Mr. Mulcahy tells us:  "I was beset from the beginning with the old Irish curse, my mother was an alcoholic and my father a chronic melancholic.  Ultimately I ended up with my grandparents in Tipperary at the age of 8 in my new home on the River Suir.  Life was so slow there, time stood still, for so long.  Yet being in the Suir Valley it was a place where the water connected and interwove the adjoining towns and communities.  Life and nature were truly defined by geography.  It was beautiful, but the countryside's slower pace to my city bred mentality soon left me bored and I had to explore nooks and crannies.  At home in the attic I found a portrait of a man who my grandfather was too old to remember.  It was his great-grandfather who had set up the Ardfinnan woollen mills in 1869.  My grandfather had his own relics, bolts of tweed, tweed curtains and cushions, his suitcase from his time studying textiles in Yorkshire in the early 1960s and swathes of swatches.  Finding an appreciation for fabrics here was easy but I had no siblings or uncles and was detached from my parents and aunts.  I grew up in essentially a retirement house and lived like a retired boy.  If it meant anything, I didn't catch onto trends here, I learnt from the past as if I had lived it.  It didn't take me long to see what was missing - an Irish wool industry - and the tragic reasons why."

"Tweed is elusive now, but it was a staple of Irish society, as much as potatoes and Poitín !"

"In Ireland's biggest inland town, Clonmel, my ancestors industrialised leather tanning and wool weaving for the first time in the towns history.  This was around the 1790s, when only a very small number of Catholics had the capital to import machinery under British rule.  This was the Crean family, said to originate in Donegal but who were first recorded in Irish history as prosperous leather tanners, wool, cloth and Spanish wine merchants in the port of Sligo town in the late 1500s and who continued their tanning legacy and wool trade for 400 years until the 1930s in Clonmel, when the only heir was a Mulcahy of the Ardfinnan Woollen Mills.  The name Crean became internationally famous with Ireland's first rugby legend and later war hero Surgeon-Major Thomas Crean VC.  When he was a young man he rowed in boats with my ancestors on the River Suir in Clonmel - which I did too !

Everyone aspired to dress well back then and there was only a small number of woollen mills to clothed the Irish people.  Indeed they were one of the limited types of employment in agrarian Ireland and a source of community development.  The industrial revolution made woollen mills profitable as machinery could do everything faster than the locals could.  The first and oldest woollen mills in Tipperary was at Ardfinnan in 1869.  This type of small scale industry was a great benefit to society.  Irish woollen mills usually only employed around 50 to 100 employees which represented a good natural order - in tribal clans you can only psychologically maintain trust with upto 100 members.  Before woollen mills, there were 'fulling mills' which would only finish the cloth, handwoven by locals in their homes and then fulled at the mill to increase their value.  They were small watermills that instead of milling flour, milled wool, by pounding the fabric to soften and felt it with large hammers powered by a waterwheel.  However, the Ardfinnan story reaches back to the days of fulling too and probably explains why it was so successful for a woollen mills in Tipperary -

  It is recorded by oral tradition that the charitable Knights Templar began milling at the foot of Ardfinnan Castle in the Middle Ages as an economic enterprise to support themselves, the castle and the village, with ground flour for bread and the fulling of cloth.  Ardfinnan remained the principle gateway between the ecclesiastical centres of Cashel and Lismore and the southern and eastern seaboards of Ireland.  These centres were markets for religious robes made of heavily fulled frieze cloth also worn by the Templars themselves, while the River Suir provided the gateway to Europe downstream at Waterford port.  When the castle and it's connections to the economy of the village were abandoned after a cannon barage by Cromwell in 1649, the village owed it's growth to the castle and the rolling hills of the Suir Valley remained flocked with the sheep breeds valuable for their wool, while hand weaving and spinning traditions remained in the local cottages.

Ardfinnan Woollen Mills was born out of the marriage of two families in 1868, the Mulcahy family and the Daly / Fielding family who who had invested in some of the first woollen mills in Ireland.  This included the Dripsey woollen mills (upstream from the now famous Blarney Woollen Mills) and it was among a handful of watermills in Cork operated by the families.  However, the flow of the river was ineficient for the machines at Dripsey, the family was dying out and Blarney might have been too close for comfort - John Mulcahy discovered the potential of Ardfinnan and decided to set up his new woollen mills there.  When Ardfinnan was setting up on it's new rural frontier, downstream the Crean's of Clonmel provided a stock of additional wool fleeces and a supply of leather to combine with Ardfinnan tweed to make high quality railway rugs and carpet bags.  The first of the next generation saw the marriage of a Mulcahy to a Crean in the 1890s.

Everyone wore wool then and all year round, the Irish wool was only good for tweed and the similar cloth mostly unique to Ireland called frieze.  Tweed is elusive now, but it was a staple of Irish society, as much as potatoes and Poitín !  Tweed from woollen mills was exceptional compared to handmades produced only by individuals in their cottages.  An industrial mill could give an income and standardise both production and designs.  Employing locals, this made Ardfinnan the principle maker of Tipperary Tweed as an export.  They also focused on frieze, for which in 1906 they patented their famous Galtee Motor Frieze, which was a little more fancy to say the least.  It was heavily fulled, just as any other frieze to make it waterproof but was also woven with mohair and merino to make it, somehow, extra waterproof, warm and breathable.  Designed for motoring, I can't doubt its functionality when it was used by King Edward VII and the first Director of Dunlop tyres - Irish motoring pioneer Richard Mecredy.  The value of frieze is forgotten in Ireland today.  It's a wet and gusty place here!  In Austria the frieze is known as loden and worn extensively in the wintry months, even today it's still fashionable there.  Sure, we are usually only occupied with showers, but predominatly we simply wear synthetic fibre raincoats and spend most of our time sheltered in cars and buildings.   When they get holes in them they can't be repaired, at least not with any aesthetic concern.  Ardfinnan had a darning department that customers could send their old coats or suits to, to patch up holes !

I certainly learned the merits of wearing good clothes, chiefly that you stand out and you look good - but that initially led me in the wrong direction.  If you dress well, really well, you're either seen as an actor or a "fancy" person.  Some garments are never overthought however, but are alway's given the compliment - such as scarves.  You can get a really well made, timeless, patterned scarf and nobody is going to say Peakers Blinders or Charlie Chaplin as soon as they see you coming.

I gave Ardfinnan an online presence when I was aged 13 and was able to engage with the worldwide diaspora connected to it's long heritage.  Having picked up weaving and been imparted with wisdom first in brief from my parents and then my dear grandfather, I have been ardently watching and engaging with the Irish wool community, to explore ways to promote sustainable futures.  To me sustainability is rooted in the past, not the future.  We already know how to build water or wind mills for power and to run small businesses.  The problem with the past is that it is local, independent and self-reliant, whereas the paradigm we live our lives in today is one of inter-dependency, offshoring, state regulation and the techno-corporate state."

Read about Ardfinnan's unique story here.