it successfully to Israel, many children died in the camps or during the flight to Israel.

“There was a doctor at the door of the aircraft checking everyone, but sadly many of the parents – afraid of the unknown – hid their children under their clothes, and many babies died onboard,” he shares.

Some of Charlie’s happiest memories are of his time spent flying for a Nigerian airline. He captained the BAC One-Eleven for almost two years, flying for Okada Air, the privately-owned airline of Sir Chief Gabriel Osawaru Igbinedion. “I grew very fond of Nigeria and its people,” he says.

He recalls how pedestrians used to walk across the runway all the time in Nigeria. “You got used to it,” he says, laughing. “People used to dig up the glass lights on the runway to make jewellery.”

He chuckles remembering the Nigerian co-pilot who used to go around saying Captain Charlie taught him everything. “In fact he knew nothing and was the worst co-pilot I ever had,” Charlie laughs, remembering how one time the co-pilot, who had somehow graduated to Captain, abandoned take-off after take-off (something that’s unheard of), subsequently running the plane off the end of the runway.

Charlie flew for Aer Lingus until 1992, leaving to work for Aer Turas, an Irish airline and freight operator based in Dublin. He retired in 2002.

While for some retirement can be challenging, after leaving a demanding job with such irregular hours, Charlie is relishing the freedom of later life, especially as he has Sylvia to share it with.

“I do miss the camaraderie,” he shares “and it’s a wonderful feeling being up there just above the cloud, especially when you pilot an aircraft to the best of its ability, but I’m very happy in retirement,” he says.

“I think I could drive a tractor all day long without getting bored!” he adds laughing.

Pat, the oldest of four – Martha, Michael and Margaret – was just 12-years-old when he was taken out of school to help his father, Willie Murphy, who needed a driver, having succeeded in hiring a pony and cart to Cork County Council for drawing materials to facilitate road works on the Tallon Road. After that contract finished, Pat joined his father fishing out of Castletownbere. The family had one small boat and sold their catch, – mostly scallops during the winter and lobsters, crayfish and crabs in summer – every Tuesday and Thursday on the square in the centre of town. Fish was eaten religiously every Friday in Catholic households in those days. The Murphys also sold a selection of vegetables, which they grew at their plot in Droum, just outside the town. Up until just a few years ago, Pat and Mary still grew their own vegetables here.

Mary and Pat Murphy have been happily married for over 70 years.

A pioneer of the fishing industry with an entrepreneurial spirit, Willie developed one of the earliest dredges used to catch scallops and, in the 1960s, the father and son started shipping lobsters and scallops packed in timber boxes to Billingsgate fish market in London.

“We worked very hard back then,” says Pat. “It was all manual labour and fishing played hell with my hands.” Renowned for his fierce strength, Pat recalls how the rough lines would cut into his flesh when hauling in the catch.

During the 1930s the majority of Ireland’s population occupied small agricultural holdings. “When I was growing up we didn’t have running water or electricity in the house and everyone cut their own turf, helped with saving the hay, milked their own cows morning and evening and grew their own vegetables,” says Pat, who remembers walking to Finaha to cut turf, a laborious process, which involved cutting the sods, then leaving them on the ground to dry for a few weeks, before coming back to turn the sods by hand to help with the drying. “We’d then foot the turf into upright piles before transporting them home by pony and cart,” he says, his great hands demonstrating the action.

Pat and Mary were in their late teens when they caught each other’s eye across the dance floor. The dance in question took place every Thursday night at the Berehaven Hotel in Castletownbere with an entry fee of four pence. “The four penny hop,” remarks Mary smiling. “When she asked me to dance for the ‘ladies choice’ at 10 o’clock, I knew she liked me,” says Pat with a twinkle. “Twas the only way!” adds Mary, chuckling.

One of seven children, Mary grew up in the parish of Rossmackowen; her family were sheep farmers on Hungry Hill. With employment scarce outside of agriculture in rural Ireland in the 1940s, the rate of emigration, especially for single women, was high. Mary worked in the Arcade Guesthouse (now called the Mediterranean House opposite SuperValu) in Castletownbere and, even though she and Pat had been courting for a few years, when she was offered the opportunity to join her aunt in New York – where she would have well-paid work as a housekeeper in a residence overlooking Central Park – it was too good an offer to turn down. The couple made a promise to each other and kept up their romance, writing letters to each other every Sunday for the next five years. Mary still has those letters stowed away safely in the attic.

Before Mary left, Pat’s leg was crushed when a boat he was painting fell on top of it. He spent 16 weeks in a cast. “I couldn’t dance…that’s why she left me,” he says laughing.

Pat’s leg thankfully mended and, after establishing a foothold in New York, which paved the way for her two younger sisters Annie and Peggy to join her, Mary did return home from America in 1953. Annie and Peggy never did go back: Both sisters met and married Kerrymen – O’Sullvan and Begley – and raised families in The Bronx, and Yonkers, where Peggy still lives today.

A few months after coming home – wearing the elegant pale blue wedding dress she brought home from New York – Mary wed her sweetheart at the small church in Rossmackowen, followed by a wedding breakfast attended by family and friends in Glengarriff. Pat and Mary went on to have five children.

Lady luck smiled on the couple and Pat gained employment with the Commissioners of Irish Lights, where he worked for the next 22 years. “I went from fishing for a pound a week to a weekly wage packet of six pounds with the Irish Lights,” he shares. While it was regular and well-paid work, it could also be dangerous transporting the maintenance teams up and down the southwest coast to the five lighthouses. The first boat Pat manned was the ‘Valonia’, a 90ft wooden boat, with one engine and one propeller. “There were many times she rolled more than 45 degrees and I thought we wouldn’t be able to pull her back,” says Pat.

He looks back on an incident recounted to him by Gerald Orpen, (brother of Mick) one of only a handful left of the original 19 crew – a situation that, while funny in hindsight, could easily have ended badly.

It was a particularly foggy day. “The message relayed from the lookout to the captain, who insisted on being called ‘sir’ went something like ‘Seagulls in the water ahead, sir!’ The captain replied ‘We’re at sea, lad – I should hope there are seagulls!’ The reply, slightly more urgent, came back: ‘Aye, but these seagulls are standing, sir.’ ‘Full astern’ ordered the Captain finally, just in time to avoid the rock the ‘seagulls’ were perched on!”

With the automation of lighthouses in the 1980s, Pat unfortunately lost his job, as Ireland entered a decade of recession and unemployment. “I went back fishing,” he says. “That’s all I knew.”

His good friend, Mick Orpen, is the only surviving founding member of the Castletownbere Fishermen’s Co-Operative Society Ltd, which was set up in 1968. He recalls how Pat campaigned for the co-op’s processing and storage facility located on Dinish Island to be built in 1983. Mick was one of 16 children and like most islanders, as a child he was charged with picking periwinkles, which were sold to local buyers for export. Mick’s brother Eamon, who settled in Waterford, wrote a book, ‘Lest We Forget’, recalling the hardships of growing up on Bere Island.

Pat pictured with his good friend, Mick Orpen, a fisherman who grew up on Bere Island, and the only surviving founding member of the Castletownbere Fishermen’s Cooperative Society Ltd.

Over the years, Pat has been involved in many more campaigns, including the setting up of the lobster V-notching conservation programme, which is vital in helping to support breeding stocks and became a national programme in 2002. Last year over 47,000 adult lobsters were safely returned to the sea in Ireland.

In 1987, from the kitchen of the house they still live in today, Pat’s lasting legacy was born when he helped his son Richard and son-in-law Peter O’Sullivan Greene, also fishermen, to set up the company Shellfish de la Mer. The idea behind the business was to prepare and cook the catch caught by the fishermen each day in order to deliver the freshest and best quality product to customers in Ireland and France. Mary too had a role to play in the success of the company, spending many hours quietly helping to shell crab and scallops in her kitchen. Shellfish de la Mer grew into Shellfish Ireland, a leading supplier of sustainable shellfish to domestic and international markets.

Today there are three generations of Murphys involved in the company, which employs between 110 and 160 people in the region. Pat still chairs the monthly company meeting.

As he sits looking out at the sea that helped write his story – the tide brings it right up to the back door and under the house where some of his lobster pots are still stored – Pat reels in the years on a life that held much hardship but also happiness.

“A hundred years is too short,” reaffirms the fisherman, who’s not ready to let go of his net just yet.

When Austrian native Monika Power first arrived in Ireland as a 20-year-old au pair in 1995, she could never have imagined that the cold Atlantic waters off West Cork would one day play such an important part in her life. “I remember dipping my toe in for the first time,” she shares with Mary O’Brien. “The pain was quite intense. I had spent a lot of time in lakes back in Austria but back then swimming in the sea just wasn’t for me.”

It wasn’t until 2008 after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder that Monika realised her body had become intolerant to hot and cold temperatures.

While Glengarriff is now home, it wasn’t the sea or the landscape that first captured the young au-pair’s heart so many years ago but rather a local lad with the gift of the gab by the name of Dave Power. After giving Monika and her brother a lift when they were hitchhiking around Ireland, a long-distance relationship ensued, kept alive by letters for two years.

Nearly 30 years later, the happily married couple have two children, and Monika, 51, has become well-known down west for her role in encouraging nervous swimmers, young and old, into the cold water.

In 2012, she joined The Water School in Ballylickey, where she began training as a swim teacher and water safety instructor and discovered a lifelong passion. “I didn’t even have a proper swimming costume when I started,” she admits, “But I knew immediately that this was exactly what I wanted to do.” 

Since then many people have learned to swim with confidence under her calm and encouraging instruction, oftentimes starting off in the warmth of the pool at the Maritime Hotel in Bantry before moving on to the shifting currents of Bantry Bay and Glengarriff Harbour.

Over time Monika leaned naturally towards providing individual instruction, as she finds teaching groups challenging. She prefers to engage with each swimmer’s unique needs, after realising that both children and adults, at some stage during their swimming journey, benefit from personalised coaching. “Water gives both children and adults the freedom to move with ease, especially when struggling physically due to injuries or a neurodiversity,” she explains.

It was during the pandemic, like so many in West Cork, that she finally found herself drawn to the sea. “My sister-in-law lent me a wetsuit and off I went,” she says. After struggling so long with the cold, she realised how energising and revitalising swimming in the sea can be and “was hooked”.

Seeing an opportunity to combine her teaching experience with this newfound passion, Monika completed an open water coaching qualification with Olympic open water swimmer Keri Anne Payne, travelling to Belfast between lockdowns for the practical sessions. After sharing her newly-acquired skills with her local community, in 2022, she made the leap to start up her own swim coaching business and ‘Coast Swimmer’ was born.

Monica’s approach to coaching is slow and steady. “Open water swimming is a double-edged sword,” she explains. “The benefits are incredible – that pure joy and invigoration – but it must be done safely.

She stresses how important it is that sea swimmers familiarise themselves with changing conditions like rip currents, weather and temperature before entering the water and that they take the time to acclimatise to the cold. “Try to go regularly but choose a safe area and a routine that suits your lifestyle and is easy to manage,” she advises.

The swim teacher keeps her swim groups small in order to give her full attention to individuals. “Safety comes first and confidence matters,” she says.

She also helps out with Water Safety Ireland classes during the summer, teaching vital life-saving skills to young people during the swim weeks. “That’s a big part of what I love about what I do,” she says. “Seeing the next generation, not just enjoying the water, but passing on knowledge on how to stay safe in the water and going on to become instructors themselves.”

Two of her students, Amy (70) and Mary (62), learned to swim later in life and now swim all year-long to stay fit.

“I had just retired from a busy job and was a full-time carer when I started swimming with Monika,” shares Amy. “I remember looking across to Ellen’s Rock and seeing a buoy, maybe ten strokes away, in the water. I thought I’d love to be able to swim that far.” After six weeks Amy swam to the buoy and can now swim 1K with ease. 

“At the start swimming was just an outlet, something to give me focus, providing the opportunity to meet people. Now I see my fitness improving year on year and I have a newfound confidence as a result.”

She continues to swim weekly with Monica, who she says is “an amazing teacher with infinite patience”.

Another student, 13-year-old Amelia, completed a 3K swim over the summer, raising €2,800 for Bantry Inshore Search and Rescue.

“Monica is a brilliant instructor and under her instruction Amelia gained the extra confidence she needed to go into the open water,” shares Amelia’s dad Eoghan Quish “Swimming 3K was an amazing achievement for someone so young and Amelia is aiming for the 5K next year.”

Four years ago Helen learned how to do the front crawl under Monika’s guidance and this year swam her first 5K in open water, as well as bringing home a medal from the Vibes and Scribes Lee Swim last July.

“Swimming has become my happy place,” she says “and I am grateful to Monika for her support on my journey.”

For Monika, every session is special. “It’s a heartwarming experience” she says. “When someone who was afraid finally takes off without fear, or when clients get back to me with happy swimming stories after joining their friends – that’s what keeps me going.” 

She recalls one woman who had always swum head up doing the breast stroke, too afraid to look beneath the surface. She was terrified, but she trusted me. The moment she looked down, she saw the beauty underneath – the light, the seaweed, the fish. I couldn’t get her out of the water after that!”

Diving her time between the open water and pool, Monika teaches all levels and abilities. She offers four different levels in the sea during the summer, catering for beginners to more experienced sea swimmers training for local swim events or triathlons around the country. 

Her next project, she says, will focus on parents and toddlers in the pool, but with more emphasis on the parents. “When parents are confident in the water with their little ones these children will benefit in their future swim journey!” she explains.  

Looking back, the swim teacher is modest about how many people she’s helped – she’s lost count – but her impact in Glengarriff and beyond is easy to see. Over the past three years, Monika has guided countless swimmers into the sea, from beginners staying close to shore to more experienced ones taking on challenges of up to 5k.

If you would like more information you can text Monika on 087-2396284.

A new feature documentary, ‘Theocracy, the Emigrant’s Artist’, capturing the life and work of the London-based Irish artist Bernard Canavan – known globally as The Emigrant’s Artist because of his paintings of the Irish Diaspora – will premiere at this year’s Cork International Film Festival in November. Directed by renowned documentary filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle, the film traces Bernard’s story, from being abandoned as a baby in a notorious orphanage in Dublin to his emigration to London. Now in his early 80s, for the past few years Bernard has diverged from the theme of emigration to confront his demons – what the Catholic Church did to him and to thousands of other victims, mothers and babies who were incarcerated – in a darker collection of paintings entitled ‘Theocracy’ writes Mary O’Brien. Bernard is married to fellow emigrant Janet Lucitt from Bandon.

In 1944, Bernard’s unmarried parents had no other option living in Catholic Ireland but to place their newborn child into Saint Patrick’s Guild, a so-called orphanage in Dublin, later to become known as ‘The House of Shame’. At the age of four, the little boy was sold by the nuns to a Longford-based couple, Mr and Mrs Canavan, who were unable to have children of their own. In 1959, at the age of 15, Bernard emigrated to London where he worked in a sawmills before earning a scholarship to Oxford University.

He went on to work as as a teacher of history and art history, as well as an illustrator for radical and left-wing British magazines and journals, including ‘Oz’, ‘International Times’ and ‘Tribune’.

In 2001, while teaching a creative writing class at the Hammersmith Irish Centre, Bernard met Bandon native Janet, a student in his class. Although there was a considerable age gap – she was in her 30s and he in his 50s at the time – she would become his second wife and greatest supporter, encouraging him to exhibit his work, leading to international acclaim for the artist.

Bernard’s paintings of the diaspora have been described as creating a visual narrative showing the pain of women and men, girls and boys, leaving a broken Ireland to face the indignity of joining the cattle on the boat train to a new life in England. They show the realities of life as a subbie, piece work, being ‘on the lump’ and digging the tunnels.

In 2018, the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins bestowed the prestigious Presidential Award upon Bernard for his contribution to Irish culture in the UK.  

Janet Lucitt grew up in Bandon – her dad, Ted Lucitt, was well-known in the local community as a boxing coach at Gaggin Boxing Club – and after graduating from UCC in 1987, at a time when Ireland was in the grips of economic recession, she emigrated to London to find work, where she received a baptism of fire as a young trainee teacher, working at an underfunded ‘failing’ school in London.

After spending 20 years teaching, Janet went back to college to study law before returning to work in education. Today she heads up a special needs unit in a college of further education in London, where she hopes that she too is “making a difference”.

“I think what first drew me to Bernard was his intellect, his ideas,” she shares. “he was left-wing, interested in the arts and so was I.”

She describes her husband as intelligent, charming and very kind, the type of person that people and animals are drawn to. “He also holds a great amount of anger at the Church and state in Ireland for taking his identity from him.

“We got a cat this year, which has brought out the lighter side of him,” she adds. “It’s a great distraction.”

Bernard paints out his dark thoughts, through his paintings addressing the suffering that he and so many thousands of other unfortunates faced in orphanages and Mother and Baby homes in 20th century Ireland. The images are stark and unforgiving with Bishops depicted holding teddy bears to tempt children away from their mothers, clergy ripping new-born babies out of their mother’s arms, and nuns digging graves.

Of his early years, Bernard shares: “We infants owned nothing; no clothes except donated garments, no toys or picture books, we knew nothing, in fact we were nothings ourselves. We had no rights.”

Following a decades-long search, at the age of 65, Bernard finally managed to make contact with his biological family after locating his aunt, Maura Reardon, in Glengarriff.

At 81, he remains committed to being a voice for the countless survivors of Ireland’s Mother and Baby homes. He is a regular visitor to West Cork with Janet.

‘Theocracy, the Emigrant’s Artist’ directed by Sé Merry Doyle screens at The Cork International Film Festival 2025 on November 10, (5pm) at The Triskel Cinema, Tobin Street Cork. 

Along with gambling addiction, alcohol and drug addiction are on the rise in Ireland. According to the Health Research Board there were 8,745 treatment cases for problem alcohol use in Ireland in 2024, the highest number of cases in a decade. The figures also show that nearly one in three cases had a problem with other drugs as well as alcohol.

“I know how incredibly destructive any form of addiction can be and how easily one addiction can lead to another, so I am incredibly relieved that we managed to stop this gaming arcade in the town,” says Adrian.

Adrian, 35, was 11 when he first started drinking alcohol to excess and 14 when he attended his first treatment centre. After spending 10 years in a downward spiral, battling alcohol, drug addiction and depression, the Bandon native went into recovery in 2011. Today he runs Recovery Coach Addiction Services, using his experience to help other people struggling with addiction.

“There was a void in me and drinking made me feel like I belonged,” he shares. “At first it was just at weekends but it soon got out of control.”

Adrian started using drugs, first marijuana, then benzodiazepines and opiates – essentially anything he could get his hands on.

He took a year out of school when he was 16 to try to get his substance misuse under control but instead his addiction escalated and he started getting into trouble with the guards, eventually ending up in the foster care system, which resulted in a move to Cork City.

The transition from country to city came as a huge shock to the teenager and before long “I found people just like me and things got worse,” he shares.

By the age of 17 Adrian was taking up to 50 tablets a day. “I didn’t know or care what I was taking,” he says. During one drug test methadone was found in his system.

He became homeless, sleeping on a bridge in Cork City.

Adrian tried to take his own life more than once by taking an overdose or jumping into the River Lee. “At the time I couldn’t stop using, I was desperately lonely and felt like I was just a nuisance to people, especially my family.”

After becoming a regular at CUH’s Emergency Department, he accepted assistance from a crisis nurse, who travelled with him to Medjugorje, where he was to join the Cenacolo Community, an organisation set up to help young people whose lives had taken a wrong turn. “I wasn’t ready for help,” he shares. “I lasted four days before my mother had to come and collect me.”

“My mother is the only person who never gave up on me,” he adds.

Adrian’s turning point came in the early hours of a morning at a party in Bandon. “I was 21 and sitting there unable to finish a drink,” he remembers. He went home and over the next few days suffered severe alcohol and drug withdrawal symptoms, including vomiting blood and hallucinations. “The walls were talking to me,” he says. Unable to cope, he called his mother and told her he was going to kill himself.

A week later Adrian woke up from a coma in CUH. “I had a moment of clarity when I woke up and I realised I was willing to do anything to get sober,” he shares. He then entered treatment for the seventh time.

“It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do in my life, as I was mourning the drink and drugs,” he shares. “I cried very night I was in Tabor Lodge.”

Twenty-eight days later Adrian walked out, scared, but in recovery, and started his life over.

“I came out a different person and I haven’t looked back since.”

With the support of his family, Adrian went on to study Health and Fitness in college. After completing a course in Addiction Studies, two years ago Adrian started Recovery Coach Addiction Services, where he now works full-time. To-date over 500 people have passed through the service, receiving help with all sorts of addictions.

Now working full-time with Recovery Coach, a service which offers support in a confidential and non-judgemental space through addiction and recovery, Adrian is grateful to have the opportunity to help others. “It’s hugely rewarding helping others come back to life,” he shares.

As well as a 24/7 helpline, Recovery Coach offers one-to-one coaching and peer-led support groups. “We support people to their appointments, to treatment centres, through the court system, in prison and on their release, and so on,” explains Adrian.

Three nights a week, Adrian leads a group of volunteers in patrolling the banks of the River Lee on suicide watch.

The service also offers support to the families of people struggling with addiction. “My advice to families is to never give up hope,” he says.

Recovery Coach Addiction Services operates a secondhand clothes in Bandon Shopping Centre, offering employment to people in recovery and to raise funds for the initiative.

A Fashion Show in aid of Recovery Coach Addiction Services will take place at Bandon GAA Club on October 17 at 8pm.

Today Adrian is living life to the full, getting a round of golf in or holidaying with friends any chance he gets. “I was long enough in the gutter and I’ll never go back,” he says. His hope is to build Recovery Coach into a national service. 

To access Recovery Coach Addiction Services helpline call 087 6089148.

www.recoverycoach.com

If “Boldness be my friend” then Swedish native and blow-in to West Cork, Katarina Runske, 60, will surely never be lonely. One of West Cork’s most enduring entrepreneurs, who moved to Durrus from Stockholm as a young, single mother in 1989, Katarina has certainly never been shy of taking a risk writes Mary O’Brien.

A student of music and literature, Katarina’s path changed direction after she fell pregnant in her early twenties. The move to Durrus with her mother, younger brother and three-month-old son felt like “stepping into a black and white movie”. In those days in rural Ireland, a donkey and cart bringing milk to the creamery was a common sight and the village telephone box was a busy spot. Although a time of economic hardship and social change, there was something about the region that attracted people searching for an alternative way of life.

‘I’d never been to Ireland before but when I arrived I knew that I was in the right place,” she says.

Katarina settled in very quickly, getting acquainted with the West Cork turn of phrase while pulling pints in the village pub. “Ah sure look it, I was speaking like a local before I knew it!” she says smiling. Sweden didn’t join the European Union until 1995, so while legally Katarina wasn’t allowed to work in Ireland, people turned a blind eye. “I never claimed a penny off the State,” she says with pride.

A year later the family traded the Mizen peninsula for the Seven Heads, after Katarina’s mother, Catherine Noren, bought Dunworley Cottage with the intention of setting up a restaurant.

Around this time Katarina met who she thought was the man of her dreams. Unfortunately the relationship didn’t work out and shortly after the break-up she discovered she was expecting her second son.

With nothing in her pockets, the young Swede moved back in with her mother, helping to get the restaurant off the ground. “Mother loved to cook and she passed that passion on to both myself and my son Nico,” shares Katarina.

Determined to stand on her own two feet, Katerina found a small, rundown cottage without heating on a one-and-a-half acre site in Kilbrittain and approached the bank manager in Clonakilty for a mortgage.

“I sat in front of him and said I have one child in my hand and one in my belly and we need somewhere to live,” she recalls. “He took a chance on me and gave me a 100 per cent mortgage, which is something I’ll be forever grateful for.”

With just enough money to install a Stanley stove in the kitchen, everything else in the cottage was given a lick of paint.

To make ends meet, Katarina juggled jobs, giving piano lessons – sometimes seeing up to 60 students a week – and working front of house at two well-known restaurants in Kinsale.

“One local farmer regularly swapped 17 litres of milk a week for piano lessons,” she recalls. “and I was grateful for it, as we often had porridge for dinner.”

When the opportunity arose to go into an antiques and interiors business with a friend, Katerina didn’t blink. She spent the next ten years selling antiques and dressing people’s houses, opened a shoe shop in Kinsale “because every woman needs a pair of shoes” and continued giving music lessons. All the while she was growing her own veg, keeping chickens and ponies and raising her two children. “I’d bring them to Gurraneasig National School every morning on ponyback,” she remembers fondly. 

“Ireland really was a different world back then and I’m so pleased I got to experience that.”

Later on Katarina made time to study, completing a course in Women’s Studies and two years of law at UCC.

She credits her paternal grandmother with her knack for business. “A widow and single mum to three boys, she was a business woman and a real grafter. She had to be. I’m like her in more ways than one.”

In 2005, after a conversation at a family wedding in Jamaica about opening a restaurant, and having secured a loan for a cool million euros, she made the snap decision to buy Grove House, an 18th century house overlooking the harbour in Schull. Once hosting the likes of George Bernard Shaw, Jack B Yeats and Edith Somerville, the heritage of this beautiful old villa appealed to Katarina.

After packing up her share of the stock from the antiques and interiors shop and shoe business, Katarina and her family moved west. “The front room at Grove House was turned into a shoe shop that first year,” she says laughing.

Grove House turned into a successful family affair, before long achieving a reputation as one of West Cork’s finest restaurants. Nico was just 12 when, guided by his mother and grandmother, he learned his way around the kitchen. By the age of 14, he had become the youngest ever participant on the prestigious Ballymaloe cookery course. Over time, the dynamic in the kitchen shifted with Nico naturally taking the lead. “I was happy to step into the role of his commis chef,” shares Katarina. Meanwhile, her eldest son Max managed the front of house before eventually pursuing a maritime career, working his way up from deckhand to sea captain. Today, Nico runs his own restaurant in Schull.

Katarina spent 17 years running Grove House as a restaurant and guesthouse, where she became known for the warmth of her welcome.  “I wanted it to be the type of place where people would feel comfortable whether they turned up in an evening gown or t-shirt and shorts. The atmosphere was always as important as the food,” she explains. For six years she also ran a bookshop, Anna Bs, on the main street in Schull.

But after a few difficult years during the recession – coping with the loss of her mother, mounting pressure from the bank, and the demands of running the business – Katarina was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011. The day she received her diagnosis was the only time she ever cancelled a sitting at the restaurant. “They were a tough two years. Nico was here, so he shouldered much of the burden,” she recalls. Two years later, more cancer cells were discovered, and she had to undergo another major operation. “There’s always something sitting on your shoulder when you’ve had cancer,” she says.

Desperate for a change of pace, in 2016 she made the decision to prioritise her health and sell Grove House. “I couldn’t continue with that level of stress and work.”

Grove was still on the market when the pandemic hit, eventually selling for an undisclosed sum in 2021. Katarina moved to East Cork to be with family, but then again felt the call back west. “I went to housesit a friend’s house in Goleen, ended up buying the property, and never left,” she says.

Today life moves at a slower pace for Katarina. There was a time when she would never have refused a party invitation but she admits to now enjoying an early night more often than not. She still works – hosting dinner parties in people’s houses, running an airbnb on her property and teaching piano, but mostly she enjoys pottering around her charming little cottage and garden, swimming in Dunmanus Bay, or cooking dinner for friends.

Her dream however is to get back to her literary roots…she has written two novels, which are gathering dust in a drawer.

Is there another business in her? “Never say never,” she says smiling. “Who’s to say what will happen if opportunity knocks.”

“As a medical doctor, after a while I simply started wondering if I was promoting health or just sticking a thumb in a dike,” explains Martin, who was drawn to the idea of an alternative to prescribing pharmaceutical medication, a more holistic approach that would look at a patient’s overall health and wellbeing. 

Martin started his professional life working in conventional medicine. While studying in Holland, he fell in love with a psychology student from the West indies and, after completing his final exams, followed her to an island in the Caribbean where he got a job as a locum with the resident GP. While his interest was in general practice, with a shortage of medical specialists on the small island, Martin was talked into practicing ambulatory psychiatry, part of which involved administering an aversion therapy programme for addiction. Thrown in at the deep end, the young doctor learned a lot, expanding not only upon his medical knowledge and skills but also on patient care.

While life on the island was comfortable, Martin and Cita, who were both interested in living a self-sufficient lifestyle, started thinking about spreading their wings. They investigated climates less desert-like and more suitable to growing food, travelling to places like Columbia, Venezuela and France. Then a friend convinced them to check out Ireland so they rented a VW Beetle and drove from Connemara down to Kerry. “We were baffled by the friendliness of the people,” says Martin laughing. “We couldn’t figure out the A and B system in the old phone boxes and why perfect strangers would stop at the side of the road to help us book our flights.”

Attracted by the lush green landscape and and the blue-green hues of the sea – it’s vibrant colour reminiscent of the Caribbean – and not least the people, Martin and Cita decided to put down roots and bought an old farmhouse that needed work in Kealkil.

A year later, the mixed-race couple returned to Ireland with enough savings to start renovations on their new home.

Everyone knew everyone and everyone’s business in the Ireland of that time. “The local Garda knocked on our door soon after we arrived and asked to see proof of our savings,” shares Martin.

“We felt very welcome,” he adds. “The neighbours helped us to make jam, that kind of thing. We did find out later that we were known as ‘Black and Dekker’ in Bantry but it was said in an affectionate and funny way, so we didn’t take offence. I think people thought we were exotic and were more flattered than anything else that we wanted to live in West Cork.”

While working on the house, Martin volunteered at Bantry Hospital. “Just to keep my foot in and improve my medical English,” he says. It was during this time that his interest in holistic medicine was piqued, after a young Indian nun, also a doctor, gave him the loan of a book on naturopathy. “Homeopathy is very commonly practiced by medics in India,” says Martin.

“I think I was always a bit alternative,” he admits. While he performed well in college, Martin still found time to join the protests of the day. He regularly attended peace rallies and demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and was also part of a movement, sometimes called the “university revolt”, which included occupations of university buildings and demands for greater student and faculty representation in university affairs. “We felt that society wasn’t fair and it was time for change,” he shares.

Back to the future and while renovations on the house were complete, money was running out, so Martin decided to set up a medical practice at their home. With the living room doubling as the waiting area, apple tart served to waiting patients, and sessions typically lasting more than an hour, this was no ordinary GP practice. “I wanted to give patients time, look at the whole person, what they ate, their sleep habits, medical history, their parent’s medical history and so on,” shares Martin.

“People soon began to treat it like entertainment, a day out, staying for the afternoon to chat,” he adds.

By their second winter in West Cork, the couple were out of money and surviving on very little. They kept a goat, which they made cheese from and grew their own vegetables. Dreaming about starting a family, they set a goal of 10 patients to place themselves in a more financially stable position to have a child.

After the birth of their son, with their family and the practice expanding, Martin and Cita sold the farmhouse and bought a three-acre site between Drimoleague and Skibbereen where they built a timber frame house with a consulting room. 

It was around this time that Martin started seriously looking into homeopathy. He enrolled in a course at the Faculty of Homeopathy in London and was accepted as a member after completing his exams two years later.

“I was a bit nervous at the beginning,” shares Martin. “I thought the course would be full of hippies but there were plenty of serious English GPs there, the pipe and tweed jacket type!”

Life became very busy – the practice was growing and so was their family. The couple welcomed their second son in an unexpected home birth. “We were booked in with an obstetrician but when I found Cita she was too far progressed to travel so we had to get on with it,” he says “I had given her a homeopathic remedy to soften the cervix, but I had no idea it would work so well,” he adds. The baby was born within an hour of Cita’s waters breaking without any complications.

By now Martin was practicing acupuncture, after setting up a training course in Cork, for which he flew in a teacher from London. He later travelled to Sri Lanka to train with the recognised healer and author, Professor Anton Jayasuriya who, over 40 years, treated more than 2.5 million patients free of charge and trained more than 40,000 doctors in complementary medicines.

“People want to be better fast,” says Martin. “Pharmaceutical drugs of course work quickly, an aspirin works within half an hour, but then the pain comes back again four hours later. Then the doctor typically ups the dosage and eventually you’ll be sent to a specialist. But by then you’re a chronic patient.

“With these sorts of expectations, I felt I had to impress people a little bit, especially if they were travelling a distance to see me” he explains. “A homeopathic remedy can sometimes take a while to work so I’d stick a needle in a sore spot to give immediate relief and then the remedy would work over time for a more long-lasting effect.

“There is a lot more to acupuncture than this of course,” he adds.

Martin uses the complementary therapy, kinesiology, to identify the right remedy for his patients. Kinesiology uses muscle testing to identify and address imbalances in the body’s energy systems.

“I get the patient to hold the remedy and, if the remedy doesn’t suit them, then the hand comes down easily,” he explains.

He admits to being skeptical of the practice himself at the beginning. “I had to experience it to believe it,” he shares. “My wife brought me to a kinesiologist she was doing a course with and I witnessed a farmer suffering from severe arthritis being diagnosed with a milk allergy. As part of the demonstration, the kinesiologist had the farmer hold a bottle of milk in his hand and when tested for muscle strength, the farmer’s arm weakened – an indicator of a negative reaction.

“The result was the same when my wife held the farmer’s hand while the farmer held the milk – her arm also weakened. I was still skeptical so he had me hold my wife’s hand, she held the farmer’s, and the farmer held the milk. This time, despite trying to resist, my arm weakened.”

The experience convinced Martin that kinesiology could not only detect harmful substances but might also help identify beneficial ones.

“People will call homeopathy and other complementary therapies ridiculous, particularly doctors,” says Martin “but most non-believers have never even tried homeopathy or really looked into the process.”

Homeopathic remedies are made by diluting a substance in water or alcohol (potentiation) and then vigorously shaking the mixture (succussion). This process is repeated many times and it’s believed that the more diluted a substance is, the more potent it becomes.

Homeopaths work not only on the symptoms but also on the emotions, treating the entire person.

“I’ve prescribed plenty of drugs…antibiotics, anti-psychotic medication, benzodiazepines you name it, in my day, and I would never deny anyone the medication that they need, but people just naturally started coming to me specifically for homeopathy and acupuncture because of the results,” says Martin.

“The bane of every homeopath’s life is finding the right remedy, but when you do find the right one, the results can be amazing.

“I’ve seen people walk on badly swollen ankles, that I would have given three weeks to heal, just a few hours after taking ‘Arnica’.

“Just a few days ago I stepped on a piece of broken glass, so I took a remedy called ‘Staphysargia’ for healing wounds and cuts, and the pain went after 20 minutes.

According to Martin, children in particular respond very well to homeopathy. “Over the years, I’ve treated a lot of immune-compromised children with recurring infections, as well as eczema, asthma and so on, and most do quite well, better than on repeated antibiotics, steroids and trips to the hospital certainly.”

Today, while he’d like to give more time to creative pursuits like working with paint and clay, talents that have emerged in later years, there is no sign of him giving up work, which he confesses to having a love-hate relationship with. “Listening to peoples woes is no fun, but if you can do something to help them, it can be very gratifying,” he explains.

Martin was in his forties when he and his wife separated (they’re still good friends) and, while there have been a few serious relationships since, being alone is something he has come to accept. What he is finding hard to accept is growing old. “It’s no joke,” he says. “I can live with the idea of being finite but it’s the process of getting there that I find difficult. As a doctor I suppose I’m more aware of how dependant we get on others as we age and I find that daunting.”

But if it comes to it, there is even a little white pill for old age. “Baryta Carbonica is a classical homeopathic remedy for the symptoms of aging like forgetfulness,” he shares.

With his cruise boat, the ‘Spirit of Kinsale’, finally sold after over a year on the market, life has come full circle for Jerome, as he settles contentedly into a retirement that allows him to fully indulge his fascination for history and place names, his little cottage a mere stone’s throw from where his maternal great-great-grandfather grew up. 

All of Jerome’s ancestors can be traced within the confines of Kinsale, Clonakilty, Dunmanway and Bandon and it’s this connection to the region that has fuelled his fascination with genealogy, a passion that he has imbued into a project tracing the people of the peninsula he calls home. The resulting book ‘Peninsula People’ – a collaboration between Jerome, the late Eugene Dennis and Pádraig Begley – is a beautiful collection of photographic memories telling the everyday story of life on the peninsula from the late 1800s onwards. Over 600 photographs were collected door-to-door in the local community, of which 450 were published, including one of the earliest, in 1890, of Jerome’s great-grandmother.

Growing up in a time when there was rarely a car on the road at the Old Head off season, a young Jerome spent many hours listening to the old ‘piseogs’ and tales of the local fishermen who frequented his mother’s pub ‘The Speckled Door’, an establishment that’s still in the Lordan family today. Built in 1867, the building, located in a small hamlet, which included a blacksmith’s forge, houses and a pub, was run as a small hotel (The Old Head Hotel) in the early 1900s. Jerome’s mother, May Dempsey, bought the pub in the 1950s, after moving home from Kinsale where she had been working in her uncle’s bed and breakfast, Dempsey’s Guesthouse, which today is the site of the Blue Haven Hotel. She met Jerome’s father, a local butcher, soon afterwards, and they renovated the building together.

While today the Old Head is mostly used for recreational activities, with the beautiful beaches and landscape drawing a large number of walkers, sauna-goers and watersports enthusiasts all year round; lobster and other types of inshore fishing featured predominantly in the area until more recent times.

As recorded in ‘Peninsula People’, local man Batty O’Sullivan, born 1871, still fished well into his eighties and would call to houses early in the morning selling fish caught the previous evening. Locals remember how there was always a race to sell the fish, as competition was keen; in those days a dozen mackerel could be bought for a penny.

“He was possibly the last man living on the Old Head who was brought up with Irish as his first language,” says Jerome.

Batty’s son Con emigrated to America and, after joining the US Army, spent time in a field hospital in France during WWI. It turned out that the man lying in the bed next to him, a British soldier, also had a connection to the Old Head. “Amazingly, it transpired during the course of their conversation that the British soldier was married to Con’s sister, Mary,” shares Jerome.

On July 1, 1982, the ‘City of Chicago’ ship wedged into the cave at Poll na Bolg, at the Old Head. All of the 505 passengers and crew were rescued and, over the ensuing days, the vessel broke in two and sunk. A variety of artefacts, including dinner plates, chests, and a door from the ship were collected by locals and are still preserved in local homes in the area today.

“Hearing stories like those when I was a boy was my first taste of history and the past,” shares Jerome, “and the start of my obsession with placenames.

His interest sparked by fishermen’s tales; the lure of the sea and promise of freedom – away from the tedious responsibilities of the family businesses –  was inevitable for the teenage Jerome.

“To us children, the city kids (who arrived during the summer season) were much more sophisticated…and had more freedom than we could ever wish for,” he says.

“I was a bit wild when I was younger,” he smiles “when I wasn’t working, I was off climbing a cliff or out in a punt, with no lifejacket and a dodgy outboard motor, inevitably having to be rescued and towed in by a local fisherman.”

After finishing school, Jerome started his maritime career at the National Fisheries College in Greencastle, Co Donegal, in 1976. For the next 28 years, he fished out of Castletownbere, Ros a’Mhíl, Dunmore East, Kinsale and all places in between at one time or another, including a stint in Cornwall, Australia and New Zealand. He owned several boats throughout his career, the first a French 58-footer in partnership with Tom Williams in 1985. “I think I just wanted to run away to sea,” he shares, “away from the grind, morning, noon and night, of the abattoir, butcher shop, pub and farm.”

In Australia, he gained a new appreciation for the skills of the Irish fisherman. “The boats and techniques over there were very antiquated.” In New Zealand, he enjoyed the highlight of his career – as crewman on a crawfish boat, just him and the skipper, fishing in ‘Doubtful and Dusky Sounds, two remote fiords in Fiordland National Park, known for its stunning beauty and isolation. “It was bliss,” he says “like being on retreat. The only person we saw was the pilot of the seaplane that flew in once a month to take away the frozen cray fish tails.”  After that, he fished off Cornwall for a few years, before returning home and buying a small 28-foot boat for shrimp, lobster and sole fishing. It wasn’t very profitable so he invested in a 39 ft trawler, fishing off the southwest coast for the next seven years. “It was a great earner,” he says “but I was getting older, my bones had started creaking, and with the introduction of quotas, it became harder to make a living out of fishing, so I sold the boat.” In the early 1990s after the fall of the Iron Curtain, he spent some time travelling through Southern and Eastern Europe.

After returning to fishing for a few more years, Jerome’s fascination for local history and folklore brought a change of path in midlife that took him back to education and resulted in the launch of his tourism business, Kinsale Harbour Cruises.

He completed a course in heritage management at Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa, went on to do a BA in archaeology and Celtic Civilisation at University College Cork and, in 2012, a masters degree in local history, which was awarded for his thesis on local place names of the Old Head.

He has since published two books, the first, ‘No Flowers on a Sailor’s Grave’, tracing the long-forgotten shipwrecks of Kinsale and Courtmacsherry and the afore-mentioned collaboration ‘Peninsula People’. Most recently he has created a map of 180 place names running from east of Howe Strand to Hake Head, south of Sandycove, Kinsale, which he plans on digitalising. “I used a map made by a distant relative of my mother, Francis Dempsey, as a template,” he explains.

“My aunt used to say, if you’re going fishing, keep me a ‘biardán’, which was a small white pollock. Like so many other old Irish words, you won’t find it in Dinnen’s ‘Foclóir Gaeilge agus Bearla’ dictionary,” says Jerome. “A lot of these names were intimate interpretations of our landscape by locals, becoming placenames, so it’s important to record them.”

As well as field names, the map includes a number of 17th and 19th century lighthouses, the Signal Tower at the Old Head, early medieval ring forts, promontory forts, boathouses, cillíns (burial site for children) and a fulacht fia (a bronze age burnt mound exposed today at low tide on The White Strand at the base of the Old Head). “If you crack one of the stones, you’ll see that it’s red inside,” shares Jerome.

It’s only in the last fifteen years that Jerome’s interest in history’s social legacy has really developed. “I had little or no interest in this kind of thing when I was younger,” he admits. “But as you get older you realise the importance of recording things before they are forgotten.”

Between 1937 and 1939, the National Folklore Commission collected stories about local history and folklore from school children all over Ireland. “It’s one of the biggest oral archives in the world,” says Jerome. “There’s 64,000 townlands in Ireland, 60 in this parish alone. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every parish collected stories and old place names. What a record that would be.”

He recalls how during the War of Independence his own grandfather fed members of the Third (West) Cork Brigade, a unit of the Irish Republican Army, the night before his trashing in Courceys Parish, as he had ample food in the house for the next day. “They had a narrow escape, as later on that night Percival and the Black and Tans paid a visit, searching the farm high up and low down looking for members of the brigade, all to no avail.”

On another occasion, Jerome’s aunt and grandfather, while picking potatoes in a field near Bandon’s Seven Crosses, witnessed the shooting of IRA man John Murphy by the Black and Tans. “They hid behind a ditch. Everybody around here has little stories like those.”

His first publication, tracing local shipwrecks between Oysterhaven and the southwest corner of the Seven Heads – using newspaper reports and historical accounts, supplemented by local knowledge and the invaluable lore of members of the older generation – illustrates the precarious nature of seafaring in the past.

“All of the shipwrecks are equally fascinating, but of particular significance to the local area was the sinking of the ‘Ellen’ off Black Head in 1977,” shares Jerome. Tragically, it took the lives of five men from the peninsula. Remarkably the inquest gave no evidence of the weather conditions, tides or details of where exactly the event took place but the sunken rock the survivor’s spoke about going inside on their return voyage and referred to in a newspaper report was at Black Head. Jerome’s guess is that the sunken rock “was at ‘Carraig na Rón’ midway along the shore at Bullen’s Bay.” The descendants of some of the crew still live in the area today.

Currently, Jerome is doing some research on fishing, or rather the lack of, during the Famine. “If you look at the stats, there were lots of boats but the boats were terribly poor quality, half rotten,” he says. “The country was also awash with pawn brokers and people were so desperate they pawned everything of value, including their boats. There was also no salt for preserving fish.”

It’s easy to look back through rose-tinted glasses, but Jerome can’t forget the “bone tiredness” that came with commercial fishing. It took him years after stepping away from the industry before he could enjoy fishing again. These days, when he’s not doing research, he enjoys pottering in his garden, going out in his boat, or travelling to places like Northern Norway or Iceland — drawn to their “elemental” landscapes.

He’s currently reading ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear, and says his aim going forward is simple: “to try to do everything a little bit better.”

Considering West Cork not just a place, but a mindset; Jerome is determined to continue documenting the lives of those shaped by its landscape, capturing a local history that might otherwise fade.