Lifestyle
Staying local makes butcher Justin a cut above the rest
It’s as modern and pristine a butcher’s shop as you would see in the most urban shopping centre, but Justin Flannery’s outlet in Peterswell just outside Gort is also old fashioned in the best sense of the word.
On a Friday afternoon, trade is brisk as regular customers come from near and far to buy their meat from a source they know and trust.
Justin’s butchers shop is unusual in that it is located on his 120-acre farm, down the end of a long driveway in the middle of the countryside. It’s also beside the family abattoir which was set up by Justin’s father in the 1970s and has since been expanded by his son.
Justin has an easygoing manner but he is a man who believes in hard work and planning. That approach has seen him create a successful business that supplies local people with their meat as well as restaurants such as the Gallery in Gort, Pat McDonagh’s successful fast food chain Supermac’s – where his mince is used in its Taco fries – and Magnetti Brothers, the Galway company that makes Italian meals for supermarkets. He also supplies the burgers for Kettle of Fish restaurants.
Justin’s father, Brendan who is originally from the parish of Leitrim and Ballyduggan outside Loughrea, moved to Peterswell after buying the farm from his aunt.
A self-taught butcher, he established the abattoir on the farm in the early 1970s. At that stage it was all ‘deep-freeze work’, says Justin, explaining that he mostly served farmers who came in with their own cattle or sheep.
“Dad would kill the animal, hang it, freeze it and give it to them,” he explains. But when Justin got involved fulltime in the 1990s, he realised change was needed.
As children were leaving home and family numbers were getting smaller, the freezer work was declining. So he adapted and, in 2003, this shop was opened.
“I started selling half sides of beef and lamb to people, who didn’t want a full animal and we started doing direct sales, too.”
At that point, the Flannerys also reared their own lamb – since then they have focused on cattle and poultry, but they still buy all their lamb from within the parish, he says.
Their pork comes from the award-winning Waldron Meats in Athlone, with whom Justin has been dealing since the beginning, while he also stocks Poulataggle organic hens’ eggs from Tubber.
“It’s all local. The furthest we go for a product is to McCarthy’s in Kanturk for black pudding and they are gold-medal winners.”
Justin, who is one of a family of four, always loved farming and when he left school in 1989 he followed in his father’s footsteps.
“The farming way of life is grand, I like being outside and I loved the idea of working for myself,” he says simply. As children, Justin, his brother and two sisters had helped their father in the abattoir when things were busy, so he knew exactly what was involved.
“You got a knife and you learned on the job,” he says with a laugh.
Occasionally, you hear tales of conflict between fathers and sons when it comes to inheriting family farms, but the Flannerys had no issues, says Justin.
Health, Beauty and Lifestyle with Denise McNamara
Patricia McGettigan grew up in a house in Inverin where flowers and herb would be used as remedies for common complaints. Once married, she moved first to Donegal and then to the UK and anywhere she set up home she would grow herbs and use those to create teas and tinctures.
These she would dole out to family and friends for complaints ranging from sore joints, constipation, stomach issues, sleep.
A trained beauty therapist, holistic masseur with training in aromatherapy and dealing with gut problems, it was during the pandemic that she decided to immerse herself in training in herbalism and get qualified with the Herbal Study Academy.
Accredited by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners, it is an online school founded by Tuam-based herbalist Patrick Murphy which allows people to pick and choose what aspects of herbal medicine they wish to learn about with a view to living healthier or to practice in the field.
“While I’ve always done it myself, I decided to get really deep into it because I love it, it’s an utter passion for me,” explains Patricia.
“The things is, everybody knows a bit about it, they just forget what they’ve learned when they were small when their granny or grandad would reach for the old-fashioned cure.”
Patricia practices from her home in Inverin where she does consultations with people before deciding which herbs and teas would suit them best. A consultation costs €50.
“They come in and have a chat as long as they want so we can try to get the cause of the problem. They might have a headache but it could be a stress headache, the problem could actually be coming from the gut as a result of die but it manifests itself as a headache.
“You have to start slow and give time to let herbs work. It’s better for the body to get to the root cause. It’s easy to treat a symptom, it’s harder to find out why the body is reacting the way it does.”
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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Country Living with Francis Farragher
As one ‘shoves on’ in life, there tends to be an increasing attendance at anniversary masses of friends and family — at the back of the mind, there’s always the nagging feeling at such occasions, that you’ve moved up in the queue.
Regardless of the intensity of one’s religious fever though — or the lack of it — there is always something special about remembering the passing of a loved one: gone but not forgotten, is probably the best way to sum it.
The great and warming tradition of the chat with neighbours after the preacher has finishing his words still persists, and especially so across rural Ireland, and inevitably the conversation seems to switch to the weather.
Last Sunday morning as I walked out from Brooklodge Church in Ballyglunin — a lovely little prayer place nestled in one corner of the old Blake estate — I was reminded that I shouldn’t have praised February too much over recent weeks, as March was always waiting in the wings to deal with such buds of early spring optimism.
The theme of the advice was to never count your chickens before they hatch, because if we enjoyed a good spell of weather in the late-winter, early-spring period, nature’s scales would soon balance things out. There were also murmurs too about the price of bales of silage.
For those of you not of a rural hue, these are essentially big bales of grass wrapped up in plastic to preserve them, a commodity you couldn’t ‘give away’ in February as we all looked forward to an ‘early spring’.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
1923
Capital of Connacht
Retail shopkeepers in County Galway towns complain very justly that they have to go to Dublin and cross-Channel for their goods, whereas in the all too few instances in which they can purchase in the county town at wholesale rates, they find they can do much better as to price and quite as good as to quality.
Has Galway ever considered what it would mean to the town if the wholesale trade were developed to any extent within its walls?
It would mean that instead of crowded streets on Saturdays and occasionally on Wednesdays, we should have eager, active businessmen thronging our thoroughfares every day of the six; that we should have streams of vehicles coming to and going from the city; that business would be stimulated, employment increased and prices reduced.
It would mean that shipping in our harbour would grow and expand, slowly and, perhaps even painfully, at first, that coastwise traffic would be developed, and that Galway would in course of time become in fact, as well as in the name, the capital of Connacht.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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