Up to 10 years ago many towns in Ireland still had family-owned bakeries. Many have since gone to the wall in the face of supermarket competition and mass-produced bread of mass-produced quality.
A month ago, many in Carrick-on-Suir, Co Tipperary, were shocked by the closure of Galvin's Bakery, which had been close to the heart of local life and its communal sustenance for 100 years. The loss of Galvin's was like a family death.
The bakery, retail premises and adjacent coffee shop in New Street are now for sale in a town which cannot afford job losses and has a strong perception of persistent political neglect in the location of new industry.
A generation back, Carrick had half-a-dozen family-owned bakeries producing local bread. Now, with the closure of Galvin's, only one remains, Carroll's of Kickham Street.
There is more to this story than the ubiquitous pattern of small local outlets suffering corporate predation. Local bread is more than just a commodity: it's a primary and primal element of local identity. Even in France, where the early morning walk to the boulangerie can be a ritual, it's reported to be threatened.
Carroll's of Kickham Street in Carrick is a typically unpretentious small-town bakery of the kind we have long taken for granted and only miss when they're gone.
Billy Kavanagh, the senior baker, has worked all his life there. His father was a baker. Carroll's is renowned locally for the quality of the traditional Carrick Loaf, as well as its other bread and confectionery products. The loaves are baked in batches of a joined dozen, the dough mixed and shaped by hand in a time- and labour-intensive process.
The baking process itself is also distinct from that of the more standardised "pan" bread, with different oven requirements.
The customer's order of two or three loaves is broken off from the long batch and can be had fresh, hot and aromatic every morning. Or it can be had "settled" and a couple of days old: two different tastes. Some like it hot; some settled. Many relish it either way.
The much-regretted closure of Galvin's has boosted sales for Carroll's. Against all the received economic rationale of our age, it still provides a traditional service, delivering individual orders to private houses and retail outlets. Carroll's van does set rounds every day of the working week, both in the town and through a 15-mile radius in the hinterland. About half of overall sales are of the traditional Carrick Loaf.
Some years ago a Canadian film crew came visiting to make a documentary on the Newfoundland connection with the region. Sharing a meal in our house, they fell upon all we could muster of Carrick Loaves like men tasting manna in the desert; midway through the meal my wife had to slip to town to replenish our bread rations.
Subsequently I was travelling to St John's, Newfoundland, on a poet's bursary and took with me as gifts to "the land of fish" a large batch of that morning's loaves, hot from the bakery. Toronto customs were bemused, possibly suspecting an attempted importation of Carrick cocaine. But they let me through. I was enabling a transatlantic communion out of a Carrick bakery.
From the oven time and time again, the incensed miracle of bread, its truth and grace, brought out to light and offered to the morning*
*From Oven Lane, by Michael Coady, Gallery Press.