‘Once I got a computer, DoneDeal became part of my life,’ he says. ‘I was able to follow the market. Like if you go back 20 years, there might be value in an item and nobody five miles away would know about it. There would be things left inside sheds and no one was clued in enough to take photos of them and try to make money from them. The internet changed all that and people quickly began to realise there was a way of connecting items to buyers.’
Over the years, he has done well with several items, including a Model Y Ford car that had been owned by the same family in Rathkeale since the 1930s. When Mike came across it, following a bereavement in the family, it was covered in bags and dust. It turned out to be an original car and he brought it home and restored it. Even though he sold it five years later for a sizeable profit, he says looking back that he made a mistake and should have held on to it a while longer. But like many collectors, by that time his eye had moved on to other items and he needed to free up some money. He came across the car recently for sale for a staggering amount of money.
Sometimes that happens, he says: he sees cars or items he sold turn up years later in all sorts of places. And sometimes the owners of items come looking for him. Two months ago, he got a call out of the blue from a man in west Cork, who said he thought he had traced his grandfather’s tractor to Mike’s farmyard.
‘It was a 1940s tractor and he began to describe it to me and was wondering if I had it. He told me there was an unusual mark where a part of it had been welded, and I knew then I had it! I bought it 10 years ago for about €1,500, I think, and it had gone through about four or five collectors at that point. This man had traced its journey from collector to collector and eventually, he landed at my door.
‘He came to look at it and wanted to buy it back for obvious reasons. I told him once I got the market value for it, I was happy, so we did a deal for about €5,000. I’m a bit reluctant to sell it, but because in fairness it has a lot of value for this man, I’ll let it go to him. He was genuine and very nice about it.’
All this conversation has taken place in Mike’s kitchen, during a lunch break from his day job, which is selling four-by-four jeeps in his family business a few miles up the road. He opens his laptop on the table and pulls up the ad for the hearse currently running.
‘The hearse for sale is out the back. I haven’t had a lot of callers though. As someone said to me, there used to be fellas dying to get into them at one time,’ Mike says. We’re on the move away from the kitchen, and he leads me through a maze of outhouses and huge industrial-size sheds. We stop at a large shed at the back, having passed along the way the aforementioned wake scene with a life-size body in a bed and shawled figures kneeling over it. These items came from a building which was purpose built as a folk park some years ago, but had closed by the time Mike stumbled upon it. He had a look around and ended up buying most of the contents and so now has a wake and an old farmhouse scene set up in his shed as if it was a folk museum. Over the years, he and his wife have held set dancing and music nights here in the barn.
Just past these figures, in a corner behind gnarly machinery and boxes of tools, is a beautifully ornate, black horse-drawn Victorian hearse, complete with oil lamps and glass panels. It’s the kind of thing you’d imagine the Krays would have been happy to be transported to their burials in.
It’s in fairly good condition, but in need of some repairs here and there, and some of the glass panels have cracked. ‘This is where the hearse has been lying for the last four or five years,’ Mike tells me. ‘It needs a little bit of restoration, but it’s totally intact and totally original. I don’t really know when it was made, but looking at the old spoked wheels, and the iron bands on them, as well as the craftsmanship, I would imagine it is 150 years old.’
So this hearse, which dates back to some time around the mid to late nineteenth century – in a region which saw more than its fair share of death around then – has somehow been preserved and cared for, and ended up in this shed. How does someone come to have a hearse in the back of their shed in the first place? ‘I’m not sure how to answer that one,’ Mike says. ‘It’s like asking how does someone come to have a wife. Some things are just destined to happen …’ I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I’ve ever heard someone compare their spouse to a nineteenth-century Victorian hearse. And they say romance is dead.
Has he any idea where the hearse came from? ‘To the best of my knowledge it was somewhere around north Cork, Doneraile or somewhere like that,’ Mike says. ‘I know it was used until 70 or 80 years ago. I fell in love with it when I saw it. I’ve got a lot of calls about it. If I had a euro for every call, I could be on holidays full-time. A lot of the calls are curiosity and a lot of the calls are people that are undertakers that would like to have it as a showpiece. A few have come to see it.’
How much would he take for it? ‘I thought it was worth about €3,000. I bought it with a collection. I think really somewhere around €2,000 would buy it,’ says Mike.
Every week since he put the hearse up online a year or two ago, Mike has had enquiries about it, often from persons who are simply curious rather than serious buyers. In recent weeks though, he has had one genuine enquiry about the hearse, which may lead to a sale. ‘An elderly man rang me from Carlow and said he wanted to buy the hearse,’ he says. ‘He had something like it one time, and was always looking for a replacement. He’s due to come down next week to look at it, but if I had a euro for every time someone said that to me I’d be retired.’
What I’m trying to figure out is who really is going to buy it. I mean, it’s not likely to be used for the school run. ‘I would like to see somebody buy it who would look after it, and give it a bit of care and maybe restore it to its former glory,’ Mike says. ‘I would like to see it completely refurbished. But the most important thing is someone with the €2,000. After that we wish them good luck and hopefully they won’t need it for personal use for a long time to come.’
Over the years, Mike says his wife has got used to him coming home with all sorts of artefacts and items. Perhaps she didn’t bat an eyelid, but I have to ask what her reaction was when he arrived home one day with a horse-drawn nineteenth-century hearse? ‘She reckons I should be inside it,’ he replies.
Before most classifieds moved online, Mike trawled the print ads, but now he says he’s a DoneDeal devotee and most nights, he checks through the ads for items of interest. ‘I’ve been using DoneDeal for a while. It’s a good way of advertising,’ he says. ‘Before that it was Buy and Sell. At night, when I finish work, it has replaced the television for me. I would be on it till 12 o’clock at night and I’m especially looking for something unusual,’ he tells me.
What keeps him engaged is the fact that his range of interests is varied and eclectic. ‘I also have a replica Model T truck, which I bought from a gentleman in Kilkenny and he hired it out to RTÉ for filmmaking. In fact, this particular truck was used in the making of the Michael Collins film. I sold a few very old tractors recently; there’s a David Brown there in the middle of the shed, a 2D, which would be a very rare tractor, even though it doesn’t look like a tractor. So, when I come across them, I just kind of pick them up and I like restoring them. Some people like to go to the pub. Other people do crosswords and different things. This is what I do, like. As my wife says, everybody goes mad in a different way. And when I come home from another purchase, she says, “Oh God no, do we really want another tractor?” She’s very patient though.’
He’s not sure what will happen to his collection after he dies. He has one son and from time to time he floats the idea of selling off the collection, especially as lately he hasn’t had as much time as in previous years to take out the items and look at them. ‘Maybe it would be easier if I only had one tractor and a small number of vintage tools,’ he says. ‘With the tractors, I have so many at this stage that I can’t just take one of them out and drive it. I feel guilty if
I do that and feel like I’m depriving the rest of them. The odd time for St Patrick’s Day or local events they get a run out.’
He thinks there should be some incentive available to people like him who are committed to restoring old items – something like grant aid, for example. He looks at the next generation and believes that the passion and interest in preserving the older crafts and trades may not be there. The current generation don’t see the same value in these things, he believes, and he’s quick to point out he’s not a professional collector in the sense that he’s not looking to make money from his endeavours overall.
‘You might think it’s unusual I have gathered all this stuff,’ he says. ‘The collection of Model T Fords is probably my pension if I ever need to cash in. But to be honest, I don’t ever see that happening. The day I stop adding to the collection is the day I stop living.’
Plotting a Way Out of Grief
Mount Venus Cemetery plot with 3 graves. Current cost €6,000 but no longer required. Will sell for €4,500. DoneDeal, October 2018
It’s not often you see death for sale. When I first saw this ad, I thought to myself surely there isn’t a secondary market for graves and burial plots in Ireland? Wouldn’t that just be typically Irish and in a way, sum up our obsession with land and property perfectly, so that even when preparing for death we are speculating and trying to make money from buying and selling land?
Then when I’d rung the seller and he’d told me he worked in banking, I had a thesis proposal and a Sunday Business Post column half-written in my head already. A few days after our phone call, at five past five on a soggy Wednesday evening, I found myself sitting at the counter of a traditional-looking bar in the affluent suburb of Ballsbridge in Dublin, ordering a Heineken zero (some craic I am) and waiting for a man selling a grave to show up.
The man’s name is Richard, and he works in a bank nearby, and there’s a party planned for a colleague in the back of the bar later so it suits him to meet here. He’s in his fifties, and once drinks are ordered and brief pleasantries exchanged, he wants to get down to business and tell his story fairly swiftly. I’m surprised how quickly he wants to get into it, but later learn that he spent many a childhood holiday in Listowel, a town where if you threw a stone in any direction you were likely to hit a storyteller. So, wiping the froth from his upper lip, he leans in and begins his burial plot for sale backstory.
‘Twenty-two years ago, my mother was told my father was very ill and so she needed to buy a grave in a hurry,’ he says. ‘She probably said she wanted to be buried beside him, so she needed two graves. The cemetery sold her two graves at £475 each, back in 1995, located up in Mount Venus Cemetery behind Rathfarnham.’
At the time Richard’s father had been 76 years of age. His family had thought initially that he had had a heart attack, and so did his medical team, who even went so far as to fit a pacemaker and send him home. It wasn’t until two weeks later that medics realised that in fact he had a brain tumour. He became ill in February, and sadly by July, he was dead.
‘The fact that he didn’t have long to live was why my mother was anxious to buy two graves,’ Richard explains. ‘My mother was only 66 years old at the time. I accompanied her to the cemetery and we walked away with two pieces of paper that I now understand were folio numbers, or deeds, for the graves. So now let’s move the story on two decades after that, to last year in fact, around the time of my mother’s funeral. When we were making arrangements for her, we discovered that it wasn’t actually two graves she’d bought, it was two plots; each of them was three graves deep. So we ended up with a spare plot.’
Some people lose the plot; it turned out that Richard and his family had found one. And instead of owning two graves as they thought they did, they now owned six. As the eldest in his family, Richard had the job of dealing with a lot of his mother’s affairs after she died. Boxing away someone’s life is an unenviable task. Personally, I’ve only had to help do it once when a close friend died. I remember thinking that it meant nothing to hired workers to throw a hoodie into a skip, but for me, that hoodie contained in its fabric the memories of a night out in Kinsale, or a walk along the estuary, or the day we both went to see the new Rocky film and put our hoods up like children. Inner lives are held in boxes in attics, forgotten loves locked away in torn letters, and there’s both an intimacy and an invasion in going through someone’s possessions after they’ve gone.
Unfortunately, someone’s got to do it. ‘I was tasked with doing the clean-out afterwards,’ says Richard, ‘and going through the paperwork and the contents, it feels awful because it feels like you’re throwing out a person’s life and the grief keeps coming up and grabbing you.’
There were boxes and boxes of letters to be sorted through. Richard tells me his father had been born in 1919 and many of his family had emigrated. Those were the days when people didn’t phone or visit for long periods so letter writing was a vital link to home. His aunt, for example, went to the US in the early 1930s and didn’t come home until 1958. Probably Ireland hadn’t changed all that much in the intervening years. By way of illustrating this point, Richard tells me that every summer he went on holiday to Kerry and that there are seven years between him and his younger brother. ‘My earliest memories are going down there in the early 1960s and that horses were still working the land,’ Richard says. ‘By the time my youngest brother came along he only ever saw tractors, because it had modernised so quickly. So there were huge leaps from then on that I don’t think were there in earlier decades.’
Nothing he read in the letters gave him any greater insight into the lives of his parents though. Many were formulaic and followed a very specific pattern. Most began with flowery language, describing how everyone was, what the weather was like, who had said Mass – that kind of thing. The next paragraph was generally all the news locally, such as marriages, deaths and other life events. And then the third paragraph was straight into the GAA football results and who should and shouldn’t be playing in the local or county team.
‘Clearing out the house of a loved one is a job far bigger than you think it is,’ Richard says. ‘All of a sudden you’re hit with memories. The letters and the paperwork and the photographs are all triggers and you have to sit with those memories while you are clearing them away. So that all takes time. It was during this clearing out, though, that we discovered the deed for the two plots. None of us will need them in that area. As executor of the estate, it’s my job to ensure everything has been divided up and the one thing left is the burial plot.’
Richard’s first step was to offer the plot back to the cemetery. These days, a new plot goes for about €6,000, but they don’t buy it back at that price. The explanation given was that they don’t allow speculation on graves or plots. That’s when Richard decided to put the plot on DoneDeal and see if anyone needed one in a hurry perhaps. When I met him, it had been up for two months and the ad had one more month to run. ‘The only interesting thing that has come out of the ad is this conversation!’ he tells me.
As we get a second drink, our conversation inevitably turns to grief. Richard has had three significant deaths in his life – his father’s, his mother’s and his younger brother’s. I’m keen to find out how different the grief had been each time, or whether each death had been all that different from the previous one. ‘My brother died of cancer and he was 36. He started getting a pain in his back and they all said it was related to a leg break he got while playing football. It went on for two years and then they found a lump and it was diagnosed as cancer. He had a cancerous node on his spine and that was causing the pain and it had a very high successful treatment rate of about 95–97 per cent.’
While the family were worried, they were given a lot of hope and optimism by his brother’s initial diagnosis and the likely positive outcome after treatment. Richard’s brother underwent treatment for six months, then had a reprieve – and then unfortunately
, the cancer came back. His medical team wanted to do a bone marrow transplant and it had to come from a brother.
‘My other brother and I did the test and we matched each other but not him,’ says Richard. ‘He was the odd one out. His chances went from 90 per cent to 70 per cent to 30 per cent to zero. He had two young kids, but he was very good-humoured despite all of what he had to endure. I asked him once, “Is there anything I can do for you?” He said: “If you can’t get me a new body, there’s nothing you can do for me!”’
Richard said his brother wasn’t one to complain, which he thinks is partly why his cancer wasn’t diagnosed a lot sooner. His brother remained good-humoured to the end, even telling cousins visiting him for the last time to have a great hooley at the funeral! That helped with the grief and when the end came it was relatively quick and his brother’s suffering wasn’t prolonged. He went to hospital on a Friday, on Saturday, the brothers had a robust exchange about how Gaelic football has changed over the decades, and on Sunday, he died. He had been able to drive to hospital himself, which is what he would have wanted.
Richard had been close to his brother – much closer than he had been to his father, who was almost like a throwback to the Victorian era. The grief of course is always much more acute when someone dies young. But he has ongoing contact with his brother’s children, and that helps to keep the closeness.
We talk a little about retirement plans and Richard tells me he wants to give something back to the community and will get involved in some form of community education project after his time with the bank. ‘I would aspire to trying to make a difference,’ he tells me.
We’ve finished our second drink and his colleagues have gathered and are giving him the nod that he must join them for a few drinks at the back of the bar. I tell him I’ve enjoyed our chat and that he’s been an open interviewee and is a natural storyteller. He’s pretty much resigned to not selling the plot at this stage, he says, but he’s done his bit to take care of the last few loose ends after his mother’s death. His duty fulfilled, his grief all but exhausted, he can move forward now with a clear conscience.
The Personals Page 14