A West Cork business woman and mum-to-be has created a pioneering website designed to help other pregnant women and new mothers navigate the overwhelming overload of information that is part of the maternity journey in Ireland. Built by Sinéad O’Donovan from Timoleague, maternityjourneyireland.ie provides a free, simple checklist that covers every appointment, form and entitlement, week by week, drawn from HSE
and Citizens Information guidance. She chats
to Mary O’Brien.

Sinéad’s own maternity journey began this year after she walked away from a demanding position as a senior executive to pursue her ambition of starting up her own business.

Facing into new territory on both accounts, the expectant mother set herself the task of reducing overwhelm and stress-load by creating a checklist to help make sense of the information and preparations involved at each stage of the maternity experience. “I wanted to bring useful guidance together in one place rather than requiring a search across multiple sources,” she explains.

The easy-to-follow phase-based approach of the website designed by Sinéad covers from early pregnancy and antenatal care to preparing for labour and birth, followed by the postnatal period with checklists providing a practical way to organise key tasks along the way.

Sinéad’s consultancy practice is also founded on the premise that reducing stress improves health, lifestyle and productivity. She experienced burnout firsthand while working for over ten years in a top leadership position. Despite holding a PhD in nutrition and inflammation, the executive found that she couldn’t apply what she knew to herself. “When I was under pressure everything I had learned about nutrition and inflammation during my PhD went out the window,” says Sinéad.

Recognising the toll that her career was taking on her health and personal life – working 60-hour weeks left little time for her marriage or anything else – Sinead made the decision to change course in life.

In the wake of addressing her own health concerns, she combined her business acumen with her academic background in nutritional science to set up The Leadership Biome, positioning herself as Ireland’s first leadership physiology expert.

Her business model bridges the gap between physiology and productivity in the workplace bringing focus and clarity to leaders who are burning the candle at both ends and struggling to understand the effect that prolonged unmanaged chronic stress has on their nervous system and working capacity.

“If you’re under stress you automatically tend to pull back,” she shares. “You pull back from your friends, your family and the things you enjoy doing in life. There is very little joy left after that.”

She says that cortisol has a bad reputation as the ‘stress hormone’. “It’s painted as the baddie of the hormones but it’s actually vital for our survival,” explains Sinéad. “Cortisol is what wakes you up in the morning and what drives you through crises and deadlines.”

Hormones like oxytocin, which are released in response to physical touch and emotional connection, are needed to buffer cortisol’s response to stress.

“Oxytocin decreases as we pull back from society,” explains Sinéad. “Physiologically our biochemistry changes when we’re constantly under stress; our beneficial gut bacteria also deteriorate, which creates low grade inflammation, the precursor to chronic diseases that come knocking on the door later in life. Every system is affected because once inflammation crosses into the circulatory or cardiovascular system it travels systemically.”

Sinéad suffered from constant chest infections, musculoskeletal, cardiac and nervous system issues throughout her corporate career. “Inflammation hits your weakest point first, where you’re most vulnerable. That was my lungs.”

She was prescribed beta blockers for three years to help lower her heart rate. “I was so stressed that my heart was racing constantly.” 

Sinéad’s approach is based on her own lived experience. Many of her clients are women juggling family and work pressure, though she also works with corporate teams.

“Changing the language we use, just swapping the word “challenging” for “interesting” in a situation can help keep the nervous system open and curious rather than triggering a threat response,” she says.

She helps clients to reframe their narrative using practical strategies. “Introducing self-regulation breathing techniques and making time for small intentional moments, asking yourself questions like ‘did you have impact or did you do things today?’” and nourishing your microbiome can all make a difference,” she shares.

maternityjourneyireland.ie

www.theleadershipbiome.com

Jerome Lordan’s aunt used to say if you’re going fishing, keep me a ‘biardán’. She was referring to a small white pollock. Like so many other old Irish words, you won’t find ‘biardán’ in Dinnen’s ‘Foclóir Gaeilge agus Bearla’ dictionary. Sadly, with the decline of the Irish language, many of the old names traditionally handed down orally through the generations have long been forgotten. While he didn’t pay much heed to these colloquial words and phrases as a young boy, with age has come a deeper appreciation for lore and our connection to the land, and today, writes Mary O’Brien, the retired boatman and passionate local historian has turned his fascination with non-administrative or ‘minor’ placenames into a project dedicated to preserving the lost language of the Irish landscape along the southwest coast.

Over the past 30 years, Jerome has collected roughly 500 minor placenames drawn from his own recollections and through conversations with the older people still living on the Old Head of Kinsale and surrounding areas, opening a window into the social history of the area where he grew up. These have now been recorded along with archaeological features, historic timelines, parish and townland names and boundaries and shipwrecks in a series of maps covering the coastal area from Dunworley to Kinsale.

“Many of the older folklore collections never made maps, leaving names without locations,” says Jerome. The historian has taken on this challenge and, through careful detective work, has endeavoured to connect his collection of placenames and local landmarks to their exact locations. “Vincent Murphy gave me the locations for a stretch of coastline, specifically around Howe Strand, from memory, as he drank his pint at The Speckled Door,” he shares smiling. The late Francie Dempsey of Lispatrick also passed on his huge corpus of minor place names, which Jerome recorded, as he did with many more of the older generation, now passed on.

He drew on Brúnó O’Donoghue’s parish histories to complete townland maps for the intertwined parishes of Kilbrittain and Courceys.

“As you get older you realise the importance of recording things before they are forgotten and minor place names share the ‘greater story’ for that area,” he explains.

“In the past local people knew their own landscape intimately and had names for every field, rock and physical feature, as their world was an entirely local one and people moved little outside their own area.”

Unlike townland, parish or county names, minor placenames – many reoccurring around the coast of West Cork and Kerry like Cuas Buí, Tráigh Mór or Cuas a’Rón – were never anglicised.

Jerome’s fascination with folklore, archaeology and shipwrecks started during his master’s thesis at UCC in 2007. This developed into a passion for unearthing obscure Irish words.

On the advice of historian Dr. Éamon Lankford, he focuses on interpretation rather than translation.

“Sometimes literal translations can be incorrect or can strip away the nuance,” he explains. A ‘capall’ may not mean a ‘horse’ but instead can refer to a sharp submerged rock shaped like a horse’s back.

He references colour, as it can have a double meaning in Irish. Take the words ‘Cúis Buí’.

“Buí’ means yellow, but the name could mean a sandy yellow cove, a shallow cove, or reference yellow sedge growing on the banks,” he explains.

He interprets ‘Pointín na Rínce’ – a small rock point located between Garrylucas and Garretstown beaches – as meaning converging bodies of water making the waves dance.

‘Cúaisín na nDaoine Báite’ (Little cove of the Drowned People) in Dooneen downland (close to The Speckled Door), has been linked to the wreck of the ‘Stonewall Jackson’. “The entire crew were lost here in 1868,” says Jerome. A mound in the field adjoining the inlet is reputed to be the burial place of the sailors.

In ‘Poll na mBolg’, a sea cave at the Old Head, ‘bolg’ could mean ‘belly’. “But it could also imply ‘bellows’, describing how waves pump into the rock like a bellows,” adds Jerome.

He draws attention to Blanket Wood in the Bawnea townland of Kilbrittain. “It’s an interesting placename…so named because O’Sullivan Bere camped here on the way to the Battle of Kinsale in 1601.” Clashavanna, where the new GAA pitch in Kilbrittain is located, comes from ‘Clash a’ Bainne’ (the hollow of the milk).

He has also collected a number of Hiberno-English words used in everyday conversation to describe the landscape.

In the past when people spoke about a ‘wind dog’ they were referring to a low hanging, ragged, stormy-looking cloud. “It was looked on as a sign of ominous weather,” shares Jerome.

Seamen would have used the word ‘cottontail’ instead of ‘rabbit’ while offshore. “You would dare not mention the word fox, rabbit or donkey on a boat, as it was considered very bad luck.”

‘Bollán’, ‘Buillig’, ‘Rabha’, ‘Capall’, ‘Scoth’, ‘Droum’, ‘Mionnán’, ‘Stuicín’ and ‘Staca’ all referred to different types of rock formations both underwater and above water.

The phrase ‘fire in the water’ denoted phosphorescence. “If this was in the water it was  seen as a sign that the conditions weren’t good for herring fishing,” says Jerome.

‘Crothóg’ was the name most commonly used throughout West Cork and Kerry to describe a small black pollock. Cailleach Breac was used for a bull huss or greater spotted dogfish and battle board or stock fish alluded to salt ling.

An otter was referred to as a ‘water dog and a seal was called a ‘rón’.

The word ‘gearcuach’ described little fledglings in a nest.

“These words were the cusp between the old linguistic world of Irish and the modern world of English,” says Jerome. Most have fallen into disuse today.

In the past fields were traditionally named in Ireland, a fact brought to the attention of the wider public in recent times by the late Manchán Magan. “‘Páirc/Gort/ na Horna’, ‘Páirc na mBó’, ‘Paircín Caol’ and many more descriptions were used,” shares Jerome. Once land ownership changed hands more often than not these names were unfortunately lost to memory.”

Jerome has also done a lot of research on local shipwrecks, referencing a number of notable ones and their legacies on the maps.

The distinguished victims of the Albion shipwreck lost west of Garretstown in 1822 – including Alexander Metcalfe (Yale physics professor), Anne Powell (daughter of the Governor of Upper Canada), and Charles Lefebure Desnouttes (a general in Napoleon’s army) – are interred in Templetrine graveyard, on the north side of the church. Other less distinguished victims are buried in an unmarked site in the same graveyard.

The deceased crew and passengers from the troopships ‘Lord Melville’ and ‘Boadecia’ – returning from the Napoleonic Wars – lost in 1816 were buried in a sand dune on White Strand. They were reinterred to Old Court graveyard in the early 1900s by Robert Buttimer on the instructions of Cork antiquarian Robert Day.

The victims of the Hercules, a German collier lost in 1874 at Hackettstown, are interred in an unmarked grave in the southeast corner of Currarane burial ground.

A number of dinner plates and other items from ‘The City of Chicago’ ended up in nearly every house on the Old Head. The ship was wrecked in 1892 at Ringagorteen with no loss of life.

Burial grounds for unbaptised infants, suicides, and unidentified sailors are documented on the maps. These ‘cillíns’ are typically found on townland boundaries. “Liminal places, neither here nor there, representing purgatory,” explains Jerome.

In places like Ardfield, the Seven Heads and the Old Head, the language survived well into the middle of the 20th century. This was one of the main reasons a record of minor place names survived. In other areas where the language disappeared at an earlier date there tends to be scant records. Jerome’s maps bring our attention back to the language of the land and the stories hidden beneath it.

The maps are available to purchase: €35 for A1 size and €45 for A0 size. Email:
harbourcruises@gmail.com.

If you’ve been following Brian Colgan and Jordan Veloso’s house-building journey (@ouririshbarn) on Instagram, you’ll know that the charismatic couple have just broken ground on their dream home in West Cork. After making the move from London, the couple are managing the self-build themselves through direct labour – a 2,000-square-foot timber frame house on a 0.6-acre site near Brian’s homeplace in Courtmacsherry. They chat to Mary O’Brien about the project.

Courtmacsherry native Brian, a project manager, and Jordan, an actor-turned-curriculum lead for a UK performing arts organisation, from Guernsey, met in London almost eight years ago. The couple bought their first home together in 2022 – a new-build terrace in a 2,000-home estate between Milton Keynes and London, commutable for their jobs in London. While it offered the opportunity to step onto the property ladder, the couple soon realised that they craved a quieter, more rural lifestyle such as that offered by Guernsey or West Cork. Guernsey’s property market is expensive and offered limited opportunities to build, whereas Brian had family land available in West Cork, so the decision ultimately became an easy one. After years of travelling back and forth to visit family they were also attracted by the welcoming community in West Cork. “We came over one Christmas and literally sat filling out the planning form.” shares Jordan.

With Brian’s background in construction and Jordan’s love for design, there was never any question that they would do anything other than manage the project themselves.

After sourcing free pre-fabricated home plans online and studying Cork County Council’s rural planning guide intensively – “it was bedtime reading” – the first step was the pre-planning consultation.

Their homework and thorough preparation paid off, as they received no objections to their ridge height, cladding choice, or contemporary design.

“The main feedback we got from pre-planning was that our gable was too wide so we created a design that features two distinct blocks connected by a hallway with views out towards the Old Head of Kinsale,” shares Brian. A single-storey living wing features a vaulted kitchen and dining area alongside a cosy living room with a lowered ceiling, while the two-storey bedroom wing has three bedrooms, including the master suite. The exterior will be clad in black corrugated iron, leaning into what they describe as a “vernacular, rural, agricultural feel” – like the barn building of the family homeplace.

The exterior is deliberately “masculine and sheltered” (the site is exposed), while the interior aims to have the feel of an Irish/Guernsey cottage. “It will be full of character, fun and colour,” adds Jordan.

Brian and Jordan want a practical, relaxed home suited to life in the countryside incorporating secondhand finds and natural materials. “We want a comfortable and genuinely liveable space, especially after a dog walk or sea swim,” says Jordan.

The house has a Kore foundation – an insulated system built up from ground level rather than excavated – which suits the rocky site. The timber frame is by Ecotech Homes from Midleton. There is precision required in such a build: “You need to know details like where you want your toilet waste to go before it even gets manufactured,” says Brian.

Alu-clad triple-glazed windows have been ordered from Rationale (a Danish company based in Cork).

With the majority of the more difficult decisions now made – including polished concrete floors downstairs and pocket doors throughout – the couple are turning their attention to the finer design details and finishing touches. They’re aiming for an A-rated home with solar panels, underfloor heating, and a stove.

The couple have made a huge effort to keep spending close to home, using businesses, tradespeople and suppliers wherever possible, for example Rick’s Plant Hire and local plumbers and electricians. “We got multiple quotes for everything,” shares Brian.

Details still under discussion include if they should go with surface-mounted light switches in galvanised trunking and heat recovery ventilation versus natural ventilation.

A significant hurdle has been Irish banks’ stage-payment mortgage system, which clashes with timber frame companies requiring a significant amount of money upfront before the frame arrives on site. 

After a frustrating year-and-a-half with a broker who ultimately couldn’t help, they finally secured financing through EBS. “We had exceptional support from EBS mortgage advisor Gavin Kiely,” they add.

Brian and Jordan’s Instagram page (@ouririshbarn) has now grown to over 25,000 followers with the response overwhelmingly positive. People have been asking questions on everything from foundations to ESB pole relocation to material choices. “I think people are just are admiring our journey and wishing us well,” says Jordan.

The couple spent their first summer living in a caravan in Kilbrittain and are now renting in Barryroe, with the aim of moving into their new home in Courtmacsherry by April or May next year. Given the meticulous planning that has gone into the project so far, it’s an ambition that no doubt will be realised.

Brian and Jordan’s advice for others planning a self-build project

• Use pre-planning: “Before we invested any money, all we really wanted to know from pre-planning was, is it worth investing money in to get actual plans? Are we allowed to build here?”

• Study the rural planning guide: Understand what planners want before you design.

• Get multiple quotes: Ask suppliers if they’re willing to quote before spending too much time putting all the information together.

• Think ahead: Looking into requirements early. “Our ESB pole relocation took time to arrange.”

• Be prepared for cash flow challenges: Timber frame requires significant upfront capital.

• Make decisions early: Changes are more difficult to make later with a timber frame than with a traditional build, so things like services, plumbing, electrics and layouts need early consideration.

• Consider your site: Understand your ground conditions. “Our Kore foundation worked because of rock.”

While relocating her business to the busy town of Kinsale feels like a step in the right direction for Emily Connell and her popular interiors and lifestyle store, Chalk & Easel, it also marks a bittersweet chapter in this local success story writes Mary O’Brien.

For the past ten years – until this past summer – Chalk & Easel has been a landmark in the pretty little village of Ballinspittle, in a building that was not only a place of business for the shop owner, but is where she, her husband Matthew, son Elliott and shop dog Sam have called home. While the business has moved further away, with the near completion of their new build house just outside the village, the Connell family are looking forward to continuing this part of their story within the tight-knit community of Ballinspittle.

While some may believe that life does not get better by chance, but by change, this new beginning for Chalk & Easel has surely been written by both.

As so often happens in West Cork – after a year of uncertainty regarding the future of the business – fortunately the possibility of a suitable premises in Kinsale eventually arose through word of mouth. The protected heritage building at Market Place, for many years known as Patsy’s Corner, was being carefully renovated and would take some time – more time than anticipated – but in the end it was worth the more than two year wait.

The exterior has now been tastefully painted in a soft ochre yellow, chosen by Emily to complement the meticulously-preserved character of the building and the inviting storefront can’t help but encourage passersby to pause and discover the carefully curated contents within.

With Emily’s eye for beautiful yet functional items and her commitment to sustainability wherever possible – “Things that make life a bit better without making the planet worse,” she explains – this independent shop inspires beauty in the everyday.

While Chalk & Easel started out as interiors, over the years it has evolved into a lifestyle store. “Customers would ask me ‘Would you ever stock this or that?’ and so it happened,” explains Emily. Chalk & Easel now stocks reading glasses, clothing, perfumes and other lifestyle items alongside interiors. Each item is carefully researched and sourced with quality and durability prioritised over cheaper alternatives. “They’re mostly products I would buy for myself,” shares Emily.

While the shop floor is far from large, Emily has created an uncluttered and attractive display that is impactful rather than overwhelming. 

From dustpan and brush sets made using natural materials to toilet roll holders that double as a basket, window bird feeders from Born in Sweden to Ocean tide clocks made in France, stylish bags from Uashmama made from washable paper in Italy to the ever-popular La Bougie candles, diffusers and perfumes created locally in Kinsale and chic tableware by Côté Table in France, each item is presented with such care that it feels effortless. Yet the precision to the presentation suggests that it has all been executed with deliberate intention, reflecting Emily’s background in interior and structural design.

For the person in your life who appears to have everything, check out the Eva Solo designer bread dustpan-and-brush or go for something more fun like the KOOKOO AnimalHouse cuckoo clock, which allows you to choose between five different brightly-coloured animal figures. 

Chalk & Easel also stocks books that are a little bit different; the range of mindful titles from the London-based School of Life publishing company cover topics ranging from understanding emotions to dealing with conflict to managing stress and finding everyday pleasures.

The clothing in Chalk & Easel echoes the owner’s style – a collection of timeless pieces in natural materials (linens, cottons), to suit all shapes, sizes, and ages.

Scandinavian brand moshi moshi mind definitely deserves a mention for its non-seasonal multifunctional wardrobe, created for women with comfort, movement and softness in mind. Another beautiful ethical clothing brand stocked is Myrah Penaloza. Each piece is handmade by women in Bali who are all paid a fair wage.

The natural skincare range from Dublin Herbalists is also a personal favourite with Emily, who uses the products herself.

Some of the other Irish-made products include wooden chopping boards and jewellery, all by makers in West Cork.

Balancing a shop move with a house build has brought its fair share of challenges, but Emily’s passion for design has made both projects genuinely enjoyable. Five years on from purchasing the site, she and her family are finally close to moving in to their new home.

Like the shop, the house has been created with sustainability at its heart. It’s a Passivhaus requiring little to no active heating or cooling and, at 140 square metres, it’s modest by today’s standards, with a timber frame clad in cement board and corrugated metal. A KORE foundation system means the house weighs just a sixth of an average home, and it has been insulated using Ecocel, an eco-friendly product made from recycled newspapers by a Cork-based company. A veranda wraps around the house, designed to encourage inside-outside living.

Inside, Emily has planned the living space with minimal corners and open areas to allow ease of movement and relaxed gatherings. “I’ve positioned the dishwasher so it won’t get in the way when we’re cooking and lots of empty space, that kind of thing,” she explains.  The home will, of course, be furnished using many of the beautiful pieces Emily has sourced for the shop, including unusual lighting made from baskets woven in Ghana and a timeless favourite, linen cushions from Danish brand House Doctor

Her advice to anyone considering a self build? “Just do it, and trust the process.”

If you’re looking for inspiration for your own home, then do call in to this lovely independent store in Kinsale. It’s worth travelling for.

www.chalkandeasel.ie.

An impending hip replacement might cause most people to slow down a bit in life, but for Kevin Ogden, 68, it was the impetus to do the exact opposite writes Mary O’Brien. The retired American airline captain is just back from a three-month solo bike trip that took him across the United States from west to east, from Seattle Washington to Washington DC. Throughout his lifetime Kevin’s love of outdoor pursuits and adventure has brought him up in the skies, across seas and over land, all around the world. His late wife Comhairle, from Bishopstown, brought him to Cork and home is now Kinsale – not too far from Comhairle’s family – and Cork/Kinsale is where four of the couple’s five children have also settled.

Born in Iowa and raised across the Midwest as the son of a corporate family, Kevin’s passion for flying began soon after cutting out a five dollar introductory flight coupon from a flying magazine. He was also a longer distance bikepacking enthusiast, at a time when that meant cycling while actually wearing a pack on your back! After working part-time at a local grocery store to fund flying lessons and, soloing at 16, “pretty much before I could drive,” he earned his private pilot’s license at the age of 17, and entered the US Air Force on a university scholarship, graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering.

After pilot training in Texas – flying the T-37 and T-38, including one supersonic flight – he was assigned to fly the C-130 Hercules at Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina. The role involved tactical airlift such as airdrops, airlands, and formation flying, with rotations covering South and Central America, Europe, Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Kevin’s only combat experience came during the US invasion of Grenada, which he described as chaotic. “Every unit in the States was sending people down there. We almost sank the neighbouring island of Barbados with men and material!”

He spent his final two years with the Air Force taking part in special operations, single-ship, night-vision-goggle missions under Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) utilising terrain masking where available. “It was a much more survivable role in any near-peer scenario,” he explains.

Kevin left the Air Force in 1986, around the same time the industry was deregulated under the Reagan administration. Faced with a big drop in pay – as it would take seven years to work back up to his previous military salary with the added job insecurity brought on by airlines folding or merging – Kevin left the US and joined Saudi Arabian Airlines as an instructor for their new Airbus A300-600, the first wide-body, two-man, glass-cockpit aircraft.

After becoming enamoured with the lifestyle in Jeddah – which wasn’t difficult as it offered perks such as a tax-free income, free accommodations, worldwide standby travel and a vibrant international community – what was supposed to be a two-year stint turned into eleven years. “Diving in the Red Sea, Hash House Harriers desert runs, dinner parties, four-wheeling in the desert – it was an extraordinary place and we were essentially the only tourists,” he shares.

It was at one such party in 1993 where Kevin met his beautiful wife Comhairle O Donnchadha, a full of life and fun-loving doctor who would “light up the room”. She was working as a physician at the military hospital in Jeddah. While they apparently shared little in common except a love for fun and adventure – “When I asked what her hobbies were, her answer was ‘Well, we go down to the Bishopstown Bar,’” recalls Kevin, laughing – they had an instant attraction. “It was like meeting someone you feel you have known your whole life,” he shares. After a whirlwind, three-month courtship, they got engaged, and married the following year.

“We flew to New York for the ring, then to Boston to meet my mother, before heading to Ireland to meet Comhairle’s family. I then spent the flight to Dublin trying to write on a napkin and memorise the Irish names of her siblings and parents!”

On arrival in Cork, the plan was to have a get-to-know-you period over three days for Kevin and the family, followed by the proposal. “But there I was, pulling the bags out of the back of the car and ‘Doozy’ (the affectionate name Comhairle’s father had for her) came out and said ‘come on Kevin, grab the ring, I’ve got them trapped in the oifig’,” shares Kevin with a laugh. Up until that point Comhairle’s family knew only that “a friend” was visiting, so it was quite the surprise, but none-the-less he received an incredibly warm welcome from this extraordinary family. 

Around 1995, while they were still in Saudi, and Comhairle was expecting their first son, Aodan, Kevin – having done several yachting courses in the UK – purchased a Freedom 32 Hoyt that had survived Hurricane Hugo and been neglected for five years. After restoring it, he sailed it from the US to Ireland with his wife’s brother, Seamus, uncle Gearoid (a priest), cousin Donal, and a friend Peter O’Gorman in a 26-day crossing that turned into quite an ordeal.

Problems arose almost immediately. “We had to deal with a clogged fuel filter from algae, a broken steering chain due to electrolytic corrosion, and a leaking fuel tank that had been cross-threaded during cleaning,” explains Kevin. “I spent the better part of the first two weeks of the voyage with a tool belt strapped around my waist fixing things.”

After drifting up the gulf stream and through days of Greenland fog, south of Iceland they encountered a double low-pressure system with force nine-plus winds and waves up to 50 feet. “It was like looking at the Himalayas, completely white, and row after row of mountainous waves with the occasional bearded rogue wave moving at a 90-degree angle,” shares Kevin. The wind was so strong it blew apart his handheld anemometer. “Water gushed through the rudder stock, requiring bilge pumping every 45 minutes.”

At one stage, becalmed off Newfoundland, they were seven days behind the schedule set by Comhairle’s uncle Gearoid, a Fenit parish priest. They were under pressure as press and others were due to meet them on arrival, but the storm and stronger winds soon made up the lost time.

Following two or three weeks with virtually no contact with anyone, and hearing Concorde pass overhead each day with its trademark double sonic boom, Kevin used a handheld VHF airband radio to contact a passing British Airways Concorde at flight level five five zero. After establishing, to the great surprise of a BA crew member, that they were indeed a sailing yacht crossing the Atlantic, Kevin passed on phone numbers. When the Concorde arrived in New York, the crew did actually call the family members to let them know they were safe.

“We were probably the slowest vessel in the Atlantic talking to the fastest,” laughs Kevin.

Against all odds however, they did reach their destination, Fenit, County Kerry, on schedule with a following gale blowing them past Mount Brandon and homeward into the bay into the midnight hours.

It wouldn’t be the last adventure for this boat but that’s someone else’s story!

After the birth of their first son in Saudi, Kevin and Comhairle moved back to Ireland in early 1998, where Kevin joined TransAer, a charter airline based out of Dublin and various other European bases. The company initially based him in Manchester and then eventually Gatwick, as Comhairle wished to do  a course in London. Around 2000, Kevin developed a heart problem that grounded him for about a year. Shortly after becoming medically re-qualified however, his airline entered receivership but, as luck would have it, another UK based airline purchased the company’s assets and he was re-employed within two weeks. Then of course came the dot-com crash and 9/11 with its still reverberating effects. The day following 9/11 Kevin piloted a surreal football charter flight to Athens with “chillingly empty skies”. “We didn’t hear one other aircraft on ATC frequency and saw no other aircraft with the exception of a single US Air Force AWACS passing under us over Germany,” he adds.

“After 9/11, everything changed…there were a lot more security measures,” he shares. “With locked armoured cockpit doors, you couldn’t bring nervous passengers up front to calm their fears anymore. It took some of the fun out of the job for me.”

In 2012, Kevin returned to a captain’s position with Saudi Arabian Airlines based in Jeddah, with the whole family – which numbered five children by then, including twins. Comhairle worked as a consultant in general practice and the children attended the local international school. “They were going to school with the elite of Jeddah, who had their own aircraft, palaces and so on, so we really had to do our best to keep them grounded,” says Kevin.

One by one, the children returned to Ireland for school and college.

Then in 2020, with the children all at home in Ireland and the year before Kevin was due to retire and move back to Kinsale with his family, tragedy struck. After a sudden and brief illness, Comhairle, age 55, passed away. “She was my very best friend, and there will certainly never be another like her,” shares Kevin.

Since then he has kept busy, having taken up a part-time job with the Atlantic Flight Training Academy based at Cork airport as a multi-crew co-ordination instructor, and tries to stay active swimming or cycling most days. He enjoys hiking, camping, skiing and mountaineering and, while an Achilles problem has had him sidelined from those activities for the past eight months, he is working assiduously to rectify that and get back to some of the passions that he really loves.

His recent TransAmerica trip – on an 18-speed Gates Pinion German VSF bicycle (a ‘B bike’, as he calls it: a biological bike, not an E-bike) – took him east across Washington, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and part of West Virginia, before arriving back in DC.

Carrying bear spray for the Idaho and Montana mountains, and, for part of the journey, a pistol his friend Mike brought from Montana, Kevin started with the Palouse to Cascades State Park Trail, a nearly 300-mile long non-motorised rail-trail in Washington State that follows the historic Milwaukee Road route from Cedar Falls to the Idaho border, through the scenic landscape of the forested Cascade Mountains. Throughout his journey he availed of the hospitality of Warm Showers hosts where possible but for the most part camped out.

His son, Aodan, joined him for a week in Idaho and Montana, and his old university roommate Mike, now 72, accompanied him on a 650 Suzuki motorcycle from Idaho to South Dakota, leapfrogging ahead to scout campsites.

In the Black Hills of South Dakota, Kevin experienced the sacred history and traditions of the Native Americans with a memorable stopover in Mission SD for the Fourth of July in the Rosebud Indian Reservation, home to the Sicangu Lakota Oyate (Burnt Thigh Nation), one of the seven sovereign council fires of the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation).

After crossing Nebraska on another rail trail, the Cowboy Trail, he arrived into Iowa where he took part in the Des Moines RAGBRAI, (Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa) – a seven-day ride from the westernmost part of Iowa to Dubuque on the Mississippi River on Iowa’s Eastern edge – with up to 40,000 other cyclists. In this “river of cyclists” he was also joined by his younger son David, older daughter Armelle, and his younger brother Eric.

The hardest stretch of the trip, embedded in his memory, was the Midwest, with endless straight roads, corn and soybean fields, 15-20 mph headwinds, 40-degree heat, and “corn sweat humidity. “In Illinois my shoes filled with sweat within two hours. I had to remove them and wring out the water from my socks regularly,” he shares. “I filled three water bottles five times on that one day with rehydration solution and finally had to book a cabin to recover. Dangerously close to heat stroke, I don’t think I’ve ever been so exhausted in my life.”

At one point, Kevin’s brother Eric took action to lighten his load, appearing with a carbon fibre racing bike to exchange with the 50 kilo loaded touring bike that Kevin was on. For the next few days, in and out of Chicago, Kevin enjoyed the pleasures of lightweight cycling, flying along.

The final and most rewarding stretch in his epic journey took Kevin along the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O Canal trail from Pittsburgh to DC, a 334.5-mile non-motorised trail “Stunningly beautiful, immaculately maintained, what a way to end the trip,” he says.

Now back home in Kinsale, he is already thinking about another bike trip next year, which may take him through Eastern Europe to Istanbul or perhaps along some wine river in Europe. “Who knows where…on a bicycle the world is your oyster.” he adds smiling.

The hip replacement will have to wait!

After spending four decades helping countries and organisations to rebuild after communism, Steven Kelly and Mari Novak finally hung their hats in West Cork. Partners in life and business, the couple, who celebrate 42 years of marriage this year, moved to West Cork from Prague in 2012 with the intention of easing into retirement. It was a turn they tell Mary O’Brien “of about 180 degrees”. The recent publication of their shared memoir entitled ‘In the trenches of change’ maps their journey together working for reform, while navigating culture, politics and bureaucracy along the way.

While people were wary and reserved in Prague post-communism, Mari shares how fascinating it was to be there right from the beginning “…watching hearts unfolding, brains unfolding.

“Under communism, you never wanted to stand out. You never wanted to be noticed… you didn’t look people in the eye or say hello,” she says.

Here in West Cork, the couple are appreciative of being part of an open and engaged community and are embracing the lifestyle that has allowed them to slow down while retaining their interests.

“There’s so many people who have travelled or lived in different places… there’s an awareness and ongoing conversation about geopolitics and economy here, as well as history and language,” says Mari.

Steven grew up in Nevada. His early career was in the army, working in intelligence, before moving on to training and human development. After leaving the army, he started a company called GSC (Good Services for the Community) delivering training to organisations in Houston.

From Cleveland, Mari’s background is in business, specialising in complex systems, and human resources. Her father had served in the navy in the Pacific during WWII so she developed a fascination with geography at an early age and volunteered for a stint with the Peace Corps in Micronesia.

After meeting at a personal development conference in New York City in the early 1980s, the couple married in 1984 and honeymooned in the Soviet Union, carrying a letter from the mayor of Houston to the mayor of Baku (Houston’s sister city). 

“He hired me and then he married me,” says Mari laughing.

Through their work together, Steven and Mari began to realise that, more often than not, it wasn’t just training that organisations needed. “The incentives may have been wrong, or they didn’t have the resources they needed or the procedures and guidelines weren’t correct,” explains Steven.

Overcoming the health challenge of a collapsed lung as a university student earlier in life had led Mari to Nepal on more than one occasion.

Based on her experience there, the couple came up with the idea of leading business people on transformational trekking experiences to Nepal.

“Typically they were business people who were in decision points of their life… they needed an adventure,” shares Steven.

The trips were physically challenging (10-12,000 feet in difficult terrain) but gave people the opportunity to disengage and reflect. “We’d choose the right moment to have a  conversation… about whether they had the confidence or the courage to do what they thought they should do as opposed to what they had always been doing,” explains Steven.

When glasnost and perestroika policies were introduced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s to encourage open discussion of political and social issues, Mari began thinking about opportunities working overseas. “We knew there was going to be a need to rebuild organisations,” she says. 

Then the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. 

Steven and Mari arrived in Czechoslovakia two months after the Velvet Revolution, initially for Steven’s PhD research.

Steven’s PhD research fell through after the entire university system was unexpectedly reorganised and his sponsor retired. Meanwhile, they had set up their consultancy office as Kelly Novak Opportunities (KNO), and that steadily gained clients. 

While Steven concentrated on corporate training in the large organisations moving in post communism (Opel, McDonald’s, Shell), Mari focused on international development funded through the EU and US, working across the former Soviet republics designing training programmes for government ministers.

“We trained the Supreme Court, different things… I ended up working all over the former Soviet republics helping to design and administer programmes,” shares Mari.

The couple’s role was to create order in the chaos of post-communist transition. “You didn’t know what your postage stamp was. You didn’t know what your flag was. You didn’t know who owned a building,” says Mari.

“It was exciting, it was exhausting, it was intense and a bit insane at moments.”

“We had two of our banks fail on us in the early years”, adds Steven.

On one occasion they recall sitting at a table in a restaurant for 15 minutes and being completely ignored. “When we eventually enquired about why nobody was coming to take our order, we were told we were sitting in Andre’s section and it was his day off,” says Mari.

While Mari and Steven are US natives, Mari has a family connection to Czechia and Slovakia, with all her grandparents born there, while Steven is half Irish. Neither however identifies strongly with nationality. “To be proud to have been accidentally born with curly hair, is like… the stroke of luck that I was born in Cleveland, Ohio versus Timbuktu,” says Mari. 

After becoming Irish citizens, the couple started learning Irish and have become active in local groups, including Cnoc Bui Arts Centre just over the road in Union Hall. Both enjoy gardening and Steven has joined a writer’s group – his compositions ranging from papers on geopolitics to satirical poetry – while Mari’s passion for knitting has led to her becoming involved in a wool collective.

Their lives and careers have left them with a particular perspective on politics and governance. They see the current political situation in the US as unfortunate. “Many people felt so desperate to want to put in such an administration. They were desperate for any kind of change, even if it was unpredictable,” says Mari.

Steven references Neil Howe’s ‘The Fourth Turning’, which argues that the US is in a cyclical period of crisis that will bring significant turmoil before improvement.

They appreciate Ireland’s quality of life, even while remaining critical of aspects of its governance. Having visited more than 100 countries and worked with presidents, ministers and kings, they have seen the strengths and weaknesses of systems in many different parts of the world, their experience reinforcing their belief that no system remains effective forever

“Any system atrophies after a while,” says Mari. “Re-invigoration must be constant.”

For all the complexity of their work however, the most important lesson they have taken from four decades of helping organisations and countries through periods of change is that total efficiency should never be the ultimate goal. Whatever the organisation, country or situation, Steven and Mari believe that it’s the people who matter and who will ultimately make a difference in the end.

‘In the trenches of change’ by Steven Kelly and Mari Novak is available to purchase through the website www.trenchesofchange.com.

After going into heart failure at the age of 40, Martina Conroy was told she had 18 months to live unless she underwent surgery. In that moment her life changed forever. “You learn what fear really feels like and you stop taking life for granted,” she tells Mary O’Brien. Handed back the gift of life by cardiothoracic surgeon, the late Aonghus O’Donnell, – who died unexpectedly, aged 49, six weeks after operating on Martina – the surgery marked the start of Martina’s journey of self-reflection, with which came the realisation that simply surviving isn’t enough. She had to learn how to live again but to live in a different way.

Martina was first admitted to hospital in 2009 with what felt like congestion in her lungs and pain across the bottom of her back. A scan showed fluid in both lungs and she was diagnosed with double pneumonia. A few months later she woke in the early hours of the morning experiencing severe breathing difficulties. After a series of tests it was discovered that both her lungs were retaining fluid because her heart wasn’t functioning properly.

Six months after she first started feeling unwell, Martina was told by the cardiologist that she was in heart failure and had rheumatic heart disease. One of the valves in her heart had stopped working completely and another was damaged as a result of the rheumatic fever she had developed as a child.

Advised before the surgery to get her affairs in order, Martina went home to Dunmanway confronted with her own mortality. She planned her funeral, wrote her will, and said her goodbyes to loved ones, just in case.

At this stage Martina’s heart was unable to provide her body with enough blood and oxygen so she couldn’t get to the end of a sentence without running out of breath and the surgery was high risk.

She remembers the normality of the backdrop to the surgeon’s stark words – the feel of the sun through the window in the office, the sounds of children playing outside. Then the feeling of being punched in the stomach.

“Something inside you changes when you hear those words,” she says.

“When death hovers, you cling as hard as you can to life, but you’re unaware that it’s about to be rewritten.”

To understand how profoundly this experience changed Martina, it’s important to understand her life before it. She grew up in a close-knit Catholic family in East Cork and attended the local convent school. From a young age, she knew her sexual orientation was different, but struggled with the conflict between her sexuality and her religious upbringing, before eventually coming out to family and friends in her late twenties.

She has always been a very determined person. After failing maths in her Leaving Cert, which thwarted her plans to attend university, Martina entered a religious order with the intention of becoming a nun, although she left after just a few months. At 26, she returned to education as a mature student, working three jobs to fund her studies before completing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Social Science and Psychology.

Her career took her into support and advocacy work, including roles with Edel House and the Cork Deaf Association. Then after moving to West Cork to be with her long-term partner, she joined Bantry Citizens Information Centre, where she remained for 18 years. 

Throughout those years, Martina threw herself into helping others, building a busy and, what she considered at the time, to be a purposeful life. Looking back now however, she recognises that she had become so focused on fixing things for other people that she ended up losing sight of herself along the way.

With her surgery scheduled for September 22, in typical Martina fashion, she continued to work until the end of August.

But her surgery marked a watershed moment. “I learned that life after serious illness isn’t necessarily the life you had before. Life is about thriving, not just surviving,” she shares.

Martina woke up from the seven-and-a-half hour surgery covered in tubes and wires and bruises. “You can’t laugh, cough or roll over without feeling like your chest might split open. You need help doing things you once did without thinking.”

Then the realisation hit that it was never enough just to survive.

‘When you survive something like this, everyone assumes the hardest part is over,” says Martina. “It isn’t. 

While the physical recovery was hard, the emotional recovery was even harder.

“The fear. The trauma. The grief. The constant awareness that your heart has failed you before and the terrifying thought that it could happen again.

“You feel broken – because for a while, you are,” she shares.

Each little step forward is a triumph.

The tube being taken out and her lungs not collapsing.

The first sip of ice cold water trickling down her throat. Brushing her teeth. Walking.

Then six weeks on, she received the news that Aonghus O’Donnell, the surgeon who had saved her life, had passed away unexpectedly.  “I wasn’t prepared for how hard that news hit me. His skill and dedication had given me another shot at life and then he lost his own,” she says.

Throughout her very slow recovery, Martina started to really look inwards. With the support of her partner and with the help of counselling, she started to find the answers she was searching for.

That first year Martina spent a lot of time seeking out solitude. “I felt completely out of step with people so I’d take off in the car by myself with just my camera,” she says. “The things that other people thought were important, celebrations, activities, just felt frivolous.”

While trying to piece her own life back together, Martina found a sense of peace traipsing around abandoned old houses photographing the remnants of other people’s lives.

“These houses never felt empty to me,” she says. “Everywhere I looked there were traces of the people who had once called them home – a chair left beside a window, a cup in a cupboard, wallpaper someone had chosen decades before. I began to wonder who they were, what happened to them, and why they left. Their stories were gone, but something of them remained. That sense of lives once lived stayed with me long after I put the camera down.”  

Through photographing the remains of lives that had already ended, she finally began to process the fact that her own life had almost ended.

Martina made the decision to retire from her job three years ago after developing an arrhythmia. 

Today she volunteers at a local charity shop and is contributing to a book about talking therapy.

She has held a number of exhibitions of her photographs entitled ‘Remnants’ dedicated to the memory of the surgeon who saved her life.

“My experience made me realise that what I had in the past was a surface happiness. That fades fast,” she says.

Today Martina doesn’t look too far ahead. Joy is found in the little things…

While it’s many moons since the clanging of the hammer on the anvil last rang out around the village of Butlerstown, it’s a sound that Michael O’Brien, 81, tells Mary O’Brien, he still hears as clearly as if it were yesterday. The small coastal village between Courtmacsherry and Barryroe once upon a time boasted two forges, three pubs and five shops, all within easy throwing distance of each other. While today the sleepy village, with it’s pretty pastel-coloured houses and one pub, is probably best known for being located on the Seven Heads Walk, Michael remembers a time when the sound of cockerels crowing followed by the chatter of women at the village water pump marked the start of each day with the shuffling of footfall leaving the public houses bringing it to a close. A storyteller and songwriter, Michael has been fondly crowned locally as the ‘bard of Butlerstown’ for his many evocative and often humorous compositions that capture life, past and present, in West Cork.

Music is in Michael’s blood. His father, a quiet man, taught his young son how to play the fiddle. However it was his mother’s instrument, the rich, reedy sound of the accordion that captured Michael’s attention, his natural aptitude for music allowing him to become self-taught in the instrument. ‘“My mother played but she would never pick up the instrument in front of my father, as she was very shy about it,” he says. For many years Michael played regularly in sessions at local pubs and, later on, in the 1960s, he was the guitar player for a band called The Concordes, playing at socials and weddings for over 20 years.

When The Butlerstown Variety Group launched in 1978 (starting as a fundraiser for Barryroe GAA), Michael’s talent as a wordsmith was put to good use and he became scriptwriter, as well as active participant. He passed on his musical talent to all of his children with his daughters Anne Marie and Evelyn both becoming involved in the Variety Group and his son Timmie also becoming a musician.

While his lighter compositions cover everything from port-a-loos – ‘I remember in the old days you could have a piddle free, but now that we have the Celtic Tiger, it will cost you 20p if you want to have a wee.’ – to potholes; he has recorded more sombre events in history too, such as the story of the soldier who sleeps at Lislee. Private Daniel Sullivan of the US Army was a native of the parish who died fighting in World War I. Repatriated from France, his final resting place is at Lislee Cemetery in Courtmacsherry.

Michael also wrote an article for The Echo’s Holly Bough publication on the sinking of the ‘Cardiff Hall’ off the Seven Heads in 1925, an event during which 28 men drowned.

In 1974, Ireland experienced one of its most severe weather events of the 20th century with a violent gale bringing gusts of over 100mph. “When an older man commented to me that the noise of the wind was worse than that on the night of the sinking of the ‘Cardiff Hall’, and with the following year being the 50th anniversary of the ship sinking, it struck me that many young people in the area knew nothing about this event,” he shares.

Travelling from South America, the ship was carrying a cargo of 6000 tonnes of maize headed for R&H Hall grainstore in Cork City. Michael’s father told him stories of locals harvesting the maize along the coast after the ship sank and drying it before selling it on.

Michael’s reminiscences go back to before he was born. His namesake, his uncle Mike, left Ireland for America in 1924, only returning for a visit 40 years later, in 1964. His uncle’s last vision of Butlerstown, as his ship sailed past the West Cork coastline  – the early morning shimmer of sunlight on the rooftops of his home village and the big farewell fire blazing in his honour on the cliff – left a lasting impression on young Michael, whose grá for words, history, and music perhaps preordained that he would go on to preserve memories of the old way of life through storytelling and song.

When Michael was growing up there were three pubs in Butlerstown village: O’Donovan’s (known as the Eastern house), O’Regan’s (known as the middle house) and O’Donovan’s (known as the western house). If someone from the village left to start a new life in America, then an all-night ‘racket’ with singing and dancing was traditionally held to bid them farewell in one or all of the pubs. “It was usual for the person emigrating, like my uncle Mike, to leave directly from the pub in the morning to catch their ship from Cobh and a farewell bonfire was always lit for them at the old watch tower on the peninsula,” explains Michael.

Built in 1804 by the English to watch for French invaders, the old watch tower was one of a series built along the southwest coast. Interested in the history behind the towers, Michael says the open ruin on the Seven Heads “was built well back from the edge of the cliff so it wouldn’t be vulnerable to cannon fire.”

Before he left for America, uncle Mike, like so many others of that era, relied on his bicycle for transportation. He worked and lived in Cork city and every Sunday morning he’d attend mass at St. Augustine church on Washington Street – which this month saw its almost 800-year history coming to an end with its closure – and afterwards travel by bicycle down to Butlerstown for the day. 

“He’d have his dinner at the homeplace and afterwards cycle over to Dunworley to take part in the platform dancing there,” says Michael. “The accordion player would arrive in one of the boats rowed over from Dunowen in Ardfield, ready for a grand evening of entertainment.”

Uncle Mike’s employment involved driving a steam lorry so, after the dancing finished, he’d stop off again quickly in Butlerstown for his tea, before returning to Cork by bicycle, where on his arrival he’d light the fire in the steam lorry, so it would be ready for work on Monday morning, before finally retiring for the night.

“Different times indeed,” says Michael laughing. His own memories of travelling by pushbike include day trips to Dunworley beach with his parents. “My brother Pat and I were passengers on their bikes. My mother would pack a bottle of lemonade and a packet of biscuits and we’d picnic on the beach.” In the old days rural communities near the sea believed that if a boat went down, knowing how to swim only prolonged the inevitable drowning. “None of my family learned how to swim,” confirms Michael, who recalls his father rolling up the legs of his trousers and paddling in the shallow water.

After finishing primary school, Michael travelled by bicycle every day for two years to attend the technical college in Clonakilty. “By the time you’d reach the pier at Ring, the rain would be down inside your shoes,” he remembers. Every evening he’d return home to warm clothes placed in front of the fire by his mother.

He mentions how he had the offer of a scholarship at Hamilton High School in Bandon but the family couldn’t afford the 12 shillings and six pence for the bus fare.

As a young boy Michael found part-time work with local farmers, thinning beet by hand. ‘it was very hard work,” he recalls. “We’d tie hessian bags around our legs so we wouldn’t wear out the knees of our trousers and the going pay at the time was half a crown a drill.”

Farms were small back then. “Most farmers had five or six cows and the milk was taken to the co-operative by horse and cart.”

Fish was sold in the village by the Hurley brothers, known locally as the Raghnall brothers. “They’d bring fresh mackerel and pollock to the shop in the summer and stockfish, usually dried hake, in the winter. Michael remembers his mother soaking the fish in water overnight to remove the salt and cooking it with onions and white sauce the following day. ‘You’d be licking your fingers after that meal,” he says smiling.

 “We’d go fishing ourselves too,” he adds. He recalls how after salting the fish they had caught, his mother would place the lot into a big tub, before covering it up with a sheet of asbestos in the yard outside. “I can still hear her warning me not to sit on top of the sheet, but of course I did, breaking the asbestos, which fell into the fish” shares Michael. “The fish was eaten nonetheless!”

He says his mother would break an egg into milk for them every day after school and cook rice with milk until it was almost congealed. “I had to put a clothes peg on my nose to eat that meal and I’ve never been able to drink milk since,” he shares.

She would bake cakes on the bastible over the fire and in summertime, when the weather was fine, Michael and his brother would be sent out into the fields to collect dry cow dung to burn instead of turf. “Sometimes the dung would be mixed with whitewash, as it created a barrier to stop smoke stains coming through a wall,” shares Michael.

As the children got older, they were allowed to help out at local threshings, always a major event in the calendar for everyone in the community. Michael recalls the great feasting and night of singing and dancing that took place afterwards.

While he was too young to remember his paternal grandmother, who died in the early 1940s, she was well known and respected in the locality for her voluntary work during the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu pandemic. “She travelled around the parish helping to lay out corpses in houses,” shares Michael. “When she died, each of those families she had helped brought a bottle of whiskey to her wake. Any whiskey left over after the three-day funeral was sold in one of the local pubs with the funds passed on to my mother.”

Just across the road from Michael’s home, where he still lives today, was the village post office – it closed in 2001 and, in recent years was bought and renovated by Michael’s son Timmie and his partner Siobhán O’Mahony – where for many years parcels would regularly arrive from America. “My aunt Mary lived in Boston and would collect clothes from family there to send home in a parcel every year at Christmas,” says Michael. “There was always a lovely smell from those parcels, maybe of disinfectant!” he adds laughing.

Michael’s mother told him that during the war years her sister-in-law would sew teabags into the arms of the overcoat in the clothes parcel for fear they would be stolen by customs officials before reaching their intended destination.

The first phone in the village was installed at the post office in the 1950s. Up until then all communication with America would have been by telegraph. Michael recalls seeing his mother and her friend crying on the street outside the post office, overcome with emotion, the very first time a local woman spoke to her daughters in America over the telephone.

In 1961, Michael secured a trainee technician position with the Posts and Telegraphs (P&T) service and the still regular arrival of the clothes parcel from America was suddenly very much appreciated when he acquired a heavy fur-lined pilot’s leather jacket, keeping him from freezing during an exceptionally cold winter in the P&T van. “The van had holes in the floor by the pedals and no heater,” he explains.

Ten years later, June 20, 1971, marked one of the most important dates in Michael’s life story, as it was the day he met his future wife, Marian. She had come over to the parish with her family to celebrate the centenary of the church in Barryroe but was eager to attend a dance in Ballinascarthy afterwards. Fortunately Michael loved to dance too and he and his friends happened to be heading the way. “She got a lift with us and I asked her for a dance towards the end of the night,” shares Michael. “That’s how it all started, we just clicked!” Marian was 17 and Michael was 27. “She celebrated her 21st birthday in Clonakilty as Mrs O’Brien,” he says with a smile.

Michael retired from An Post in 1999, enjoying the extra time this allowed to dedicate to his passions of music and history, even working part-time for a while as a tour guide at the Michael Collins Centre just outside Clonakilty.

While today the passage of age means that his fingers are stiffer and the stage has been replaced with his sitting room, the music hasn’t stopped for Michael… This bard will always be singing.

“If it scares you, you should probably do it,” Éidín Griffin tells Mary O’Brien, laughing. It’s an outlook that has served Éidín well throughout her 53 years, during which time she has taken more than a few leaps into the unknown across two continents, with humour always as her compass. From Ireland to South Africa and back again, Éidín’s adventures have been anything but ordinary. She now lives in Kinsale where, as well as discovering her sea legs and a peculiar penchant for pirates, she has become a fixture in the local arts and creative community.

Éidín will take on the rather swashbuckling form of Captain Lavinia Silverwood in her latest escapade. Together with her salty crew of melodious female pirates, aka the Shanty Aunties, (Pearl Periwinkle, Burgundy Swift and assorted unexpected guests), Éidín (Captain Lavinia Silverwood) will launch her ‘Sea Shanties and Salty Tales’ performance at this year’s Kinsale Arts Festival at Black’s Brewery on Saturday, July 11. If you miss meeting her pirate persona (described by Éidín as posh, slightly narcissistic and not quite as clever as she thinks) on land, this participatory show, promising plenty of shenanigans, will repeat throughout the summer aboard the ‘Spirit of Kinsale’ in collaboration with Kinsale Harbour Cruises.

Éidín first landed in Kinsale in 2019 after spending 25 years in South Africa. What began as a gap year for her younger self – then a 19-year-old student with a work permit and the promise of a job at a small alternative hotel – turned into a much longer adventure, during which time she ran her own horse trail business, studied and taught permaculture and even dipped her toe, or rather jumped feet-first into stand-up comedy in her mid-twenties “I was back and forth between Ireland and South Africa for a while, so I did a few comedy stints in Dublin, at the Ha’penny Bridge Inn and International Bar, before performing at 500-seater venues in Johannesburg,” she shares. “That was some jump from a crowd of 30 in Dublin.”

After being fortunate enough to train under permaculture founder Bill Mollison at the farm where she lived in South Africa – “He told us to just go out and ‘do’ permaculture,” she says – the determined young woman succeeded in building her own home with the help of her community, a mix of internationals and locals who traded skills with each other, up in the mountains near Lesotho at a place called Rustler’s Valley. “Big sky and big wildlife country…lots of sandstone ridges, water dams and grasslands, kind of like Montana,” describes Éidín. The result was a charming little thatched house made from sod and cow dung and whatever materials she could find. With the help of a small credit union loan the DIY-er equipped her home with a gravity-fed water system, two small solar panels, and a solar shower made from corrugated iron painted black. “It was pretty basic, not necessarily comfortable or level or any of those things…I had no money, no skills, and no idea whatsoever,” she shares. After the house burned down in 2008, she moved to KwaZulu-Natal where she helped install outdoor classrooms, food gardens, libraries and taught permaculture skills at schools and communities.

Life got in the way of her comedic career when Éidín became pregnant. “Casinos don’t really mix with life in the countryside and a young child,” she explains.

Jump forward to 2019 and, after deciding to embrace her greys, the Wicklow native moved home for a fresh start. As her permaculture qualifications weren’t recognised in Ireland, Éidín researched her options and enrolled in the Sustainable Horticulture course at Kinsale College just before the Covid pandemic. So started a whole other chapter in her life.

Never one to shy from a challenge, Éidín lived on a boat for a while in the marina in Kinsale. While she admits being a ‘liveaboard’ wasn’t easy or comfortable in all weathers, she says she enjoyed living on the edge. “The seals popping up, herons hunting, and jellyfish floating past…your life is tide based and it changes your perspective around time.”

Around this time she decided to study art at Kinsale College, gaining a newfound confidence after selling one of her larger sculptures. “It’s really interesting to start again at something later in life,” she says. She also put pen to paper, basing her first play ‘Fierce Awkward’ on the vaccine divide and resulting friendship fractures during the pandemic. Her most recent project ‘Captain Wagtail’, an all-female, bawdy comedy play following infamous Cork-born pirate Anne Bonny, was well-received at the West Cork Fit-Up Festival and most recently at the Cork Fringe Festival.

The call of the sea is strong by the coast and it wasn’t long before Éidín tried her hand at sailing, something her late father had excelled at before his untimely death. “He took sailing up later in life too…after my mother’s death,” shares Éidín, who was just nine-years-old when she lost her mother to cancer and eleven when her father died suddenly from a heart attack on a sailing trip to the Jersey Islands. That shy little girl way back when was raised by her five older siblings. “I think I talked myself into being brave,” she admits.

“Initially it was the connection to her father that attracted Éidín to sailing, but later, somewhere off the Old Head, with the wind in her hair and the boat surrounded by wildlife, the realisation hit that that this was something she was doing for herself.

The novice sailor got the chance to test her mettle, during what she describes as “an epic, scary journey”, battling a south-westerly gale off the Waterford coast. “I was terrified and exhausted and remember bargaining with God,” she says. After making it to Dunmore East, a rested Éidín went back out the following morning with skipper Lisa Murphy and crew Mel Richter. “I came to the realisation that there’s no out, only in, when it comes to sailing and you have to trust your skipper and your crew,” she says. She has since sailed to Scotland and Norway. “I wouldn’t say I’m a good sailor, but I’m definitely enthusiastic,” she says with a laugh.

In the short time she’s been in Kinsale, Éidín has set up a seed bank at Kinsale library, taught Skills for Life workshops on seed saving and gardening and been granted the Arts Council Agility Award three times to develop her practice.

Most recently, after completing an MA in Arts and Engagement, the artist, gardener and writer is looking forward to having more time to commit to her playwriting and artistic endeavours. “There’s definitely a one-woman show in me and I have a story that’s been brewing for the past 20 years around my family surname,” she shares.

A self-described extroverted introvert, when she’s not playacting on the social circuits or working in the community, Éidín enjoys her more solitary roles of gardener and writer.

While it’s hard to imagine her sitting still, in the spirit of the best ideas coming from the most unexpected of places, she says she spends “a lot of time rummaging around in the hedgerows and staring off into space!”

Follow Éidín’s adventures at www.rebelseed.ie.

There’s a heavy drizzle falling on the country road. Framed by the lush green of the softly humming hedgerows, a man sits on his bicycle in the mist, waiting to greet the farmer coming his way. “Soft,” remarks the cyclist with a smile, acknowledging the weather. “Soft indeed,” replies the farmer with a nod. Dreamer Fred La Haye moved from the Netherlands to Ireland almost 50 years ago drawn by the possibility of a self-sufficient lifestyle. These are the sort of interactions that kept him here. “It’s beautiful you know,” he tells Mary O’Brien. “To be able to hold a conversation around just one word. I love that about the people in this country.”

Words, but perhaps more importantly listening, are all-important to Fred, (78), who is well known around West Cork for being a passionate proponent of dialogue, as well as for his pioneering work introducing sustainable practices into local communities.

A poet and philosopher, Fred’s writing is inspired by the thoughts and writings of the philosopher and scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest, who sought to bridge the gap between faith and science by showing they are interconnected. He also looks to the teachings of American physicist and philosopher, David Bohm, who believed that beyond the visible, tangible world there lies a deeper, implicit order of undivided wholeness; and that transformation in society could be brought about by dialogue.

“Listening to the world is essential and the quality of listening so important,” says Fred passionately.

In his poem ‘Noosphere’ Fred describes ‘The ringing out of a thousand million human vibrations! / A whole layer of consciousness exerting simultaneous pressure on the future! / And the collected and hoarded produce of a million years of thought! / Have we ever tried to form an idea of what such magnitudes represent? / Have we?’

After discovering a shared interest in the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin, musician Justin Grounds composed the oratorio ‘The Embracing Universe’ to elevate Fred’s poetry, which shares the thoughts and writings of the visionary French philosopher.

“Teilhard de Chardin was banned from lecturing and publishing his own work, as he was told by his superiors that the Jesuit society was not founded to support religious pioneers,” explains Fred. “I wrote this work to rescue him from historical oblivion.”

Actions speak loudly too for Fred, who got his first taste of community activism as a young man in the Netherlands when he hitchhiked to Amsterdam to join the thousands of demonstrators opposed to the Vietnam War and the expansion of nuclear energy. “We were so furious, so angry that we couldn’t even celebrate Christmas,” he recalls.

Although he struggled at school and dropped out early, Fred’s hunger for change and ambition to fight injustice led him back to education and eventually to study law at university specialising in criminology, in particular institutional and structural crime.

Married with a young child and eager to explore the possibility of living a self-reliant life in a more natural environment, Fred moved with his family to West Cork in 1978. The original plan was to continue his law studies in Ireland, however life and its struggles got in the way of that ambition, with the young family finding themselves focused on mere survival. “It felt like we had stepped back about 25 years in time going from a modern city in the Netherlands to rural West Cork,” he shares.

Fred found work in a piggery six days a week that brought in eight pound a day and, with the help of other odd jobs, eventually the couple saved up enough to buy a ruin of a cottage near Ballygurteen.

“Life was so basic but our surroundings – the wildness of the land, the ocean – were so fantastic, that it made the challenges and insecurity bearable,” says Fred. “The questions we asked ourselves at that time were very simple: ‘Will we keep the roof on tonight or will it blow off!’.” The family didn’t have a car for the first year and Fred recalls cycling to the village of Ballineen from Rossmore to do the shopping. “All I came home with was a white loaf, a floppy cabbage and a few carrots,” he laughs.

While life wasn’t easy, there was a strong sense of community with many lifelong friendships forged. “We were a part of the community and participated in many ‘meitheals’ – bringing in the hay or cutting the turf with our neighbours, helping to do up each other’s houses, that kind of thing,” says Fred.

A member of the West Cork Organic Growers cooperative, which he helped to get off the ground in the mid-eighties, Fred grew a selection of vegetables on their acre of land, as well as rearing fowl, which were sold through the distribution centre at Bridgemount House in Dunmanway. 

A mix of different nationalities mainly farming in the Ballineen area, the West Cork growers broke new and exciting ground in 1987 when they were granted use of the brand new IOFGA (now known as the Irish Organic Association) soil symbol. “It stood for produce grown without the use of pesticides and fertilisers in high quality soil,” says Fred. “We belonged to the first wave of organic farming in Ireland and our aim was not only to grow high quality food but to show our farming neighbours the advantages of organic methods and to influence the way Irish food is produced.”

After he and his wife separated, Fred moved to Clonakilty for a period, where he lived in a tiny flat, finding work with the local Council and joining the famous street theatre group, Craic na Coillte.

In the early 90s, after his divorce was finalised, he settled in Bantry with his two children. It was while living here that he met his longterm partner of 35 years, gardener Julia Kemp. In 1992, they were both involved in the start-up of the healthfood store Essential Foods – better known today as Organico – with Alan Dare, a project which began on a shoestring budget. Around this time Fred was also instrumental in the setting up of the country market in Bantry.

A few years later, in 1996, Fred chaired a group that set up a system of trade in the Bantry area that worked without money, through which people exchanged goods and services.

The LETS (Local Exchange Trading System) in Bantry had its own currency known as BATS (Bantry Area Trading System). It encouraged people to help each other out, operating successfully for a number of years with transactions recorded by means of cheques written in LETS units.

“We traded in whatever anybody had to offer, knitting, babysitting, walking the dog, you name it” says Fred, who was best known for organising ‘meitheals’ and bringing a chef along.

Then the opportunity arose for Fred – who at this stage was an enthusiastic advocate of organic growing and sustainable agriculture – and Julia to be part of a collective purchase of 30 acres of land edged by the River Lee in Ballingeary. They lived at this site, which they named ‘Slí an Uisce’ (Way of the Water), for over 20 years, during which time Fred – living by the principles of permaculture – earned the moniker ‘the man who lives in the polytunnel’, after creating a home and a garden within the confines of a tunnel measuring 9m x 16m. “I wanted to live among my plants,” he says of this extraordinary lifestyle. “It was a continuous learning experience and experiment and inspired so many people.”

In the summer the tunnel was opened up to allow fresh air to circulate and in the winter it was heated by a large stove. Nothing was wasted, with ‘grey’ water and tea leaves emptied directly around the base of the plants to feed them. Fred shared his home with frogs (who helped keep the slug population down), lizards and a friendly musical robin. At night it transformed into a space lit by candles and the full moon. With the smell of flowers, ripening peaches and grapes filling the air during the summer and fresh beans an arms-length from the cooker, it was as close to Utopia as he could get.

Eager to share their experiences and learnings and to bring the community together around food growing, Fred and Julia launched the ‘Bia Ghleann na Laoi’ group, hosting a number of innovative talks and workshops on sustainable practices at Creedon’s Hotel in Inchigeelagh and raising important points around peak oil and food security to different community groups in the Mhúscraí area

A Harvest Festival initiated by ‘Bia Ghleann na Laoi’ provided the launching pad for a  farmers’ market in Inchigeelagh and a community orchard in Ballingeary. Designed by Julia and kindly sponsored by local plant nursery Future Forests – ensuring that local children would be able to pick fruit for years to come – the orchard was planted in collaboration with the village Tidy Towns.

“We wanted to bring the people who produce food and the people who consume it together and open up new ways of doing things in the community, particularly around food resilience,” shares Fred.

In 2016, on World Water Day, the group organised an initiative entitled ‘Salmon Come Back’, focusing on the health of the River Lee and its impact on local communities. 

With the current oil crisis and the world’s food systems dangerously dependent on fossil fuels, Fred’s hope is that the work done by ‘Bia Ghleann na Laoi’ will continue to make a difference at local level.

Fred eventually retired to Bantry back to the same house he lived in before. It’s on a quiet street overlooking the town with a garden that mostly looks after itself. The house is small but comfortable, easily heated by a large stone stove and filled with books, plants and interesting items collected over the years.

He gets around locally by walking or cycling and, if he needs to travel further afield – for instance to visit his children and grandchildren in Glengarriff who he values spending time with – he plans his route using the bus timetable. “We used to be so isolated in West Cork but we have such a good public transport network nowadays that it’s very easy to get around without a car,” he says.

While the Dialogue sessions in Clonakilty ran their course, he still hosts a regular session in Bantry, at the Bridge Street Community Cafe every fortnight on Wednesday mornings.

After a lifetime of doing, today the soft-spoken Dutchman is happy to mostly just be. From his kitchen he has a view of the hawthorn and the wildlife that visit his untamed patch. Fred spends a lot of time here at his table…writing, thinking, listening.

The how and why will always be more important than the finished product to process-driven artist Kathy Kirwan. In fact the end may never be reached, as demonstrated by her most recent and ongoing passion for flax and its many threads writes Mary O’Brien.

Kathy Kirwan’s interest in flax – a plant whose cultivation and use dates back over two thousand years in Ireland – was first sparked close to her home in Clonakilty, a town whose history is inextricably interweaved with this versatile plant in the production of linen. Walks past an old retting pond – where flax would have been soaked to rot away the unusable plant parts – inspired Kathy to explore the labour-intensive process behind flax to fibre and collect stories about the industry from older people in the area.

Born in Birr, Co Offaly, or as she puts it “in the bog in the middle of Ireland”, Kathy has always felt deeply connected to nature. After moving to West Cork to teach geography and PE, she ended up sailing around the world for a couple of years before returning to put down roots with her future husband, a Clonakilty man, and pursue a career as an eco-social artist and educator in sustainability.

As part of the Flax Lín (flax to linen) community, she has been connecting past with present through a ‘Flax – Threads of Time’ project, organising immersive exhibitions and talks and quietly planting the seeds for the revival of flax growing in West Cork. Looking to the future, she says she would love to see the old Linen Hall in Clonakilty turned into a creative space to preserve its rich flax and linen heritage while fostering a vibrant hub that supports local artists, performance, and the evolving cultural future of the community.

This year, 2026, is particularly significant, as it marks 200 years since the collapse of what was once a thriving linen industry in Clonakilty. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the linen industry underwent explosive growth in the area, employing tens of thousands of people until its collapse – almost overnight – in 1826. Local historian Con O’Neill has written a fascinating paper on the economic transformation of Clonakilty through linen in the 18th century. He writes that “the collapse of 1826 was not merely a precursor to the Great Famine; it was the event that dismantled the region’s primary economic defence, leaving a generation of dispossessed weavers and struggling smallholders entirely dependent on the potato…. The long shadow of 1826 stretched across the century that followed, leaving the town economically diminished.”

With the 1936 Flax Bill, the growing of flax experienced a short-lived revival in West Cork, as it offered a good return on investment for local farmers, later encouraged by the guaranteed high price offered for flax following the outbreak of WWII, when linen was needed for RAF aircraft, parachutes and uniforms. “Flax and therefore linen has anti-microbial properties so it was used to make bandages,” adds Kathy. “It was dyed using nettles to create camouflage fabric.”

She shares how flax inspector Patrick Kerr – the father of retired Clonakilty estate agent John Kerr – played a key role in the revival of the flax industry in West Cork following the introduction of the Flax Bill. “Drawing on his extensive experience – particularly from his time in the North of Ireland and Donegal – and comprehensive understanding of the sector, Kerr travelled across West Cork, encouraging farmers to take advantage of the strong opportunity to earn income, emphasising that flax prices were secured at a guaranteed minimum level.”

Five years after the War, in 1950, the suspension of the Flax Act (1936) signalled the beginning of the end for the flax industry in West Cork. The rise of synthetic material, increase in cotton production and changing consumer habits, all contributed to the decline of linen in the 1950s.

“I felt an urgency to collect some of those memories before they were lost,” explains Kathy. ‘Some of the older people I spoke to have since passed away.”

Growing flax takes about 100 days. Once the pretty blue or white flowers have dropped and the seed heads appear, the plants are then pulled, gathered into bundles and dried for two weeks before being retted for up to 15 days, which releases the fibre strands, from which linen is produced. In Ireland, retting was traditionally done in streams or ponds and the resulting foul odour of the decomposing plant was notorious. It was then spread out in fields to dry before being bound and stored, ready for transportation to the mill for scutching, which separated the flax into long finer fibres called line, short coarser fibres called tow, and waste woody matter called shives.

“Nothing goes to waste with the flax plant,” says Kathy. “The shives, used for manufacturing composites, are now being used to make car seats for the McClaren Formula One racing team.”

In an article in the Ardfield/Rathbarry Journal, Michael Collins writes how ‘a good acre of flax would produce between fifty to seventy stone of flax plus a certain amount of tow. This would be sold at the Flax Market in Clonakilty, which was held every four to six weeks, when buyers from Belfast and elsewhere in Northern Ireland would be in attendance.’

The late Johnny Crowley, a well-known owner of a service station in Clonakilty, worked in a retting pond as a young man.

He recalled to Kathy how the workers “would scrub themselves with carbolic soap after a day at the retting pond before going dancing at The Lilac Ballroom in Enniskeane.”

“He laughed as he reminisced to me at the petrol pumps, sharing how as the temperature rose in the ballroom, so too did the smell!”

The late Michael Santry from Lisavaird told Kathy how they would “keep the flax in the ‘seomra maith’ (good room) to mind it” before bringing it to the market in Clonakilty on a Friday.

He also remembered his mother using the flax shives for cooking outside in a bothy (small hut). “As flax was highly flammable, the cooking was done outside the home for safety,” explains Kathy.

In‘Ghosts, Gargoyles and Garages’, a book of childhood memories, Michael Pattwell, a retired Irish District Court judge from Clonakilty, recalled the “long queue of flax laden horses and carts” running the entire length of the street where he grew up.

As a young boy, Michael created the enterprising role of minding the farmers’ places in the queue when they “would drift into Santry’s pub for a pint or two or three”.

“I was employed to hold the reins and move the horse along and when the owners turn was about to be reached, to dash into the pub and get him out to take control again.

“With that, shilling in pocket, I ran back up the queue and it  wasn’t long before I was employed again. This continued for the entire day – especially when the market was held on days when there was no school – or for the evening if it was a school day. The longer the queue the better, because the longer the farmer was in the pub, then the more he drank and this often blurred the difference between a shilling, a two-shilling piece or even a half-crown.”

Michael O’Sullivan from Rosscarbery, 91, is a treasure trove of memories. He learned about the complex process of flax production from his father, James O’Sullivan, a flax inspector. He shared how his father tested the quality of seed collected from local farmers on blotting paper at their home.

Michael also recalled how fine rushes were placed on the flax in the retting pond before being weighted down with heavy stones to keep the flax from rising. “I remember we had to walk on the flax morning and night during this period to ensure that it was kept below water level.”

His remembers accompanying his father to the Linen Hall in Clonakilty where Wilsons of Belfast would come to purchase flax for linen production. “Very often Wilson’s of Belfast would ask my father to assist them with the vetting process when determining the quality of the flax. This was an unenviable task for my father to have to vet his neighbour’s flax but people trusted his judgement, as he was known to be such an honest man.”

With the once busy mills now lying in ruin around West Cork, memories are all that remain of West Cork’s linen legacy. However, flax enthusiasts like Kathy are driving a resurgence of the hardy and versatile plant in their communities around the world. Kathy is a member of Fibreshed Ireland, a global movement that focuses on regenerative fashion using locally grown fibres. “As demand grows for sustainable fibres, flax may offer a potential diversification route for smaller farms,” she says. “It’s also being looked at as a tool to restore soil health and decarbonise industries.

“You could say I’m obsessed with it,” she admits laughing. “It really is a fascinating plant, even more so because of its history in West Cork”

While she currently has her head down joining pieces of cordage together for the ‘Flax 405: From Mallon to Mizen’ shared island project, which will launch online on May 1, future flax projects are never far from mind.

“405km is the winding distance between Mallon Linen in Co. Tyrone and Mizen Head in Co. Cork so the objective of the project,” she explains “is to engage communities across the island in creating 405 equivalent pieces of flax rope, thread and linen that symbolically weave together our shared past, present, and future.”

Over the coming months, Kathy is organising a number of flax events in West Cork, including the planting of flax around Clonakilty through local community groups and farmers, an interactive experience outside the Linen Hall in Clonakilty as part of the Old Time Fair and a flax harvesting event and craft workshops during Heritage Week.

One of the flax planting projects will take place at Fernhill House Hotel, a site historically surrounded by retting ponds and flax fields. This year’s planting coincides with the bicentenary of both the collapse of the local linen industry and the founding of Fernhill House. In September, Kathy and the hotel will also welcome a group of 25 textile enthusiasts from the United States.

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.