DISNEY Stuff. It’s how Maurice Ó Scannaill describes those far-fetched scenes in TV vet series. Although, Oman - his next port of call - provided a true story that could fit any Disney script.

“I went there in January 1995 and left in July 2002. Oman is a fabulous place, beautiful countryside and the Omanis are lovely people. So I must say, I was very happy there for seven and a half years.

“Colm [Walsh, his vet colleague, who organised Maurice’s job there] left about two years later, so I was down in Salalah, looking after the mares. You were kind of master of all you surveyed.”

The capital of the Dhofar province is the birthplace of the late Sultan Qaboos bin Said, who set up many projects. These included Salalah’s self-sufficient Royal Farm and Royal Stables, where Maurice mainly worked.

“I never met the Sultan, who had four, fully-staffed palaces in Salalah. The Royal Farm was over a thousand acres: these fabulous banana plantations, lovely Jersey cattle, goat herds, duck ponds and whatnot. Outside the fence was just rocky, stony desert.”

Sophisticated irrigation systems supplied four million gallons of water daily to the farm and Mother Nature helped out too. 1,000 kilometres south of the capital Muscat and on the Arabian Sea coastline, Salalah offered a more temperate climate than other parts of the Middle East.

“We got the tail end of the Khareef, or monsoon season, between the middle of June to September. You could almost guarantee you’d wake up one morning and the clouds would have closed in, the humidity would be through the roof, but the temperature was rarely over 30 degrees.

“There were rivers everywhere, waterfalls and greenery, whereas up in Muscat, it was 50 degrees and sweltering, merciless sun. You know, you’ve been there,” Maurice said to this writer.

The tale of Pendle Hill intrigues him. Sold in 1985 as a yearling on Ballinasloe’s Fair Green to the late Fordie Cathers - the only prospective buyer who had heard of her then little-known sire Clover Hill - my last sighting was on a chance visit to the Royal Stables in Muscat 30 years ago.

“I was surprised to hear that you had managed to sell her to Oman,” Maurice remarked. Not half as surprised as I was to see a familiar-looking head looking out over a stable door.

Unicorn-like

After a successful novice career with Richard Smyth in the saddle, Fordie sold ‘Hilly’ to Steve Hadley, when she won the Eglinton novice championship. As the Omani show jumping trainer, it was Steve’s task to source horses for the Sultan’s Royal Stables in Muscat.

Back in 2011, when in Leominster for his feature in The Irish Field, Steve’s wife Claire obligingly produced a sales ledger and there, amongst his many Irish buys, was Pendle Hill.

The last update about Hilly was that she was sent to Salalah for a fledgling sport horse breeding project at the southern Royal Stables.

Maurice had quite a herd there: Arabians, Akhal-Tekes, Appaloosas, (the first was a gift from US president George H.W Bush on a state visit) “and you had the odd Welsh pony and Argentinian Falabellas, the type you’d put on the mantlepiece!” he said.

“We could do AI in certain breeds, Arabs for example, but not thoroughbreds. The foals ran around the paddocks up to their necks in grass and that was great.”

Although he doesn’t recall Hilly, “we’d have known each other, professionally at least!”, one mare stands out. “We had a grey Russian mare called Bron. She shattered her cannon within a couple of months of foaling and horses with broken legs are bad news.

“So we bandaged it up, did everything. Bron later learned to sit and take the weight off her leg; there were two rails around a tree in the middle of each paddock and she’d rest against the lower one. Eventually the leg healed and she foaled safely.”

Bron’s Mill Reef-style rehabilitation was one unusual case, then there was Oman’s indigenous wildlife.

“The Sultan was the patron of the World Wildlife Fund and reintroduced the Arabian oryx, which had been hunted to near-extinction. They’d look like a unicorn from the side with just one horn going straight up. Very placid animals.”

Less so was the Arabian leopard. “They were really endangered and so rare that when a call came in about a leopard, you had to go. Immediately. Even if you’re doing operations, it was the top priority.”

Top predators

Oman’s landscape differs from other Arabian Peninsula states: lush vegetation, the Grand Canyon-like Wadi Ghul, the Al Hamra mountains and then the Empty Quarter, the massive desert that covers one-third of Arabia.

“The leopards lived in these very, very deep, narrow ravines and what happens is, you get these cloudbursts every couple of years and they’d fill the water holes in these deep ravines.

“You get a whole micro-infrastructure and ecology developing in the leopard’s habitat. They never brought their prey up into the trees, because there are no trees and because they were the top predators.

“So nothing’s going to come along and steal it, like lions or hyenas. And they’re tiny little lads, the biggest one we got was about the size of a labrador,” Maurice explained.

So what happened when the call came about a leopard caught in a trap, set by the conservation team?

“Once they radioed in that there was a leopard, you had to drop everything and rush to the military side at the airport. There’d be a military helicopter waiting for you to hop in, you’d be halfway up into the sky before you even got a chance to put on your seatbelt because they’re rushing to get there.

“You’d fly 30, 40 miles inland to the site. The guy who was in charge of leopard conservation was Andrew Spalton and we’d be the only two allowed forward.

“So now here’s this leopard going crazy in this 12-foot-long trap and you’re trying to judge the weight, because you’re going to have to anaesthetise it. It was a blowdart job, so you’d load your syringe and Andrew would go to the front of the trap to distract the leopard, while I fired off the dart.

“It would stick into its thigh, so you waited… did all that go in? Was it enough? But you couldn’t give another dose.”

Once the wait-and-see was over, they swung into action, taking blood samples and skin biopsies. Each sedated leopard was measured, weighed and fitted with a collar with a tracking device attached.

“The collars would transmit a signal and the Air Force would fly over this particular ravine once a week to monitor them. Once we were finished, you had to wait for him to wake up. So you’d be sitting there by the helicopter, 100 yards away.

“The leopard would eventually come round, he’d stagger off into the bushes and you fecked off home in your helicopter. So, it was a bit different to cutting the horns off bullocks back home!”

Best of both worlds

Two benefits from his Connemara vet years were meeting memorable characters and the start of his writing career. “I suppose I spent so much time on my own driving. You could be over an hour driving from Clifden to Lettermullen on a call and, by the time you got there, you’d have hundreds of thoughts.

“I don’t think anybody should write about what they don’t know. Like, I could write a Tom Clancy bestseller about a submarine. But I know nothing about submarines or armaments or F15s.

“So I couldn’t write those, wouldn’t be interested in writing Top Gun or whatever. But I think it was probably the realisation that, if you’re a writer and you have a good imagination, there are other ways of making a few bob out of veterinary.”

Andrew, his colleague on these leopard-tagging expeditions, had the same approach. He has written several books about Oman’s landscapes and wildlife, including the The Arabian Leopards of Oman.

Maurice drew on the case of the unsolved mystery of Shergar’s kidnapping for his first book.

“For me, the first thought was, ‘What the hell could have happened to Shergar?’ He just vanished. And what do you do with him… what’s the point in stealing 10 or 100 million worth of horse? You can’t very well advertise him for stud.

“I wrote the story [Playing Dead] when I was working in Malta. That was the first book. And around the time I got the job in Oman, I got a three-book contract with Random House.

“So maybe it was time to think about an alternative career; would I be better off staying here, doing the library circuits and book signings? Random House said no, go on because we can fly you back from Oman, if necessary.

“Off I went to Oman and it was great, best of both worlds. I had brought out the first book and then I finished the second one: Outbreak.

“People say that everyone has one book in them and it might get more difficult after that. Actually, it got easier and I thought the books got better as they went on.”

Life as a Middle East expat suited both his travels and writing. Headhunted expats got impressive packages, including first-class flights. “We had great holidays. We’re halfway to Australia from Oman, so we went there for a couple of weeks to visit my brother Bernard and his family.

“You’d finish work at half-eight in the morning, so there was plenty of time then for writing.” And crosswords.

RTÉ work

“I loved words, always. My mother [Evelyn] was a great woman for doing crosswords. There’s five of us and I’m the eldest - I’ll be 78 on May 18th next - and growing up, we played Scrabble, all the usual word games,” Maurice explained.

Doing The Irish Times cryptic crossword, over a cup of tea with veterinary nurse Eileen Bennett, before rounds began was their morning ritual back in Connemara.

“I got a call once to a guy who had a summer house in Kilkerrin, near Carna. I put his old dog up on the dining room table to examine him and the owner’s wife and another woman were trying to do the same crossword we’d done two hours before.”

After Maurice’s discreet suggestions, the crossword was finished, “and they were delighted. So, when we were going out to the car, the husband said, ‘You seem to be good at these crosswords. My name is Gary Redmond, I’m the editor of the RTÉ Guide and I was thinking of introducing a cryptic crossword. Would you like to give it a go?’

“I said, ‘Well, okay,’” Maurice had replied, recalling how he was hired.

“There were no computer programmes or anything, I made up the squares, worked out anagrams, the whole lot. When I went to Malta, I was sending them back by snail mail. That’s how I started and I did it for over three years.

“I’d pop into Montrose to see my friend Gary, a lovely man. We’d go downstairs into the canteen and one day, there was a lady pushing around a trolley, gathering up plates from Pat Kenny and Mike Murphy.

“‘Mary, do you know who this man here is? This is the man who makes up our crossword,’ said Gary introducing me with a flourish.

“And Mary just looks at me and says, ‘Jaysus, you must be mighty altogether at Spot The Ball!’”

Wise counsel

A tip-off from his cousin Brendan Dolan, his travel companion for the Christmas drive home to Clifden, led to another gig. “Brendan said that The Phoenix magazine was looking for a new crossword maker. I made three crossword samples and sent them off to Paul Farrell, got the word back and I’ve been doing them twice a month since April 2006.”

By then, Maurice and Alex had settled back into life and their house in Malta, where his office computer contains a “huge database” for his crossword work.

Malta is also the setting for another thriller: A Moving Death, which centres around Inspector Leonard Cassar, a fictional figure in the Malta Police Force.

Parts of both Ridley Scott’s Gladiator movies were filmed there. “Malta has incredible financial inducements on offer for TV and films being made here, hence Gladiator II and others.”

Several UK TV companies have made preliminary enquiries about his trilogy, featuring the Connemara vet character Frank Samson. “They loved the idea that it was one guy and I reckon you can’t go wrong with a mixture of crime and veterinary, because if you look at any television, it’s Bondi Vet, Alaska Vet and crime programmes.”

A TV series would be another string to the bow of “the unelected Lord Mayor of Malta!” As described by his cousin Peadar Ó Scannaill, who visited Maurice twice there.

“He was already enjoying the retiree life. However, as a mark of his excellence and wise counsel as a veterinary surgeon, he is still revered by his peers and colleagues. He still acted as the go-to person for wisdom on all things veterinary in Malta,” said Peadar.

“That was evident in spades, as I spoke with the acting chief vet in Malta, as we all sat and enjoyed Maurice’s 70th birthday back then. I believe a full airplane load of Ó Scanaill’s travelled to that celebration and it definitely was a memorable experience!” his cousin added.

Both a veterinary vocation, reading and love of words run in the extended Ó Scannaill family. For example, the Ashbourne branch of Peadar’s three practices began with his uncle Pat “Oxy” Moran!

“My mum is an avid reader of The Irish Field every week. She’s 90 years old and I bring her a copy every Saturday morning,” said Peadar, one of 10 vets in their family and with two more prospective vets in Leaving Cert year.

“Veterinary means the world to Maurice. His professionalism and care for all matters veterinary, are the hallmark of all the Ó Scanaill’s endeavours.”

It was my Irish Horse World colleague Noel Mullins who made the introduction to Peadar, as we watched the 2024 Dublin hunter championship for the last time from the since-demolished Anglesea Stand.

Fordie Cathers watched the 1985 championship. After spotting Matthew Dempsey’s hunter mare champion Grey Clover soar, at full gallop, over a white television cable laid on the grass, he dived into his catalogue to check her sire: Clover Hill.

There’s that fortuitous incident, Peadar exchanging Maurice’s email address, finding both Hilly and then a Connacht Tribune article about the ‘Connemara vet in Oman’ just before the recent Malta visit.

Maurice Ó Scannaill’s job offers and opportunities to apply his veterinary and wordsmith skills also add up to an 11-letter word in the Oxford Dictionary. Clue: the fact of something interesting happening by chance: serendipity.