Mick's Itinerary

1.Kilkenny Castle
2.Kilkenny and the market
3.Thomastown
4.Kell's Priory

Meet Mick | Q&A

Question: Good morning Mick, now first off, your kids, they all have Irish names. Could you tell us where you plucked these names from?

Answer: They're all Irish names. Iseult my eldest daughter's name dates back to Arthurian legend and literally means "she who is gazed upon". Caoimhe means "the fair one", but I'm nice exactly sure of its exact historical origin. Saraid, my youngest's name dates back very far also and it means the "best one or excellent.

Question: In Thomastown you catch up with a friend of yours, Tom - the Chicago native with the guitars? He said that for a small place there's a lot going on, can you enlighten us as to what it is that is going on so to speak.

Answer: Yeah, I'd say the population of Thomastown is two and a half thousand max yet it has its own arts college. There's a huge artistic community in the town and this gives it a bohemian feel. I know many people who live in Kilkenny whose entire social life is in Thomastown. There was a festival on there recently call the 'Lights Out Festival'. Basically, all the pubs in the town turn off their lights and use candles for the night and then the acoustic session's kicks off. Another interesting fact about Thomastown is that there's quite an international community. There's also a vintage guitar shop in the town which again I think is quite interesting for the size of the town.

Question: My favourite point in the video is where we meet Grainne the fox&Can you tell us a little about the man who adopted and tamed the fox?

Answer: I remember that man when he would help out my father and brother with our family landscape gardening business. I wouldn't say he's eccentric, but I'd say he was a little bit out there: uninhibited, but sensible; a free individual. The fox was possibly abandoned as a cub and was wounded after falling out of a box in a shed by an old hospital in Thomastown. Now, I wouldn't say she was friendly. She'd tolerate your presence up to a point and then, well she gave me a bit of a nip as if to say "hey, I'm not a dog or a cat, I'm a fox, a wild animal, so keep back."

Question: I thought it an interesting development to take a vintage cobblers den and convert it into an award winning coffee shop. I saw the same happen in Westport, Mayo where they transformed a Cobblers into a pub named the Cobblers Inn.

Answer: (laughs) Yeah, Billy O' Reilly was the shoe-maker there for the best part of seventy years. Well he didn't make shoes, he repaired them, and up until very recently too. He used to sit in the window and used all the old cobbling tools, all the old machines traditional cobblers used. And his father before him started there as an apprentice cobbler. That business went back as far as the mid nineteenth century. Now it's a coffee shop, and it won the award last year for best shop front in Ireland. What I thought was ironic was that they just painted over the original cobblers shop front. (laughs)