Irish planters, alongside their equally eccentric British colleagues, added to the colour and folklore of the tea plantations in north-eastern India.
One such was Ginger Craig of Dublin, who was in charge of various gardens in the Dooars region in the plains in the Darjeeling foothills until 1977.
Craig was an insomniac who, after a day and night of steadily drinking gin and then whisky, would begin a round of his garden, spread over hundreds of hectares, at about 4 a.m.
He would then jump into his jeep and race off to Darjeeling some 100 km uphill to buy fresh ox tongue at the hill town's special food stores.
Having acquired the delicacy, Craig would be back home to have his breakfast off the meat, completing the arduous round trip, a precipitous mountain journey, in a record 90 minutes.
"He was one hell of a chap," Jaggi Malhotra, who worked as Craig's assistant manger, said. "A rare man and an even rarer planter, whose kind are just not around today," he added.