The "Famous Ardfinnan Tweeds" as described by the Tipperary Free Press in 1880 and as "the now famous Ardfinnan Tweeds" by the Irish Times in 1921 were famous for many reasons in old Ireland.  From the very beginnings of Ardfinnan, it was a very holy site associated with the final waypoint on the road to Saint Patrick at Cashel in the 4th century before it was twinned with the revered Lismore Abbey in the 7th.  Both the first Cistercian monks and Templar knights to arrive in the South of Ireland took advantage of this sacred place and indeed those very same men were the very first to initiate the Irish wool industry and the export of the very first 'Irish tweeds'.

With such a foundational history, Mr & Mrs Mulcahy of the old Templar knight's mill at Rossmore Mills, Cashel, revived Ardfinnan to it's former woollen glory.  Having worked with the King's representative in Tipperary, Cornelius O'Callaghan, Mr & Mrs Mulcahy used the finest sheep's wool in Ireland at Rossmore for their cloths and it was part of the cultural pride of the nation at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, the very first World Fair.  From here, a strong foothold was garnered at the only recently developing Savile Row tailoring district of London, which shortly thereafter and forever more has been the most prestigious name for tailoring in the world.  Mr and Mrs Mulcahy choose Ardfinnan for the same reasons as the Templar knights, for it was on the old coach road from Cork to Dublin, could be traversed to Waterford port via river and later steam train and onto the wool markets of Florence in Italy and its ancient mills fed by the soft waters and pastures of the sheltering Comeragh, Knockmealdown and Galtee Mountains.

For Mr and Mrs Mulcahy, Ardfinnan was close to the sheep-rearing home of the late Cornelius O'Callaghan, who's son George was then also the King's representative in Tipperary. Between the two, father and son, they had been perhaps the most public supporters of the Irish wool industry since the Duke of Ormond, the King's representative for Ireland, who introduced to Ireland the first large-scale woollen industry at the other end of the Tipperary border at downstream Carrick-on-Suir, a village come town that grew to employ over 5,000 in the woollen industry alone since it's introduction in 1671.  George O'Callaghan, a British Army officer, lived at a second home in London on Old Burlington Street from 1867, famous for it's military tailoring house, Henry Poole, which migrated through the rear entrance to the adjoining Savile Row.  O'Callaghan not only promoted the Irish woollen industry with his sheep, but wore the very cloth made from his sheep on the most fashionable promenbades of London and in his district gave influence to the most reveered tailoring houses from Henry Poole to Huntsman.  The very fact that he was the King's representative in Tipperary and patronised his next-door tailoring house favored exclusively by the future King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, is no coincidence.  Mr and Mrs Mulcahy also worked with the shepherds on the Knockmealdown Mountains, part of the Lismore Castle estate of the Duke of Devonshire, to use increase the amount of Cheviot sheep, which produced the gold-standard wool for tweed.  The success of Ardfinnan in this regard was unmatched and when the mills was restored in 1885, it was the most advanced woollen mills in Ireland.  It held that title for some time, for royal patronage even included a visit to the Ardfinnan Woollen Mills by King Edward VII himself in 1904 and the choice of the Mulcahy's 'Galtee Motor Cloth' for the King's warmest motoring coat. We may add, the King was the first royal to promote the use of the motorcar in the world.  The first Director of Dunlop Typres also wore a Galtee Motoring Coat and it made its way to the roads of Europe where motorcars generally remained a luxury until after the Great War.

Tweed wained during the Great War, WW1, but military cloth flourished naturally and the greatest priveledge earned was to make officers overcoat cloth for Tsar Nickolas II's Imperial Russian Army.  The Savile Row and often Ardfinnan tweed clad King of Spain, Alfonso XII , we may add, was a close friend of a cousin to the Mulcahy family, Captain Thomas Crean V.C., D.S.O.  The Crean family had revived the woollen industry in Clonmel in 1800 with the first industrialisation of the industry in Tipperary and it was only natural that the heir to this dynasty that went back to the second richest family in the west of Ireland, the 16th century O'Crean 'wool, hide and wine' merchant princes of Sligo, married in 1900 to the first son of the very eminent Mr Mulcahy of Ardfinnan Woollen Mills.

As we come to the 1920s, tweed becomes essential to the leisured classes in America, opening up and expanding the export trade for Irish tweeds to the best tailoring houses in swinging New York.  

There's much more to say, but that's all for now!