Ballinakill
During February 1953, My Father Dick and his two Brothers bought an adjacent farm to their home place in Ahullen from the Reps of the Late Larry Darcy. Most of this land would have been under Beauman of Hyde Park originally, Just as Mike Fanning had kept a copy of the original lease which was an Indenture between Matthew Ford Beauman and Michael Fanning, along with provision made for other members of the family in 1862. Mike also kept copies of the Fair Rent Documents, which came some time afterwards connected to Charles Stewart Parnell’s and Gladstone’s time, etc. 
1838- 1840
Buying Albert Young’s Gravel pit with 5 Acres 28th January 1970
Sissi buys 144 acres at Kilmurry in 1971 from Patrick Byrne which adjoins the twenty acres Dick already owns in Kilmichael, Co. Wexford.
Buying 70 acres in Clogga, Arklow 1972
The late Tommy Merrigan Ballymurtagh, Avoca bought Kinch’s 76 acres in February 1972 and decides to sell a 45 acre farm in Kilmagig, Avoca by auction in March ’72, it doesn’t sell and Dick does a deal with him in 1973, by the 17th October 1973 Dick has seen 543 acres in Ballinakill, Glenealy and coming up for sale and buys it During 1973, and January 1974 the lads brought the two CAT 627 Scrapers & Road grader etc. to Navan to make a new road on a greenfield site for the new TARA Mine for Priority drilling related to the present company, Priority construction.
Boosted with the confidence of TARA Mines starting preparation of the largest ZINC Mine in Europe at the end of 1973, Dick makes another move and buys 543 acres at Ballinakill Glenealy Rathdrum, shortly after it is withdrawn from Auction at £327,000 in October 1973 from Mrs. Fyans, Dr. Fyans Widow. There was an old Ford V 8 which was very rusty and it was only many years later I realized it was like later model of the famous “Bonnie and Clyde” movie, and one could see it had a chassis rather like a lorry when it was turned over on its side after being pushed out of the way and a very strong non-collapsible steering column that could do serious damage to a person’s chest on impact. After the spring crop was sown by his brother Joe and Conroy’s, Dick began buying tractors again, Two Ford 5000’s immediately in the spring of 1974 with one to follow, and very shortly after erected a five-span shed, A County 1164, the following year a FORD 7000, by the summer of 1974 I had my Honda 50 a means of getting from Avoca up to Ballinakill and after that, a FORD 9600, and the first six furrow semi-mounted plough the following year another 9600 and six furrow plough .
Ballinakill did need quite good deal of reclamation carried out on it, and the JCB 7B 
most likely after it was replaced by the JCB 807 in the Mines was left up there for quite a while in the early stages for opening and cutting out new drains and cleaning off the scrub and we constructed a new road after buying some adjoining land from Philips after’77or’78 which enabled us to draw the hen slurry up from Ballyfree farms, up a couple of miles from the village to Ballinakill, thus avoid any obnoxious smells around Glenealy village. The Late Richie Kenny and some of his family played an important part in the operation of the farm along with improving it. Dick had a great way of injecting energy into getting work done, and as would often happen in the early stages of ploughing up freshly reclaimed land one could easily get one of the tractors bogged down and there could be a could deal of time lost over getting it free especially if a second one went down and then if Dick arrived on the scene, the short fuse could blow and you would have the famous: “ For F*ck sake what were you thinking of doing driving in there?” and possibly with some more expletives along with it, if it had happened a second time, but later on it would be forgotten about and in ways, some of us thrived on it getting things done. Dick became very good friends with the late Eddie O’Loughlin an Agricultural contractor who lived close by us in Avoca after employing his lime spreading service for The Ballinakill and Avoca lands. I can remember often after doing something silly or forgetting something and then another famous one of his was: “ For Fuck sake will you keep your mind on what you’re supposed to be doing” . looking back to when we were around seventeen years of age, I can see exactly what he meant, and then on the other hand if a serious genuine accident happened which couldn’t have been avoided with some expensive damage, he would react in a very calm way at sorting it out.
Ballywalter 500 Acres 1972 McInerney may have bought It in 72 and only kept it for two or three years, and then Bert Allen of Slaney Meats bought it probably when the Beef factory was beginning to take off and become a great success.
Don Nuzum makes a move with 180 acres at Ballinteskin, April 1973 George Horan buys Bungalow which, his sister and Tom Nuzum may have built on 3 or 4 acres.
James Emmet selling Ballykilty house with 108 acres for Auction 31 May 1967
Ballykilty house 190 acres sold for £95,000 at auction in June 1973 in 3 lots
Lot.1 Ballykilty house with 109 acres. Lot 2. 24 acres withdrawn
Lot 3. 58 acres was bought in trust by Andrew Merrigan, Monareigh, who was sadly killed in a baler accident on his farm a few months later
Jos is making a move with Ballykilty 193 acres June 1973
Harry Nuzum needs some serious firepower to take on Ballykilty and puts up Coolastingan, 146 acres in March 1973
208 acres good farm at Mongnacool, Aughrim sold to Tom Mulcair, 8th June 1973 part of Roadbridge Mulcair’s for £80,000
Tom Mulcair had bought 245 acres in Logan February 1973 before buying the 208 acres in Aughrim after Eddie Whitmore had bought a property in New Zealand. Eddie was ahead of his time before the milk quotas came in, and John Hatton told me he had the up to date herringbone milking parlour at the time, and John told me he found Tom Mulcair quite a decent man to deal with. Our late neighbour Mrs Bridie O’Sullivan told me she started school in Carnew with Eddie, his sister, and Joy Bishop and told me she liked Eddie as a person. Eamonn Fanning brought me up to look at the farm around 2001, and I noticed the farm did lie away from the sun, but apart from that quite good.
Clarke Delahunt & Co
Harry Delahunt reported to the Irish Independent for 16-December 1977, that 1977 was a good year for property. Harry Delahunt said Farmland was averaging £2,000 per acre in Co. Wicklow, but in special circumstances had touched £ 3,000 per acre.
One can easily see Farmland had more than trebled its value from 1974, the year it was very difficult to sell cattle. Land prices had peaked in 1979 before interest rates began to rise. After factories like Wallboard in Arklow closed after the end of September 1980, and NU-Plast closed in 1983 after Avoca Mines closed in 1982, business really quietened down with a lot of job losses and by 6th Jan 1983 Arklow had lost 1,700 jobs. In 1985 we sold the Ballymote farm, Glenealy for about half of what we paid for it. One could see now Farmland prices were in decline, and it wasn’t until 1988 that land prices began to steady and rise slightly by the end of ‘88
Caroline and I bought Ahullen in April 1988. The high point in the rate of Interest for us was in 1989 when it was was 17 ¾ percent interest plus a 2 percent loading for that one year, bringing it to 19 ¾ percent or almost 20, and it was quite a relief as rates kept falling over the years into single digit figures. High-interest rates and job losses had caused land prices to fall quite a lot in the early eighties up as far as 1987. I was discussing land prices with a good friend of mine, who remembered Larry Darcy wife’s place in Mullawn was sold after the snow in 1947, after she died in’46.We were just talking about some of the land around was very hard to sell around 1985 and 1986, after the peak in land prices in 1979.
The McCarthys had bought over 40 acres of John Dunne’s land close by or adjoining Betty’s brother Murt who was a very good dairy farmer around 1999 or 2000, and they sold it on to Bardons’ around 2002, the same year that they bought the farm in Monamolin at Auction in March 2002, Betty told me they sold it the following October and Stafford then billed them for an extra eleven and a half thousand, approx more than the agreed price of commission between John Joe and himself. Betty told me one evening early December 2015, when they challenged him on this that Nick Stafford started bullying them, and threatening them with court and quoted another auctioneer, who had won a case for a large amount, and I was a little surprised that he didn’t quote the case he won against Mr. Pat Doyle, Edermine, Enniscorthy. During that same year Mr Buttle approached Stafford to sell his farm, who was saying the farm was going to be sold in a couple of weeks, it didn’t sell and the sale was dragging on for months with no sign of anything happening, and Mr Buttle, decided to leave him, and went to Myles Doyle or Kinsella auctioneers. He eventually sold the farm and when Stafford got to hear about it, He tried to bill him for it. There was nothing Stafford could do, as Peter had written to him telling him he was withdrawing from his services, and Stafford backed off after he got Kevin to write to him, I then asked Peter who is a very genuine man what was Stafford’s rate of commission and he told me it was 1 percent, and when I asked him did he have to haggle with him to get that rate and Peter replied no, Nick Stafford stated that was his rate. Had the Mc Cathys known this, they would easily have been able to prove the amount agreed between John Joe and Stafford in the same year 2002.Peter did remark that himself and a few of the neighbouring farmers were disgusted with him boasting about his four F Motto regarding women “Find them feel them, Fu*k ’em and forget them”,and as one person said to me that comes from an old one, with the word feel substituted for (Fool) them, which is probably how he felt about his customers.
Gerry Slattery Map of Bert Allens 400 acre around 1999 Gerry Slattery Map of Bert Allens 400 acre around 1999
I met Gerry Slattery of Warren Estates around 1998 or ’99, he had some good ideas and while my brothers and I may have seen Kilmurry Kilmichael as a bit of an Ugly Duckling, especially during the time we were tilling it, but looking back Dick had good foresight and while he didn’t succeed in running the road to get access to the beach in Clogga he did manage to run a road right through Kilmichael in to Kilmurry, and we used the three new type Magirus Deutz Dumpers to draw in 3 inch crushed stone from the Roadstone quarry and the heavy vibrating roller to roll it down which left it looking like as if it were paved in. this really was the Key to the door of the property around 1980 as one had to use the right of way through Lar Kavanaghs before this in Patrick Byrne’s Time. We had taken out all the ditches and I had the farm re-surveyed and re-mapped in 1992 and I erected new fences parallel to each other to enable fertilizer spreading at 24 metre bout widths to reduce the number of tracks If the land wasn’t quite as dry as you’d like it to be the property began to look well when it was all or mainly in grass. The Late Gerry Slattery had suggested while property had taken off to take advantage of it, and invited me in to see the Ballyrory farm auction in August ’99. Gerry then suggested to taking a look at Bert Allen’s 400-acre block, which was a magic figure only the land was quite heavy and Caroline didn’t really like the house, although it wasn’t bad and I would have preferred land that I could till a large portion of. As Gerry liked horses and had a strong interest in them, Gerry would say to me we will take a gallop down in the morning and I’ll show you around,
Gerry Slattery had got on well with David Coulson who had some very good ideas from Sea field Golf and was showing him around Kilmichael around the same time we were looking at Bert’s blockGerry Slatterys Note 1999 Bert Allens 400acre
The Late Gerry Slattery was the brains behind organizing the Ariel photography with Mr. Peter Barrow, Gerry had taken one or two of the Seafront with his own camera and placed an advert for the property in the local paper on the 1st June 2000 using it. Celtic Helicopters arrived down with Peter Barrow in their green helicopter and landed in the field in Kilmichael opposite the Coastguard station around the end of May 2000, Gerry and I went over and the man who got out introduced us to the pilot who was Michael Collins, and Gerry joked: “Michael Collins flying the Fianna Fail helicopter,” Gerry brought up his own camera too and decided to get good value out of the helicopter for the day, Gerry organized to take photographs down a little further along the coast including Alfie Spencer’s and his wife’s property, Peter took photos from a North, East, South and West view of the Property as the pilot tilted the machine to suit the photographer, we then flew up home to Ahullen where he carried out a similar exercise. Gerry also took him over Gorey town to take some photos to have for a possible need in the future. We also flew over a particularly unusual circular shaped feature at Killnahue, Gorey, Co. Wexford. Gerry told me he drew the horse trainer Jim Bolger’s attention to it many years before, because of its length. I sold this farm in 2000 through Gerry Slattery and Robert Ganly and unfortunately the sale fell through in 2001 due to the Foot and Mouth disease outbreak. Sadly, Gerry died near the end of November 2001 and my father died the following month 6th December 2001. Things were a bit slow after the .com bubble burst and as Mrs. Betty McCarthy correctly stated there was a Lull in land prices in 2002, around the end of 2003 things began to pick-up and I had suggested a higher asking price to Mr. Denis Howell and the Late Gerry’s daughter Ciara after it was mentioned that Butlers farm at Coolintaggart was steep enough to hang your coat on had brought a great price with David Quinn in November 2003. The Kilmichael Kilmurry property was gone a bit stale and we decided to go to David Quinn for a fresh start after he got on well with the Coolintaggart farm.
In February/ March 2004 a man with a Cockney accent pulled up in a lovely silver English Reg. Mercedes on the road, just as I was backing up from the sheep shed in my tractor and said hello to me, and we began to chat. He told me was buying Borleagh Manor which adjoins our farm, and asked me would I be interested in selling our farm to him and he would lease it back to me, I told him I would have to consult my wife first, as we had heard there had been a man interested in buying Borleagh from Ms Sue Bramall, and she was either thinking of or moving to France. We had heard also that he was buying a lot of houses in the area, Caroline had decided to ring Mr. Kevin O’ Doherty and Kevin thought he could be genuine, and as it happened nothing more came of it from our end and I had decided to go to David Quinn. Borleagh was also sold at auction 16th June 2004 to the Late Malachy Stone who had sold it to Sue Bramall around 1998 or’99 and had bought it back again. I believe the fake purchaser or spoofer went by the name of Buckingham after chatting to a local businessman an excellent hunting and shooting sportsman a few years ago who remembered it well.
I was impressed with David’s idea of the Low-key advert. David said it’s a bit like if people think there’s something wrong with a bullock or heifer, which perhaps may have been a touch lame, in the sale ring, that if the same animal is left and brought back a couple of weeks later will often sell very freely, David placed an advert in the classified section of the Farmer’s Journal which appeared on the 26th June 2004
, Journal Advert 26 June 04 Journal Advert 26 June 04I don’t think any of us could ever have imagined how the advert was going to work, and that it had landed just right underneath Nick Stafford’s We know now it was on the 1st September 2004, that Caroline spotted Nick Stafford’s C150-C250 acre farm wanted in any part of County Wexford for client. We now know the Advert David placed in The Farmers Journal landed right under Nick Stafford’s own advert and caught his attention. We decided to take advantage of the Advert and Caroline rang him he came up one Saturday to collect a map of the property to inspect it for his client and we chatted generally about property the day he called up to our home, he was talking about the late John Roberts who died in 2009 and in October 2004 he asked me would I meet his client John Hobson down at the farm and I wasn’t that far away in Arklow at the time, so I agreed to meet them out there at Kilmichael, John Hobson had a long wheelbase silver Toyota l Land cruiser jeep, and Nick Stafford had a maroon coloured Landrover Freelander jeep which I think was a 2002 Registration, I knew John fairly well from the time we both lived in Avoca. John is Deaf and mute but quite easy to communicate with. I thought John was just being a little silly when he wrote down that he had to get thirty million for his seventy acres in Rathdrum, as I had a fair idea of some of the land he had in a couple of different parts on the way up to Rathdrum. It was only in early February 2013 that I heard he had got 82.7 million for his land at Kilbride Arklow, which he sold to Mr. Bill Mulrooney. I had noticed that Stafford had another farm wanted advert 350-500 acre Residential in any part of County Wexford on the 6th October 2004 for his client with upwards of
5million to spend. He had an advert in the paper at the end of 2003 for small/ medium sized Residential holding also with condition of residence unimportant, must be overlooking a lake or the sea with up to 1 million available, stating we have a genuine cash client. He may have been referring to this when he asked us to meet a Kilkenny fellow, a client of his looking for land by the sea, Stafford didn’t think much of him ,but asked us to meet him just to keep him & his friend happy, and we could meet his real client Richard Mulcahy after and this, which would have happened shortly after Hobson late October November, and I would think we may have discussed money a little in December ’04 and probably took it easy over Christmas and started back in January ’05 with the big point of no commission being used to coax us to include the Farm Entitlements and Richard Mulcahy wanted to close in September 2005 when doing the deal in February ‘05 and he told us he was in Campbell catering in October 2005, and that normally weekends were a busy time around that time of the year because of catering in Croke Park, I knew Campbell catering did the catering for the N.E.T. Fertilizer factory in Arklow during the seventies , and Mr. Patrick Campbell had a big input into Bewley’s Cafés in Dublin and coffee. I was quite concerned about the amount of Farm Entitlements that were included in the sale and we were discussing this with Richard Mulcahy, I had made him a deferred offer but then Liam Young who had looked at the property around 2003 and earlier approached me in February 2006 and I had explained to him earlier I had sold and Paddy Casey called in one summer day in 2002 or 2003, and looked around but never went as far as discussing money. It was December 2005 that Stafford rang up looking for commission and began threatening me that he was worth twenty million and that I would be the fifth or sixth he had taken to court and had taken much bigger than me, when he had to pause and take his time counting the number of cases when he finally settled on it that I would be the sixth he will have taken to court and won cases against. Neither the I.A.V.I or the IPAV. would allow Stafford become a member of their organization. During 2001 he erected a brass plaque on his premises claiming dishonestly to be a member of the IPAV and I learned around 2012 or 2013 that an IPAV Board member had to write to him and order him to remove it for falsely claiming to be a member. Caroline and I employed five or six different auctioneers over the years and all were members of either the IPAV or IAVI, but never one that wasn’t.
One interesting thing I noticed after seeing one of the Ariel photographs of Kilmichael, was there were obvious parallel lines visible from fertilizer spreading as I had just bought a new Vicon twin Disc mounted fertilizer spreader for spreading 24 metres and I noticed I had forgotten to change the Gear settings from 12 metres to 24 metres in that field. 
Here is another Ariel Photo with a view from the North West looking South