Goosey Gander – Frank McNally on Donie Anderson’s menagerie, Malachi Horan’s memories, and a Mayo Frenchman in the Wild West

Just after hitting “send” on a colour piece from the Virginia Show on Wednesday night, I gazed out over the deserted parade rings to a remarkable spectacle.

It was a homeward-bound farmer herding a flock of geese with sheepdogs: the dogs (four) only slightly outnumbered by the geese (five), but still having to work hard to keep the wilful birds in line.

It was too late for inclusion in my article but I dashed down from the press room anyway to find out more about this charming scene, including perhaps details of the remote farmstead to which the group was headed.

That turned out to be in “Tallaght”, as the man first told me, generalising, before he narrowed it down to Bohernabreena, a parish in the suburban foothills of the Dublin Mountains.

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And as I now know, Donie Anderson is a bit of a celebrity not just there but in Irish farming community at large. It was his devotion to traditional practices, including sheep herding and free-range poultry, that first persuaded him to combine the two for entertainment purposes.

He started with performing hens, then worked up to ducks. But ducks are at a bit of a disadvantage at agricultural shows, where they’re as likely to get walked on as seen. So now Donie and his dogs work with geese and are much in demand for appearances at shows all over Ireland.

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With the wisdom of hindsight, I would have said that Anderson had the “mark of the mountain” about him.

That was a favourite expression of an even more famous Tallaght farmer, Malachi Horan (1847–1946), whose extraordinary life spanned the Great Famine and the second World War and was eventually recorded, with the help of a doctor friend, in the memoir Malachi Horan Remembers.

And sure enough, as I’ve since realised, Anderson’s forebears get a mention in that. In an interview with the Tallaght Echo a few years ago, he explained:

“A man wrote a book about Malachi Horan and he’s telling this story about a father and son up in the hills. The father could speak better Irish that the boy. It’s around the late 1800s. The name of the farmer was Raftery and we believe he was my grandfather on my mother’s side.”

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The glamour event at Virginia, by the way, was the All-Ireland Dairy Cow Championship, cleverly sponsored by Bailey’s, whose branding included the sashes worn into the parade ring by the bovine beauty queens.

And mention of Malachi Horan reminds me of another, dairy-based alcohol drink, now long disappeared but still common during his lifetime and served then in places like the Jobstown Inn.

If you were a farmer out in all weathers then and coming home with the aforementioned mark of the mountain on you, Horan recalled, a glass of “scalteen” was your only man.

“Scalteen would make a corpse walk, he said in the memoir. “It would put life back in them but make them drunk too. They made it from half a pint of whiskey, half a pound of butter, and six eggs. You should try it some time, but when you have it down, go to bed while you’re still able.”

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Getting back to geese – in this case the metaphorical Wild Geese of Irish history – those traditionally emigrated from Ireland to France and beyond. But my column about Mayo’s Year of the French (Diary, Wednesday) brought an interesting email on the subject, with a twist in the tail-feathers.

It was from regular correspondent Martin Aherne, who tells me that his wife’s mother was a “Folliard” from Ballyhaunis. The surname had descended through several generations there from one Michel Folliard, a soldier from Cherbourg who arrived with General Humbert in 1798 and never went home.

Instead, he put down roots in Mayo. But one of his sons emigrated to America, where the surname was improbably Gaelicised and, through the emigrant’s offspring became “famous or notorious, whichever way you look at it”.

Step forward Tom O’Folliard, best friend of Billy the Kid and second-in-command of a gang that terrorised New Mexico during the Lincoln County War of the late 1870s.

Born in Texas in 1858, O’Folliard was orphaned when his parents died of smallpox. Not much else about his childhood is recorded, but his life as an outlaw and the manner of his demise have earned cinematic immortality, with a role in at least half a dozen films.

He seems to have been considered a blank slate by Hollywood. Thus, in perhaps the most famous of the movies, Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), he was played by a 36-year-old.

In Young Guns II (1990), by contrast, he was said to be only 14-and-a-half. The truth was somewhere in between. In reality, when his criminal career was ended by a bullet from the gun of Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1880, O’Folliard was either 21 or 22.