Eamonn has a great eye for the dogs
REPORTER DAVID MEDCALF VENTURED TO TINAHELY FOR A CONVIVIAL CHAT WITH EAMONN DARCY, WHOSE LOVE OF FAST-RUNNING GREYHOUNDS IS SURPASSED ONLY BY HIS DEDICATION TO HIS CATHOLIC FAITH I HAVE HAD THE GREATEST LUCK. I HAVE WON MORE THAN I HAVE LOST. THE HOLY M
EAMONN DARCY loves talking about greyhounds, about religion, about betting and about a career that has had more twists and turns than some of the windy hill roads above his native Tinahely.
This morning’s starter topic in a rich conversation over a cup of tea is a dog which will be called Only For Faith, of whom he has high hopes – ‘fierce well bred’, he confides.
A man enjoying life in his seventies, Eamonn pursues a dedicated interest in the sport without benefit of kennels or the need to bring his prized animals for a walk.
He laughs at the notion that, as a greyhound owner, he plays the role of Arab sheikh, to his trainer Oliver ‘Hopper’ McGrath in Wexford, for there are no imperial airs about Eamonn.
He spends much of his time tending to the church in Crossbridge a few miles out of Tinahely town, where he is in charge of all practical matters. But the work still allows him plenty of time to consider his canine ventures and investments, keeping a trusty pair of binoculars close at hand for his nights at the dogs...
Eamonn Darcy will tell you proudly he is Tinahely born and bred, though he admits that the family moved to Clonmel for a while when he was young.
They returned to Crossbridge before too long after his father was laid low by crippling rheumatism.
The condition abated as Darcy senior took up an interest in a farm back home as well as running the local shop and selling a little insurance, apparently taking great benefit from great lungfuls of his native Wicklow air.
‘I hated having to leave Clonmel,’ confesses Eamonn more than half a century later, though he soon re-adjusted to life in the foothills of the Wicklow mountains.
After completing his primary education, he was dispatched in due course to the Vocational School in Hacketstown, cycling to lessons each day, which was no matter for remark as even the teachers turned up on bikes.
There he received an education up to Group Cert level and also a love of sport, lining out occasionally in football teams for the school or for Annacurragh.
He was handy around the farm and enjoyed assisting with the shop but wider horizons beckoned, with H Pasley & Company.
The name has disappeared off the business map but Pasley’s were a force to be reckoned with in the grocery trade at the time.
Young Darcy would travel the region taking orders from various shops three days a week and then returning to deliver what had been ordered.
The work proved a stepping stone to a position with Musgrave’s wholesalers of tea and coffee.
With is gift of the gab, he was a natural salesman and the nature of the job clearly appealed for more than one reason.
‘It was a good job and it was clean,’ he remembers before revealing the most attractive factor, ‘and they had a fleet of blue Volkswagen vans.’
The convoy of distinctive VW’s used to turn up in convoy at race meetings in The Curragh – great free advertising, as Eamonn recalls with a chuckle.
For several years, he stored his supplies of Musgrave stock at home in Crossbridge – ‘ the smell of tea would knock you down’ – and travelled the countryside throughout the week.
He enjoyed regular overnights at the East End Hotel in Portarlington, driving far and wide in his blue van.
It was probably the requirement to wade through masses of paperwork at the end of the week which persuaded him to move on.
From the open road, he switched career to a responsible, but very much more grounded, job at the NET fertiliser factory in Arklow.
‘Handy work’ is his verdict looking back at the four days on, four days off, 12-hour shifts regime in the ammonium sulphate plant.
He was able to finance a Fiat Mirafiore on the back of it for the commute from Tinahely to monitor sulphuric acid levels.
‘It was a great job and a great place to work’ – but it was also doomed to come to an end.
A dozen years of steady employment concluded with redundancy in the mid-1980s, obliging him to move into a very different enterprise.
HE SERVED as a fundraiser working on commission for the Central Remedial Clinic, persuading people to sign up for regular donations by direct debit.
He knocked on doors as far away as Blessington before once more settling down in 1990, this time with Ballyfree Meats in Glenealy.
Come the new millennium and he zig-zagged out of producing cooked ham and into work with Combined Insurance.
The company sold accident and sickness benefit policies and Eamonn’s job as a ‘service agent’ was to follow up customers whose payments had ceased.
Meetings of agents would be convened in Enniscorthy or Carlow to review accounts and allocate accounts which needed following up.
As Eamonn recalls it, those were great days and he always brought a human face with a humane approach to debt collection,
but the great days were numbered.
The first indication he noted that all was not as well as it seemed with the Celtic Tiger came when he had to chase a builder in the Rathdrum area for a cheque.
A customer apparently worth millions was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, with the national economy following suit.
After years raking in good commission, he was laid off, slipping into a state of semi-retirement with time to attend to the church in Crossbridge and to look back on a life lived to the full.
In 1966, he married Greta Sweeney from Aughrim, who was working as a hairdresser at the time in Dublin, so the ceremony took place in Clontarf.
The couple ran a B&B as well as raising their three children – Malachy now in the United States, David who works at Naas Hospital, and Margaret resident at Red Bog in Tinahely.
Eamonn has joined her there to live in recent times since becoming widowed – Greta died when she was just 48 years of age.
The great interest in the greyhounds began when he was persuaded to invest in a dog and a bitch while still working at NET.
He used to exercise them in the mornings before setting off for the factory in Arklow – great for the owner’s fitness. They proved to be nothing out of the ordinary in the white heat of competition but at least they made nights out at the track in Enniscorthy interesting.
He moved up a step in class when he purchased a bitch from Rosemary Rath in Ferns, a little slip of a thing at 55 pounds weight, which won 14 races as Only For Rose.
THE ‘Only For’ brand – inspired by a horse of that name ridden by Jimmy Lindley – was born, with more to follow the owner was emboldened to purchase a couple of dogs in Waterford.
He turned to the late Matt Travers to call the shots: ‘Matt was a genius,’ says Eamonn of the Dublin based trainer. The Tinahely man speaks with humour and pride of the exploits he had on the track and in the betting ring as a result of his passion for the dogs.
Best gamble of all Skywalker Puma, which he backed at 33/1 to win the 2012 Irish Derby with some unfortunate Arklow book-maker after spotting the Matt O’Donnell trained future champ in a preliminary race – ‘I’ve got a great eye for a dog,’ is no idle boast.
He also enjoyed some success in sales, sending Only for Life to England for a five-figure sum.
He has formed a new partnership with trainer Hopper McGrath who has brought on a couple of pups for him.
‘I have had the greatest luck with everything I had. I have won more than I have lost,’ he reckons. ‘I put it all down to religion – I do nine hours of Adoration every week. Somebody up there likes me. The Holy Mother is behind it all.’
The veneration of the sacred host is conducted in prayer almost every morning at Crossbridge.
He insists that he could give up gambling without regret, if only more people would join him in the pews at St Peter’s and St Paul’s.
HE prepares the church for weddings, funerals and christenings, working closely with parish priest Fr Ray Gahan.
And last year he was the organiser behind the Crossbridge Novena, a five night series of prayers with speakers addressing religious topics.
Those who gave talks included Father Thomas Dalton who told of being caught up in an earthquake which destroyed all around him but not the building he was in.
Eamonn was one of the first on to Joe Duffy’s ‘Liveline’ radio show to defend Christine Gallagher’s controversial House of Prayer.
Old-style religion is best in his book.