LOCAL legends are found throughout Ireland and Paddy Quirke undoubtedly fits the bill. On one occasion at the nearby Horse And Jockey Hotel, taxi driver Patrick Hennessy was another to suggest a feature about the Ballymureen Stud owner. “You’ll have to do an article about Paddy Quirke sometime, a mighty horseman,” and so its back to Littleton to meet the man and his wife Kay.

The couple were originally from Toomevara and moved to Littleton after their marriage. “You would have to be into horses growing up where I lived,” says Paddy, naming local breeders such as Eamon Cormack, the Hodgins and Healy families.

“Sean Healy, he’d be a first cousin of Jack Powell and it was he who I’d say bred the best horse that ever jumped for the Army. That was Bruree that Colonel Jed O’Dwyer rode in the 1940s.”

Mention Toomevara and another name crops up. “Prefairy was standing in the village with Jim O’Meara. He was a good lengthy thoroughbred horse, light of his middle but God, he got great stuff. Sure they’re gone now, all those horses – you had Carnival Night, Prefairy and Soldado, who got a lot of race winners. And I’ll tell you another good thing; Dick Jennings. He placed them around the country,” he says in praise of the late Department of Agriculture stallion inspector, who single-handedly improved Irish breeding with his gift for spotting a ‘country stallion’.

What’s long gone is the era of farm horses and demand for troopers. “It has changed altogether now. Everyone, when I was growing up during the war years, had horses. There was no tractors. You could be cutting hay so you’d put the foal in the house while the mare was working, that was the pattern that time.

“Jack Powell would be a great man for spotting horses. Jack White [the well-known dealer] was his brother-in-law so if Jack saw a good looking horse, he’d ring him and off you go. The money was a couple of hundred pounds back then but you were breaking new ground all the time,” he says, emphasising the need for turnover.

“Mick Connors used to buy the world of troopers and black horses for the police in England. There was a market for every kind of horse then but it’s a straight line now.”

He added: “I think the good horse is scarce. There’s enough of them around but to find a good foal or five-year-old can be hard.

“This country is too small for importing too many horses anyhow. It’s hard to break even now.”

Mentioning Nenagh’s famous horse vet, the late Jack Powell, brings up the subject of the local show.

“Nenagh was the best show in Ireland for broodmares, I remember being in it one year with a Matchlike mare and there was 38 in the class.”

‘Matches’ was one of Paddy’s many lucky buys. “I was just leaning over the railing at Goresbridge with no notion of buying a mare until she walked in.” Some gentle persuasion by auctioneer David Pim saw the hammer fall at £300 and that bargain buy, in foal to Royoco, soon paid her way with the resultant colt foal sold for £2,200 the following year.

Covered next by Carnival Night, she produced Overture and provided one of Paddy’s proudest moments when he was called into the main arena at the 1985 Dublin Horse Show to receive an award for breeding this supreme champion hunter.

“I think we had 10 or 11 three-year-olds in 1983, we tried them over a pole and that fellow was the only one that couldn’t jump this high,” says Paddy gesturing a few inches above the kitchen table, “but you could leave your cap on his back and it would stay there, he’d float.”

Sent to Goresbridge that autumn, “He made IR£3,300 and if he was anyway middling to jump, he’d have made three more,” he was snapped up by Ned Cash. “I said to the lads going home, ‘that horse will win in Dublin’” and Paddy’s prediction came true when Frances Cash – “a brilliant rider” – added the Dublin title to nine other championships won that year by Overture.

“He was never beaten. They had him sold for IR£20,000 to an English buyer but disagreed over the luck money. So then some Italian millionaire bought him and Frances said to me, ‘All he’ll be doing now is riding round the hills of Rome’.”

LUCKY CHOICE

Carnival Night proved a lucky choice. “Denny Vaughan, his owner, always had a good stallion, a great judge of a horse,” remarks Paddy about a fellow stallion man. A Carnival Night mare bought locally for IR£500 proved to be another bargain after producing an unexpected foal. “I found out later there was two horses, one a thoroughbred, the other a son of King Of Diamonds, that broke into the field the year before. T’was easy know which one it was when she produced a chestnut filly!” he says, narrowing down the suspects.

Kept on, that surprise package Blondini later won the Dublin four-year-old championship with Francis Connors. Max Hauri had tried her but didn’t buy; “‘Not my mare, Paddy, not my mare,’ he says. He wasn’t a fan of chesnut mares but she was sold abroad and won some big competitions.”

Paddy’s daughter Majella played her part in her father becoming the first winner of the Breeders Championship final at Dublin in 1985. “I went to the Goresbridge sales at harvest time with Majella, she was going to school at the time. I heard this lady calling me, asking if I’d be interested in her mare.” On his way home, Paddy was reminded by Majella that he had to look at this mare. “I said to the lady, Mrs Cox from Strokestown, if you don’t sell your mare today, give me a ring,” and he later duly travelled to Roscommon to buy the mare. “She was by Well Read and in foal to Diamond Lad. We had him here when the Hattons owned him and he later moved to Hugh Hennigan.”

Golden Sunset and her Diamond Lady filly foal qualified on their first day out at Thomastown for the new Breeders Championship, the brainchild of the late Thady Ryan, and repeated the success in 1987. “She won the very first one out of 28 mares, there was the best sort of mares and real old horse crowd around at that time.”

TIPP TREBLE

Gathered around too were hoarse Tipperary supporters after cheering on a Premier County treble. Not only had the Quirkes won the Breeders Championship but Kieran Rooney, “he rode out of here for a number of years,” scored in the Puissance with Hyland Serpent, followed by the Golden Vale’s victory in Thady Ryan’s other Dublin legacy; the inter-hunt chase.

“I got IR£8,000 for her [the Diamond Lady filly] off Max as a five-year-old.” Was she chesnut? “She was, but he knew he had a good one!

“Max used to come to Ireland about five times a year and there would be 100 horses sold to him.”

Another showing highlight recalled was winning the Limerick Lady and Matron finals with Littleton Lady, a full-sister to Max Hauri’s buy. “She was never beaten. They used to hate to see me coming to shows, ‘He’s here today’ they’d say” he says, laughing.

A sportsman as well as a gentleman, he recalls the late Eileen Parkhill at Rathdowney Show turning down his Daybrook Lad filly in a Limerick Lady qualifier.

“She called me over afterwards, ‘Are you vexed with me?’. ‘I’m not at all, I’m used to shows and I’ll take a beating as good as anyone’,” he replied, before Eileen explained that while his filly was one of the best in the class, her knees hadn’t fully developed.

“She learned me a lesson and I thanked her because she was right, the filly’s kneecaps hadn’t closed in and I didn’t see it. She was a person you’d learn from. She knew.”

The pair later went on to judge together at Millstreet, then a venue for stallion inspections to which Paddy once brought a Holsteiner stallion. Injured during an accident in the washbay during his competition years in Switzerland, the resultant blemished hock saw the horse turned down. That was Cavalier Royale.

“Max got [son] Michael onto him. He wanted me to buy him and said ‘when your father sees him, he will keep him. But when I saw him, I wouldn’t. And that’s an honest fact.” he says about the stallion that arrived here in 1989 and went on to revolutionise the Irish sport horse industry.

He wasn’t the only one to hesitate as he recounts how two well-known Clare horsemen decided not to bring their mares to him. They were the first two to come back to me afterwards and say ‘Paddy, we made an awful mistake’,” he says about wasted hindsight. Cavalier Royale was based at Ballymureen Stud for six years before moving to John Hughes’s yard.

“John had started using AI then and it was him who showed me how to do it.”

FAMOUS NAMES

He names the other stallions that stood here; the thoroughbred Ashmolean, their first stallion; Diamond Lad; Hallo, “Michael brought him in from Holland”; Harlequin Du Carel; Duca Di Busted, “he was nearly the best thoroughbred we had but only got one in eight mares in foal. He won 11 races and was by Busted, a great sire,” and Olympic Lux, “he got some great stuff like Sarah Ennis’s BLM Diamond Delux.”

Is there a favourite? “I’d say Harlequin. We bought him as a foal in Normandy and have him ever since. They’re mad about him in England for eventers,” he says as Kay produces a photograph of the Selle Français stallion jumping as a five-year-old with Shane Breen at Ballyrafter. Breen also competed Harlequin’s son, the multiple Hickstead speed specialist Dorada, bred by Michael Ryan, while son Michael is now based with the Breen team in Sussex.

“Michael served his time first with Mick Connors, he was a very shrewd man with hundreds of horses going through at the time, he learned anything that wanted to be learned there,” says Paddy who follows show jumping on television. And that included the Rio Olympics when the family tuned in to watch Greg Broderick keep up the county’s strike-rate for producing Olympic showjumpers, including Denis Lynch and Kevin Babington.

The conversation turns to the now-defunct Holycross Show, of which Paddy was the last chairman. “Not owning the land was the biggest problem,” he says, explaining the demise of a show, that in its ‘Carrolls clock’ heyday attracted “Eddie Macken, Paul Darragh, Jack Doyle, they were all there. Francis Connors used to stay with us during the show.”

CURRENT RESIDENTS

Earlier we had gone for a look at the current residents including the popular Holsteiner sire, Ars Vivendi. ‘He and Harlequin would nearly take over the sales in Goresbridge between them,” and Ronan Tynan’s Warrenstown You 2, competed in his successful Grand Prix career by Tholm Keane and already producing a high ratio of performers, including Olympic-listed Balham Houdini.

Then there’s two new arrivals; Freestyle Van De Wolfsakker, a replacement for his sire Querlybet Hero, now returned to Belgium, and the attractive Risohorse Locorotondo, another sourced by Michael.

Watching 90-year-old Paddy lead out the big Rheinlander is a masterclass in how a good stallion man lets the horse take centre stage, while he juggles phone calls about a yard job he had advertised. “It’s nearly impossible to get young people to do the job now, they’re getting handier jobs.”

However, help is always at hand in the form of his grand-daughter Maria Quirke-Ryan, whose mother Mary does the stud’s accounts. “It’s not easy now when it comes to payment especially with a white passport. Maybe the service isn’t paid for, which puts stallion owners in an awkward position. But there’s great customers too. You’d have some lovely people coming in and out.”

“He brought me everywhere with him when I was young and I still go everywhere with him,” says his number one fan Maria, who grew up around the yard belonging to another of Ireland’s great horsemen.