The farmer and writer who followed his heart
Wexford author and historian Nicholas ‘Nicky’ Furlong — whose re-published comic novel Young Farmer Seeks Wife is enjoying a new online global audience — was expected to marry “a good sensible girl who could carry a tonne of hay on her back”.
Instead, he recalls that he fell in “irredeemable and heroic love” with a young woman from Merrion Square in Dublin who knew nothing about farming.
After Nicky, now 90, met Mairead Breslin on an historical tour during Wexford Festival Opera in 1957, she left the glamour of Shannon Airport, where she worked as a supervisor and “landed in the cowshite in Mulgannon”, on the outskirts of Wexford town, where his parents’ 130-acre dairy farm was situated.
As the only male heir to all the land owned by his father, uncle and aunts (his only sister Ina emigrated to Vancouver) Nicky had no choice but to become a farmer.
But deep inside he was a writer, and his new wife encouraged his passion.
He had attended the Salesian Agricultural College in Warrenstown, Co Meath on a scholarship from 1946-49. When he returned home with his knowledge of modern farming concepts and soil constituents, his father Patrick viewed him as a rival.
“He had old-fashioned ideas and was still farming like it was 1914,” Nicky says. “He regarded me as a competitor. He made some terrible mistakes. I was compelled to give him an ultimatum — make over the farm to me or you’re going to end up a bankrupt.
Depressed
“I was really a writer and they steered me into farming. Psychologically, it had a terrible effect on me. I began to get very depressed because I was in the wrong job. I didn’t know this until my young wife told me.”
Nicky was 30 when they wed. “This girl knew nothing about farming before she met me, but after we got married she immediately put her head down and charged,” he says.
“She was wonderful, she was brilliant. She was a great business woman. She did everything apart from ploughing and milking. We worked together on the farm. We concentrated on the top milking Friesan breed and she took over the job of selling the calves.”
When his uncle John died, leaving a 200-acre farm in Drinagh, Nicky had two farms to run. He says: “Eventually I couldn’t cope so I sold the home farm and concentrated on the one here, but I also had a second career, since it was now discovered I was a writer.”
Mairead started an antiques and fine art business and studied art history (travelling by bus from Wexford to attend lectures in UCD).
She was a founder member of the Friends of the Wexford County Art Collection and was a specialist on the Caravaggio painting in Trinity College.
Nicky wrote farming and agribusiness articles for the Irish Press, a weekly column for the Farmers’ Journal and a satirical column under the pen name Pat O’Leary for the Wexford People.
He has written 24 books, and hundreds of papers on historical subjects as well as three plays which were directed by Tomás Mac Anna in the 1960s.
His only novel, which is loosely biographical, was first published as a paperback by Merlin Press 25 years ago on the encouragement of Mairead and his friend, the late district court judge Donagh McDonagh.
A new edition with an added chapter is now available in a print-on-demand (POD) version, an E-book for use on Kindle and an audio book on Amazon, narrated by Nicky himself.
It tells the story of a young farmer in the townland of Mulgannon whose mother told him to “avoid the company of girls until the age of 35 and then to marry a good, sensible match, a respectable girl with a farm and money”.
“But that’s not true at all — you fall in love and that’s that,” says Nicky, adding that from the moment they met, “Mairead and I were hopelessly in love and there was nothing we could do about it. We fell in love totally. You couldn’t explain it”.
Writing
His family wanted him to marry a sensible country girl with land and money behind her, but Nicky Furlong had other ideas, writes Maria Pepper
As far as his parents were concerned, this Dublin city girl “might as well have been from Japan”.
The couple turned the indebted family farm around, with Nicky’s writing supplementing his income.
“I had to write because the debt was still hanging over the farm and my livelihood, so I had to work or go under,” he says.
The couple were married for 56 years until Mairead’s death in August 2015, and Nicky misses her every day.
He still retains a portion of the farm adjacent to Drinagh Lodge, the house dating back to 1780 which was bought by his grandfather.
“I never really retired from farming because I have 40 acres here. It’s the last of the farm. I have it in forestry which gives much less hardship and torment,” he says.