“YOU could smell the sea when you got to Oranmore. That’s when I kind of began to breathe again, when you see the sea for the first time…

“The road to Oughterard could be like the rest of Galway with the limestone fields. It was only when you came out through Oughterard, up the hill at Glengowla School and suddenly, there were the Twelve Bens in front of you, the big lake beside you and the bogs.

“And you were home. Even though you had another 40 bloody miles to go! It was all familiar and you felt, no matter what happens here, I’m in friendly territory. You knew you were amongst your own people.”

Maurice Ó Scannaill is describing the drive home to Clifden, as a young veterinary medicine student, in his trusty Volkswagen Beetle and that feeling of being home.

It’s a pilgrimage of memories that countless Irish expats make, including the man himself, who will travel the N59 again to spend this Christmas in Clifden. He’s travelled many roads and criss-crossed careers in the meantime, having worked as a vet in Connemara, Malta and Oman; an author and as a “What’s the official job title for someone who compiles crosswords? Oh, it’s a fancy word - cruciverbalist!”

We’re sitting in the courtyard of his and wife Alex’s home in Malta, where Maurice retired to after working in Oman, and the banter is flowing. A born raconteur and wordsmith, there’s little political correctness in his views and a Connemara Greenway-length of stories to be told.

The courtyard’s two stables have been converted into offices, one apiece for Maurice and Alex. His books (the first three are the results of when “you’re out in the wilds of Connemara driving for hours on your own, and you have a fer-tile brain”), line bookshelves built into the original sandstone mangers.

Playing Dead, Outbreak and Malpractice centre around the character of Frank Samson, an Irish vet and “reluctant private investigator”. No Christmas cookie prizes for guessing the inspiration there, although Maurice’s pen name is Rory McCormac, based on Ruairí and Cormac, his sons from his first marriage.

“Ruairí is how its spelled, but Random House [publishers] said that looked too foreign and insisted on anglicising it to Rory. My protest: ‘What about Ngaio Marsh?!’”

Connemara Collectibles: Some of the Victorian-era jugs and jars collected by Maurice on his Connemara rounds \ Susan Finnerty

Career choice

Malta, a melting pot of Italian, Arabic and British influences, packs a lot into its tiny surface area. Its stone walls are a reminder of Connemara landscapes and there are other traces too.

Such as the collection of vintage jugs and jars gathered during his rounds, displayed on a Clifden-crafted dresser in the dining room.

“I collected all these; they’re a couple of hundred years old. And because I couldn’t find a dresser big enough for all the jugs, I had it made by a guy called Andrew Bell. It was in five pieces and then shipped over.”

Just inside the front door is another bespoke item: a brass and wooden name-plate with M. Ó Scannaill, M.V.B, M.R.C.V.S Veterinary Surgeon engraved on it.

“My mother [Evelyn] gave me that when I qualified. My father [Peadar] was a vet. I used to go around with him and automatically didn’t think of anything else as a career in those days. You know, there were four or five things you could do at university, you could be a lawyer, a doctor, a dentist, vet or engineer and that was pretty much it. None of this computer programming and AI.

“AI to me is artificial insemination, that’s it. Still never will be anything else!

The brass nameplate given to the newly-qualified vet by his mother Evelyn \ Susan Finnerty

Passion

“One of my best friends is Dermot Forde, we qualified together and we were actually born in the same nursing home in Clontarf. My parents were both from Clontarf, my father was from Seafield Road and my mother was from around the corner.

“Dermot and I met in college and we’ve been best pals ever since. Big into horses, he worked for Bord na gCapall for a while and lives up near Virginia now.”

More of Maurice’s classmates included John Powell, son of Jack ‘Ginger’ Powell, the longest-serving vet in Ireland, and Michael Burke. “He made millions, set up his Chanelle company and sold it this year for £300 million.”

And a vet-turned-author in this stellar group? “I enjoyed my years as a vet. The writing was the thing I enjoyed most. Had I thought about it, I might have preferred to go along the journalist line or writing. That’s my passion, I suppose.”

Although in this age of two-minute reads and the Oxford Word of the Year 2024: ‘brain rot’ (to describe minds numbed from scrolling addictions), is there still a place for a chapter of a book?

“Yeah. I think there’s a danger of that. People are just surrendering themselves totally to these machines, smartphones and computers. They’re fantastic if they’re used in the correct manner.

“I saw something on Facebook the other day; how would you tell somebody from the 1950s how things have moved on? The answer was I would explain to them that, in my pocket, I have a machine, in which is stored access to all of human knowledge over millennia since the beginning of time.

“I use it for looking at pictures of cats and starting stupid arguments with people I don’t even know.

“And I say, ‘Well, that’s sums it up perfectly!’

“You have these incredible resources like Google and Facebook and what do people do? Post photos of a half-eaten hamburger, a half-drunk pint or of them grinning inanely at the phone with a tiny bit of the Taj Mahal in the background.

“It’s become so me, me, me, self-centred and long selfie sticks. And I think we’re really losing the ability to communicate and to have conversations. I think smartphones are great, used in the right place or in the right way, but now people have surrendered themselves, totally abdicated any form of humanity and so you have to be told almost how to respond.

“It was an absolute shock to see the Americans elect a criminal, convicted of 34 felonies. For some, because they might get their petrol a couple of cents cheaper.

“The Democratic Party was at least trying to keep Medicaid, Medicare and choices for women. I don’t think the Democratic Party should change at all and I don’t think that writers should dumb down to words of less than two syllables.”

Disney

The gender balance of Veterinary Medicine classes has also changed. “When I graduated in 1971, which is a long, long time ago, I think we were the last class where there were no girls in the class.

“That was in UCD. There was Trinity at that stage as a much smaller faculty and then there was a merger sometime in the 1970s. Now they’re starting others,” Maurice says.

“But then everybody wanted to be a vet and the biggest, the worst, thing that ever happened was these James Herriot TV programmes. There’s all these lovely, happy-ever-after endings where the corpse comes back to life, winks at the owner and everybody’s delighted. Disney stuff!

“Nobody in these TV programmes had to lie out in the muck with hailstones hopping off them at 3 o’clock in the morning, trying to put a uterus back into a cow.

“So you had all these people then wanting to be vets and, of course, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but you needed a good pair of shoulders for the reality of large animal practice.

“Entry into the veterinary faculty became a matter of how many points you got in your Leaving Certificate and that could have been a big problem in an agricultural economy, which we were at that stage.

“Since then, it’s obviously become more pet-orientated, ponies and horses.”

“A bit of explaining”

Back in his student days, Maurice travelled around in his Volkswagen Beetle. Having owned 13 of them, this sturdy German workhorse was also the choice of the late Jack Powell for his Nenagh rounds. A loyal Volkswagen customer, the company gave Jack his 41st Volkswagen - a Polo - as his 100th birthday present in 2013.

“I lived in the Dublin mountains when I was in college. In fact, Brendan Dolan, the guy who’s collecting me at the airport and driving us to Clifden for Christmas, is a second cousin of mine and I lived with his family. So I was given an old Volkswagen Beetle to get to college.”

Which led to this infamous anecdote when Maurice obliged his sister Áine by giving a group of nuns a lift to Galway.

“There were four of five nuns in this little Volkswagen and I’d borrowed a roof rack for all the luggage. We’re going home on this dark night, pouring rain, and suddenly, outside Tyrellspass, there’s an an almighty clatter. The roof rack came off and the nun’s baggage was all over the bloody street.

“I picked up the bags, but the rack’s screws were missing, what could we do?”

Solution found, they continued on to Galway city.

“We pulled up in Eyre Square, I opened the window and asked this man for directions to whatever convent I was to let the nuns off at. He started to tell me, then looked in the back startled because there’s all the nuns sitting on their suitcases with their heads up through the bars of the roof rack, like poor unfortunate slaves on a ship. It was the only way we could bring the rack back but that took a bit of explaining!”

Maurice Ó'Scannaill in his office where the original mangers are converted to bookshelves including his own works \ Susan Finnerty

Connemara living

A shortage of vets in rural areas is a worldwide issue. According to one Canadian company, Acera Insurance, one-third to one-half of veterinary practices were actively recruiting within the country and, while 450 new vets enter the Canadian workforce annually, this figure merely replaces those retiring.

A similar shortage of vets here led the Ó Scannaill family to move to Connemara. “My father qualified in 1945 and, at one stage, no vet was going out to Connemara. Hundreds and thousands of small farmers in Connemara and there’s no vet.

“So the government decided to give a £500 a year subsidy to somebody to go and become a vet in Connemara. A huge area to cover, crazy. Leenane Bridge to Spiddal Bridge and all west of there. It was the size of a small country and 10 times bigger than Malta. Malta is only 17 miles long by nine miles wide.”

Speaking Gaelic was no issue though. “My father spoke Irish all his life. His parents came from West Cork and Irish was the language of the family. And he never spoke English to us at all, it was always Irish.

“So we spoke Irish all along. And most of my work in Connemara was through ‘as Gaeilge’ anyhow. So that was how he ended up in Connemara.

“I enjoyed veterinary and I’d much prefer the Connemara farmers, real farmers, as opposed to sometimes precious owners.”

His Connemara rounds often involved a gift of a bottle of poitin – “I don’t drink!” – but gathering pounds, shillings and pence for the practice business was a different matter.

“I was trying to negotiate with Máire Geoghegan-Quinn [the Galway West TD whose ministries included the Department for the Gaeltacht] to get a proper subsidy. You had to submit oodles of bookwork for every call you did for the £500 a year.

“It kind of wasn’t worth it, you know. Eventually, there was nothing happening. And I said, ‘Well, this is Brokesville’. You can’t drive 50 miles on a call, row out to an island two miles further out, walk across the island, see an animal and come back and get €10. It doesn’t pay, economically.

“One miserable freezing cold day in November, I came home after chopping the horns off bullocks and saw a job advertised for Malta. So, I wrote off and then forgot about it until two weeks later, I got a letter to come over to the UK for an interview.

“I said ‘Jesus, they’re paying the tickets, I’ll go’. I borrowed a lovely overcoat from Stan Barry, went across to the UK and the next minute, I got the job. So then I had to make up my mind, this was a huge decision and again, I thought ‘I’ll go’. And I did. So I came for two years and stayed for nine.”

Family gatherings

“Then I went back to Ireland. My mother had died in 1993, she was over visiting my sister Áine, who lives in Normandy. Two of my brothers – Breandan and Donal – still live in Clifden. Another brother – Bernard – lives outside Maleny in Queensland.

“Donal sings with the local choir, as does Áine in France and myself here in Malta. We all met up in Vienna to sing the Mozart Requiem on our mother’s 30th anniversary. It was lovely.”

There’s another clan gathering planned. “I’m going to sing for about the 10th time the Mozart Requiem in Salzburg next October because Áine wants to go there.”

Breandan has his own hobby. “He was working in the National Park in Letter-frack before he retired and the day after he finished work, he walked.

“He started walking from Clifden all the way to Santiago de Compostela, across Ireland, the ferry to Wales, all through Wales and England, boat across to Calais and all through France.

“That was during the heatwave summer, when there were all those fires. So he had to take a two-hour train journey south of Bordeaux, because all the houses in the area had been evacuated because of the danger of fire and walkers weren’t allowed in the area.

“He’d already walked the Camino de Compostela lots of times, but he did it all the way from Clifden to Santiago. Three and a half thousand kilometres.”

Alex is also a keen walker and will spend this holiday season with a group of friends on a walking holiday in Sri Lanka. “This would be the first time we’ve been apart for Christmas, you know, but I love Christmas in Connemara with family too.”

It was while he was back home in Connemara in 1995 that he got a phone call that would see him move away again.

“Colm Walsh was a vet working in Oman and was married to Róisín Donough from Kinvara. I think the big thing is Colm knew I’d been away, so therefore I wasn’t the kind of guy who wouldn’t leave home.

“So he rang up and said, ‘Do you want to come to Oman?’”

Next week: “There’d be a military helicopter waiting for you.”