In the lounge of The Pull Inn in Co Offaly a steady stream of customers arrives every Sunday morning seeking not the “hair of the dog” but cures of a more spiritual kind.
The pub owner, Joe Gallagher, is a seventh son, and according to the tradition has the power to heal a range of medical conditions, especially involving the skin. Ringworm used to be the big thing. It still features regularly.
But his clients last Sunday, all accompanied by their mothers, include a teenager with eczema and an angelic six-year-old boy who on his first visit (they usually come three times) had a severe facial rash, since all but disappeared from his smiling features.
Each is brought into the family sittingroom (“the clinic”), where the healer administers his cures with holy water, a prayer and – always – a laying of hands on the affected parts.
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The service is not competing with medicine, says Gallagher. On the contrary, he assumes most people also seek conventional treatment and sometimes advises them to do so, protesting his limitations: “I’m not a doctor.”
But equally, he doesn’t turn away anyone seeking help. He even performed an exorcism a few years ago, a case that “frightened” him.
Gallagher (76) is a blow-in in the village of Pullough, Co Offaly, having lived there only half a century. He was born near Kinlough, on the Donegal-Leitrim border, in 1946.
Then and now, to be a certified seventh son – or daughter – you had to come in an unbroken sequence of the same sex. Even still births count. And in fact the brother immediately before Joe, Oliver, died in infancy.
Yet there was no great excitement in the household when their seventh son was born. “I’m sure my mother was hoping for a girl,” he says. It was only gradually that the honour, or responsibility, dawned.
Hearing of the new arrival, a priest told the parents: “This lad should have a cure.”
They then performed the traditional test: placing a live worm in the baby’s hand. The worm died, as it should.
“There’s the proof,” the priest said.
Within days, the word was out and locals arrived asking: “I believe you have a young seventh son?” So it was that Gallagher performed his first cures as an unknowing baby, his hand placed on the patients by his parents.
Even as an older child, he didn’t always appreciate his talent. “It was more of a hindrance – I used to wonder why my brothers didn’t have to do it,” he says.
When as a teenager, he attended a Franciscan boarding school, on the way to becoming a monk, he kept it quiet there, too, treating fellow students only if they asked.
He might still be in the Franciscans today if a career in the foreign missions had been possible. But it wasn’t and, aged 25, he opted for a return to civilian life. At first he shed his habit only long enough to attend interviews for a job as a pharmaceutical rep in the midlands.
Back in robes when, a little later somewhere, he met one of the men from the interview panel and introduced himself. “We didn’t interview any priests,” the man said. Gallagher explained and learned that he had got the job.
He never took it up in the end, because another vocation intervened. The pub career was an accident, suggested by an estate agent when he was looking for a place to live locally. He bought The Pull Inn for £12,500 in 1971, with the help of £1,000 each in loans from his brothers (all in England).
The business thrived immediately, thanks in part to his introduction of a jukebox and pool table. Those were boom times in Offaly, with Bord na Móna and the ESB the big employers. But his religious background helped too: “People would come just because they heard there was a monk running a pub.”
He soon had a whole chain of bars – 10 across Offaly and Westmeath – of which only the one in Pullough now remains. In the meantime, the faith-healing became a regular feature of his life.
That must have boosted business too, occasionally. But it is not of itself a business. The service is free, says Gallagher, because “it’s not me doing it, really”. He considers himself a conduit for a higher power. Being paid would not be appropriate.
If grateful recipients send money afterwards, which they sometimes do, he gives it to charity. Occasionally, people also leave gifts. As his daughter Joy puts it, someone might bring “a lump of bacon, or sausages”. But presents are not expected either.
It was when Joe still had a pub in Tullamore, a few years ago, that a man apparently possessed by the devil turned up at a healing session.
He came with his wife – they were both Polish – and having only slightly more English than her husband, she struggled to explain the nature of his illness. “He’s sick,” she said, gesturing that the problem was deep inside him somewhere.
Gallagher would have referred them to a doctor but the woman insisted doctors were no use in this case.
And when the faith healer reluctantly proceeded to do his thing, with prayer and holy water, the man reacted violently, as if he was being burned. “He was making these deep growling noises. And there were dark patches around his eyes. I was frightened,” says Gallagher.
Because the spectacle was disturbing the bar’s other customers, Gallagher moved the couple upstairs to a quieter area and asked a priest who happened to be in the pub, home from England, to come with him.
“But he wouldn’t. ‘I know what that is,’ he told me, and he didn’t want to get involved. ‘Be careful,’ he warned.”
The one thing Gallagher knew about exorcism was that, once he started praying, he mustn’t stop, “because if you do, the thing might enter you instead”.
So he struggled with the man for an hour and a half, until they were both exhausted. There had to be a follow-up session before whatever they were dealing with was subdued.
Gallagher still meets the couple occasionally – they’re living a normal life these days. But the experience sent “shivers up my spine”, he says. “I definitely believe now there are such things as evil spirits.”
By complete contrast, his patients down the years have also included a young girl with severe facial acne, which disappeared. Many years later, long married but struggling to have children, she sought his blessing for that too, even though it was “outside my normal area of expertise”.
Soon afterwards, she became pregnant and eventually came back with her first-born, joking: “That’s your child.”
Offaly is nicknamed the “Faithful County” for its early fidelity to the GAA, and it seems to live up to the description in healing too.
One of the mothers attending the clinic on Sunday was also a devotee of “a man up the mountains”, near Kinnity, who cures colic and adrenal disorders: “I brought my three kids to him.”
Meanwhile, at Geashill, another village in the county, there is a married couple, Patricia and Peter Quinn, both also reputed to have healing powers.
Another of Sunday’s callers turned out to be the daughter of a Cavan faith healer, Alice Smith, recently (alongside Gallagher) the joint subject of a short film, My Cure and Me.
Smith used to treat bleeding disorders but, as explained in the film, fears she lost her power after using it on a sick animal, as a favour.
Some faith healers believe cures should be confined to humans only. But having inherited her gift from a male relative, Smith has now passed the cure on to a male cousin (it must alternate between men and women), who she says has since used it successfully.
As a seventh son, Gallagher cannot pass on whatever powers he has. He and wife, Josie, have five daughters and three sons, but seven in a row of either was never likely.
So the healing power will die with him. And as he points out, the tradition is dying generally: “Nobody has seven kids any more, never mind seven boys in a row.”
Even some of those who are qualified choose not to practise because of the “hassle” involved. In wind-down mode these days, Gallagher tries to confine the Sunday clinics to 10am-noon.
“Time was,” says Gallagher, “there would still be a queue at 3pm.”
