A glimpse into vanishing Ireland

In Vanishing Ireland: Recollections of Our Changing Times, award-winning photographer James Fennell and best-selling author Turtle Bunbury, once again journey the length and breadth of Ireland to bring us an extraordinary, powerful new collection of poignant interviews from ordinary men and women who share their memories with us, providing an invaluable link to our past.

Among those they encountered were two colourful Clare characters, John Joe Conway and the late Tom ‘Ned’ McMahon. In this feature, we reproduce extensive extracts from chapters dedicated to these extraordinary men. In their own words, they provide a wonderful insight into everyday life – work, customs and recreation.

John Joe Conway, Knockanedan, Kilfenora  – farmer and horse breeder
Born May 2, 1935

The short avenue leading down to his cottage is treacherously icy but that doesn’t stop John Joe Conway from skating across the frozen puddles like a fearless toddler. “By God and you’re welcome, lads. Come in out of the cold and make yourselves comfortable.”
John Joe’s home lies amid the hills in a place called Knockanedan, which, rather cryptically, translates as The Hill on the Brow of Another Hill. The other hill is Knockalunkard, the Hill of the Long Fort, where John Joe’s late mother grew up. Located along the old Lisdoonvarna to Ennis road, memories of ages past still linger over these remote green hills. Pitched between two ancient ringforts are the grass-covered rumps of an abandoned village.
“I knew an old man who could remember the women from the hill village,” says John Joe. “There is still contact with those times but so much of what was around here has gone over to forestry since. The Forestry Department didn’t give a tinker’s damn for the past. They would have planted trees on this kitchen floor if they could.”
John Joe’s forbears came from the townland of Ballycannoe, just north east of Lidsoonvarna, which was once called Conwaystown “and there was no one there except Conways”. They were “cleared out of it in the troubled times and moved up to Galway.” They returned to Clare in the 19th century and Michael Conway, John Joe’s grandfather, arrived in Knockanedan from Miltown Malbay. He was essentially adopted by his uncle, Paddy Conway and his wife, Bridget, who had no children of their own.
It had been Michael’s intention to join the civil service in Dublin. However, as he prepared to depart for the city, Paddy pleaded with him to stay and offered him the farm. The young man reluctantly bade farewell to his administrative dreams and stayed.
Michael married Bridget Donoghue from Maurice’s Mills who bore him three sons and three daughters. However, she died giving birth to their youngest girl in 1901. Michael then reared the six children himself, in the same house where John Joe lives now. Two of the six later emigrated to England – John to work on the railways in Manchester and Mary to work in catering in Luton – but the other four remained in County Clare, including Michael’s eldest son Patrick who was John Joe’s father.
John Joe’s kitchen is a large, open-plan room with a concrete floor and a strobe light overhead. Bags of turf encased in yellow plastic gather behind a settee between the staircase and the Stanley range. Along one wall runs a 1950s dresser, laden with chipped teacups and tick-tock clocks. “I’m a clockaholic,” he confides.
Another wall is adorned with portraits of Padre Pio, Mother Theresa and Pope John Paul II, whom he went to see at Ballybrit in 1979, “the greatest day in my life.” Amongst other photographs is a 1940s shot of the Conway family standing beside the haybarn at Knockanedan in their Sunday best; John Joe, his parents and his four brothers. The boys all wear shorts; no young man wore long pants until he reached his sixteenth birthday.
“It wasn’t easy to rear a family in those times,” says John Joe. “But they did it, however they did it.” His father was evidently a towering figure. “And terrible strong too,” he says, with a respectful nod of the head. “He was a tug-of-war man.” Patrick’s wife, Mary Ward was a cattle farmer’s daughter from nearby Knockalunkard.
As a youngster, John Joe often helped his father with the cattle. The prices were sometimes so low that they had to take the stock to two or three fairs before they found a buyer. While they awaited a sale, they lived on credit with the local shop like everybody else. “They were so terribly honest in them times that they all did pay because if they didn’t, the shopkeeper wouldn’t be able to keep going.”
The Conway sons were all educated in Inchovea, a handsome 19th century building, which was demolished in the 1950s because it was deemed too damp.
By the time he left school in the mid-1950s, John Joe knew the family farm was headed his way. Two of his brothers had emigrated to Luton, one to work with Vauxhall, the other to become a plasterer, and there they both remained until they died a few years ago. Another brother, Patrick joined the Christian Brothers and settled in Clara, County Offaly.
The fourth brother, Martin played flute with the Irish Army No. 1 Band for nearly 30 years and now lives nearby. During the 1960s, Martin was based at Batterstown, County Meath, and the biggest journeys of John Joe’s life were his annual 500km round trip to visit him. This coincided with the much-relished “Clareman’s Do” in Harry’s of Kinnegad, a gathering of all the farming men of County Clare who had moved east and settled in Meath and Westmeath. “We used to let our hair hang down – full length,” he laughs, eyes crinkling as he reels off the names of the lads he met for the “dancing and sing-song and that carry on”.
Like his grandfather before him, John Joe was not particularly excited by the prospect of taking on the farm. “I felt it would be nothing but hardship,” he says. “But I got used to it.” When his mother’s brother passed away in 1962, he acquired a second farm on Knockalunkard Hill. “So I doubled up, but it was still small, about 60 acres in total, and not the best land in the world.”
He bred pedigree Shorthorns and he has a quiver full of scary tales about cows and bulls that have run amok.
“You would have to be alert to the bulls,” he warns. But cows can also be extremely dangerous, particularly Limousin cows. “When they are calving, they have some temper. For three days after the calf is born, they are terrible.” He recalls a friend being chased up the field by one such cow. “Only for that he was an athlete, she’d have had him.”
John Joe is more at ease in the company of horses. “They used to say there was a four leaf shamrock wherever a mare foaled. I love horses. Their intelligence is something else. They know your step. They know your voice. They know if you are grumpy and they keep out of your way! The very moment you handle the reins, they know to a T what you’re made of. And when you ride them, they know when you’re in charge and they know when they can dump you. And dump you they will.”
“I had a breeding mare, a draft horse. I bred foals from her and I brought them to the fairs in Ennistymon and Ennis. I often hopped up on her, with no bridle or anything, for a gallop through the fields.”
John Joe also had a couple of workhorses. “The trick with the workhorse is to keep him working. When they aren’t working, they start acting up, plunging and rearing and shying at this, that and every other thing they meet on the road. But when they are working they are lovely and they really can work.”
John Joe sold his last “little mare” in 2005. “After she was gone I put down eight or nine terrible nights. The line was broken. Every morning I would bring her feed… but when she was gone, I was put off my stride.”
He found some consolation in music. “Oh the Lord yes, I am stone crazy mad for traditional music. I played a tin whistle back in the past and I used to sing, with porter. Aye, when the medicine was on, I’d sing. Putting on the Style, Lonnie Donegan. That was one of my songs.” In fact, John Joe frequently hosted céilidhs in his kitchen, drawing crowds of anything up to 40 people. “A couple of lads would play and they’d dance a few sets and waltzes and maybe sing a few songs. Everybody would be to and fro and there was the occasional romance out of it. It wasn’t men on the one wall and women on the other.”
That said, John Joe never married. “It was a pity for all the bachelors in this area that all the women left for England and America. Or they married the bigger farmers. I suppose they were afraid of the drudgery of marrying a smaller farmer.” The population duly tumbled and many local businesses were no longer viable. In the last decade, the creamery, the shop and the school have all closed. “This area has been turned upside down,” says John Joe. “But there was nothing we could do. Like a lot of the country areas, it came so gradual at first that no one took any notice.”

Tom ‘Ned’ McMahon – Builder and actor
Born November 1919, died September 2011

‘Tis a bit of a wrong age for you to be turning dishonest, but you must do it now. On account of the depopulation, no shopkeeper can keep alive unless he waters the drink and sells short weight and robs both rich and poor.’
Thus spake Tom ‘Ned’ McMahon a hundred times or more. They were not his words as such. They belonged to Paddy King, an 80-year-old farmer who reckoned himself to be ‘an irresistible ladykiller’ but who was, in point of fact, an innocuous numbskull.
Paddy King was one of the main characters in The Wood of the Whispering, a dark but poignant comedy about emigration and chastity written by MJ Molloy for the Abbey Theatre in 1953.
In 1957, the play went nationwide with Tom Ned and the Inchovea Players, an impressive amateur theatre company from the tiny East Clare village of Inchovea. The 11-strong company was founded by Tom Honan and his actress wife, Carmel.
Amongst other plays they staged were MJ Molloy’s 1963 comedy Daughter From Over the Water and Bryan McMahon’s powerful hunger strike drama The Bugle in the Blood. But The Wood of the Whispering was their biggest hit and, having performed at Muintir Na Tíre festivals and fleadh cheoils across the country, the Inchovea Players returned home with several medals including an All-Ireland title and the coveted Rural Cup from the Killarney Drama Festival.
Playing Paddy King was the highlight of Tom’s acting career. “I wore a big black moustache which I clipped with a pair of sheep-shearers,” says he. And as luck would have it, his brother Jack was playing the role of Paddy King’s deranged brother Jimmy in the play. “Oh, I gave him plenty of abuse alright,” smiles Tom.
“We were very brilliant at remembering our lines,” he explains, when asked why the Inchovea Players were a cut above. “It’s something within you and if there is a bit of it in you, then you can act. The same as playing music. I had a big script but I just learned it.”
Tom’s father was James McMahon, a farmer who fattened his cattle on the same fifty-acre farm in Inchovea where Tom was raised. Tom’s mother, Mary McCarty grew up near a waterfall known as the Seven Streams of Teeskagh. In the legends, these streams were the milk of a sacred cow. “When the big floods come down the mountain, the water tumbles through Teeskagh,” he says.
Born in November 1919, Tom – or ‘Tomas’, as he was christened – was one of six children. To distinguish them from other McMahons in the area, they were known as the ‘Ned McMahons’.
He went to school in Inchovea where he excelled at Irish, which he also spoke at home. “They say it is a hard language to learn, but it isn’t,” he insists. When Tom left school in 1934, emigration was considered the only option for many in Inchovea.
“I knew seven girls from the one house that all went to England,” he says. “And six of my father’s brothers were in America at one time”. He still chuckles about a friend who feared that the skyscrapers in New York were getting so tall that the moon wouldn’t be able to get past them.
However, Tom struck lucky and found work for a building contractor who is “dead since, the Lord have Mercy on him. I was never tempted to emigrate then, because I always had work here on the buildings and that gave me a few bob to rattle”. He worked “as a kind of superintendent”, building a large number of houses around Corofin and as far south as Ennis.
Tom never married. “I kept the women to one side,” says he. For him, life was about music and theatre and the occasional gamble on the geegees. “I was at the Galway races a thousand times,” he says, recalling a victorious £114 treble, followed by an £80 win on the Tote, on the very day he witnessed The Clancy Brothers perform. He also went to the Galway racecourse to meet the Pope. “I was within the roar of an ass of him but I wasn’t able to shake his hand.”
Some divine compensation came his way in 1997 when the veteran stage actor was recruited to play in the “Annual All-Priests Five-a-Side, Over-75’s Indoor Challenge Football Match” for the third series of Father Ted.
In 1998, he moved from Inchovea to his present residence in Kilfenora, a practical move that placed him within walking distance of shops, pubs and the church. Already famed across east Clare, he became an icon of Kilfenora, singing songs and telling tales. He can hum and lilt like his cousin, Robbie McMahon of Spancil Hill fame. His brother Jack was also famed for his rendition of Martin Reidy’s Tangaloni. And while he doesn’t play any instrument, Tom knows all the Kilfenora reels by ear. The Three Flowers is a favourite song, he confides.