Where genius asserts itself, from Johnny Timmy Johnny’s to Don Corkleone
IT’S now a well worn adage that Macroom is ‘ the town that never reared a fool’ but it seems equally true for the town’s immediate environs.
Television viewers have recently been noting a particular advert depicting a rustic looking chap perched astride a genuine tropical buffalo – only both man and beast are happily in Macroom (well, actually, just down the road in Cill na Martra) though they are both pretending to be Italians, and producing Italian mozzarella cheese for international supermarket chain Aldi (also in Macroom).
‘Don Corkleone’ they’re now calling him locally.
While the advert is certainly eye-catching, and has drawn favourable humorous comment both locally and much farther afield, the man making merry with the buffalo, and a bevy of cycling nuns, is certainly no fool – no, but a very hard working and astute local farmer, Johnny Lynch.
It’s a few years ago now, 2011, that Mr Lynch decided to go into the buffalo business with business partner Toby Simmons. At the time it was quite a simple equation: Toby couldn’t get enough of the short life mozzarella cheese for his market stall, while Johnny was lamenting the low price for cow’s milk.
However, it seemed a fair sized leap from that conundrum to importing a herd of water buffalo, setting up a cheese plant and selling Italian mozzarella out of Macroom.
But, six years on ... Johnny is on the TV astride a buffalo in Cill na Marta singing love-songs to passing nuns on bikes. No fool there.
And the same might be said for Johnny’s cousin, Dorothy. Chef and tour guide Dorothy O’Sullivan Uí Thuama is main instigator of the re-opening of Johnny Timmy Johnny’s in Inchigeela, which is enjoying a new lease of life as it revives memories of times past for visitors each weekend.
For more than a hundred years, the semi-circular, galvanized iron structure - Johnny Timmy Johnny’s store - sold everything from paraffin oil to corsets, from bacon to liquid paraffin and Epsom’s salts and much in between. It was a place to hear the news, have a game of cards and Dora O’Sullivan, wife of the original owner, was the local midwife and delivered most of the local babies.
Her husband, Timmy, also ran a dance hall, the Lake Hotel, and had a lorry and used it to transport animals, goods, turf and people as required. Now reopened as a museum, of sorts, the store-museum takes visitors on a trip down memory lane as they see some of the fittings of a country shop – the Avery scales that weighed out pounds of tea from the tin-foil lined tea-chest; the large drum from which paraffin oil was sold for kitchen lamps; shop documents and farm implements and a host of medications.
Many wonderful photographs remind us of simpler times and a video interview with Bridie O’Sullivan Hartnett, Timmy and Dora’s daughter, deals with the nitty gritty of shopkeeping and hygiene in times past.
Dorothy is main instigator of the re-opening of Johnny Timmy Johnny’s, albeit on a part-time schedule. But she also wishes to promote local products and, to this end, she has devised the Lee Valley Taste Trail. She offers guided tours for small groups, with the opportunity to meet .... yes, Don Corkleone at Johnny Lynch’s buffalo farm and cheese production business at Toonsbridge; that and Don O’Leary at the craft brewery in Ballyvourney and Donal Creedon at Macroom Oatmeal.
Certainly, the town that never reared a fool has influence over an extended demesne.