Sad farewell to ‘Rolls Royce of bacon’

FOR 28 years Monica O’Brien worked with the Galtee Meats plant in Mitchelstown, first as an office employee and in recent times as a pig supplier with husband Rory O’Brien.

Yesterday brought the departure of the last few dozen employees of the once-landmark bacon factory, represented a heartbreaking day for such locals, brimful of memories of the old co-operative days, when upwards of a thousand were employed by the Dairygold business.

“It’s a disgrace what’s happening now,” said Monica O’Brien yesterday. “This was a huge part of the community and it’s devastating to see it closing down.”

Bacon production is now all but history in Mitchelstown, but other parts of the Dairygold business remain such as cheddar cheese production, dairy spreads and processed cheese. However, Monica predicted: “Mark my words, in two years there won’t be any cheese made in Mitchelstown either.”

Living “out the road”, Monica and Rory were used to walking up to 1,000 pigs into the Galtee plant each week. Now any pigs they fatten have to be sent up to the North, or some other far-flung part of the island.

Rory O’Brien estimated that about 60% of the pigs processed in Mitchelstown, during the busy times, came from farms within a 12-mile radius, with much of the rest coming from west Cork or not much further away. “There were certainly a lot of people here in this region who were putting in a thousand pigs a week. The whole economy here was based on the pig industry. When they started making cheese here, one of the by-products was the whey and that was terrific feed for the pigs.”

That was how the pig industry took off in the area, with farmers and factory employees contributing to an economic arrangement which was beneficial to everybody, under the guidance of the first manager Edwin Cussen.

“There was a fantastic community spirit in the factory,” added Monica O’Brien. “I remember people dressing up for Hallowe’en dances.”

An employee for 29 years, first in the boning hall and then as procuring manager, John O’Brien said that Mitchelstown and Galtee became bywords for quality food, throughout Ireland and beyond. “I was an inter-county referee and I used to travel a lot and when you’d mention Mitchelstown, the first thing they’d say to you was that it was the home of good cheese.”

He described Galtee as “the Rolls Royce of bacon”, built up as a hugely successful brand since the early years of the co-op. “It was always the envy of the bacon industry. Everyone in Mitchelstown would have worked in the factory, or would have had someone working in the factory at some stage.”