The face of a vanished Ireland: My memories of Joe Hanrahan

For the first 81 years of his life Joe Hanrahan kept a pretty low profile. He wasn’t well known beyond the Suirside town of Kilsheelan, in Co Tipperary, although most people who lived in and around it knew the man with the wild hair and the sharp, affable eyes, often standing out by the gate of his cottage, dog at heel, raising his stick in friendly salutation at passing cars. His face made people smile.

That's why my friend James Fennell, the photographer, and I couldn't resist putting him on the cover of the third book in our Vanishing Ireland series. It made Joe something of a celebrity: across the parish, the county, the province, the country . . . He even had groupies from the US calling into him in the year after publication.

I’m assured that he adored it, that his unexpected latter-day fame was a source of great pleasure to him, which is in itself a consoling pleasure to me.

I first saw Joe Hanrahan, standing by that gate, in early 2011. Having united on two successful volumes of Vanishing Ireland, James and I were travelling through Munster in pursuit of more wonderful old-timers to charm and enlighten us. The phone rang, and it was a friend with a keen understanding of the project. She explained that she had lined up a very strong contender for us and suggested that we make a beeline for Kilsheelan.

Within hours we were seated in Joe’s house, listening to his life story. He was the seventh of eight children born to Thomas Hanrahan, a ploughman who harrowed the surrounding fields with a pair of workhorses. When Joe left school, at the age of 12, the second World War was three years old and, across the Irish Sea, Britain was virtually the only other part of western Europe that had not fallen to fascism. Churchill’s people needed a lot of things to survive: faith, courage, fortune, resilience . . . and rabbits.

Rabbit conquest

The rabbit trade between Ireland and Britain was huge in the early 1940s, Joe explained. Life for the rabbits that lived alongside the banks of the Suir became singularly less promising when Mrs Prendergast, the Kilsheelan postmistress, began her conquest of the area.

“She used to get loads of maybe four of five hundred rabbits at a time,” Joe told us. “She had a pony and cart, and I was her driver. We went all around Co Waterford, gathering rabbits up from all the farmers. The rabbits were caught in traps beforehand. We’d put the carcasses on to crates, and then she’d ship them all across to England. They lived on rabbits in England during the war.”

Mrs Prendergast paid Joe half a crown a week to drive her around the county, as well as her twice-weekly trips into Clonmel. “Things were poor enough around here that time,” he said. And jobs were scarce, so he was thankful for the work. Besides which, anything was better than school. “Oh Christ, stop. I didn’t like school. Oh God, I didn’t. The teacher was fine, but he was very hard. He knew how to work the cane.”

In the summers of his youth Joe’s then nimble fingers explored the nearby woodlands for vitamin-rich bilberries, known in those parts as hurts or, in Irish, fraochán.

“We used to go any place and pick them and sell them for a couple of pence to the old postmistress. She’d send them off to England, with the rabbits.”

The bilberries were traditionally gathered on the last Sunday in July, known as Fraochán Sunday. They were also collected in August for Lughnasa, the first traditional harvest festival of the year. The quality of the bilberries was considered a good way of predicting the likely value of the other crops come the harvest.

“There’s no demand for hurts now,” Joe said, mournfully, “and the bushes have all been smothered.”

All of Joe’s brothers and sisters married and emigrated to England. “So I was left alone. But I was never tempted to emigrate. I never got the idea into my head.”

In 1948, six years after he started with Mrs Prendergast, Joe took on a job as a labourer for a neighbouring farmer, for a crown a week. “I was too young to be drinking at that time, so the money lasted well,” he said, laughing. “But then I got bigger, and I started having a pint, and the money became valuable.”

For the next half-century Joe worked all around the Kilsheelan area, “a bit here, a bit there, anywhere I could get a few bob”. For nearly 20 years he was employed at the nearby Gurteen estate, looking after its cattle and poultry.

He never learned to drive. He rode a bicycle with confidence, and he could ride a horse, too, “but badly”. The farthest he travelled was Dublin, to which he once journeyed by train to watch Tipperary win the All-Ireland hurling championship.

He also used to frequent Thurles for the Munster final, particularly savouring those occasions when Tipperary beat Cork. “Cork beat and the hay saved,” he says wistfully.

As a youth Joseph hurled “for the craic”, although he dismissed the notion that he was ever a sporty type. He also used to be something of a card shark, flipping out winning hands of 25s in Sullivan’s pub in Kilsheelan.

“But the money got bigger, and then you’re gambling, so I got out of it,” he said. He didn’t like to squander money “on man, dog or horse”. Instead he enjoyed céilí music. “I don’t play, and I can’t sing, but I love it,” he said. “I wouldn’t give tuppence for anything else I hear on the wireless except céilithe.”

Joe had always lived a quiet life, at ease with a newspaper, a cigarette and some céilí music on the radio. He liked to sit on the bench by the crossroads in Kilsheelan, peaked hat over his eyes, watching the world whizz by, with his dog Blacky by his side. Joe would walk him every day, irrespective of the weather.

After his portrait graced the cover of Vanishing Ireland: Reflections of Our Changing Times Joe became famous. The local community united and gave him a clock by way of a congratulatory present.

Strangers began to arrive, to talk to him about rabbits and bilberries and céilí music. Some wanted his autograph. One visitor from Pittsburgh snapped a photo of him holding up her signed copy of Vanishing Ireland outside Sullivan's pub last April, and described him as a picture of health and joy.

Kind, friendly character

On Monday morning I learned of Joe’s deeply tragic death in a fire at his home. I subsequently posted an obituary to him on the Vanishing Ireland Facebook page. It clocked 1,000 likes in 24 hours, as well as 200 or more comments.

Many were by people who knew him; they recalled a kind, friendly character who loved pottering about in his yard among his chickens and his dogs. The granddaughter of one of his friends told how she would miss “your voice grumbling at me, or you waving your stick at me, giving out”.

Another told how she had moved into a new housing estate behind Joe’s house nine years ago. “There were still diggers and big machinery everywhere. Joe was standing in his driveway, looking back at it, somewhat lost and bewildered, scratching his head. I remember thinking how sad for him to have all the townies come in and invade his village.” It was “practically his back yard”.

“I’ve seen a lot of changes,” Joe said when we visited him. “But for the good or the bad I don’t know which. People say they are happier now than they were, but I don’t believe they are. Money is not all. In the old days you could go out in the morning and pick up an odd job. But now you won’t get work like that anywhere. It’s a very different world.”