Larger-than-life sheep farmer becomes an internet hit again

Two years ago, sheep farmer Joe Kelly became an unlikely internet sensation at the age of 76. Now he’s going ‘viral’ again, but this time as a work of art.

Images of the larger-than-life pensioner, with his long white hair and cowboy hat, have been lighting up social media again in recent days, thanks to a portrait drawn by Cork artist Leila Doherty.

Joe was one of three men captured on camera by Irish Examiner photographer Dan Linehan as they celebrated the reopening of the Top of Coom after their local pub, claimed to be the highest in Ireland, was destroyed in a devastating fire in 2012.

Dan’s video of the three men, featuring Joe feeding a lamb from a bottle, was watched more than 500,000 times on YouTube as viewers around the world attempted to decipher the dialect of the farmers from the mountainous area straddling the Cork-Kerry border. Indeed many wrongly assumed that Joe, Dan Kelleher, and Johnny McCarthy were conversing in Irish as they raised a glass to the end of their two-year drought without a pub in the locality, near the Gaeltacht village of Cúil Aodha.

Leila Doherty, an artist based in Burnfort, near Mallow, had never met Joe Kelly or visited the Top of Coom when she was commissioned to turn Dan Linehan’s photographs into artworks. Using pastel pencils, she recreated one scene of all three men in the bar, and another of Joe with the lamb under one arm, pint of stout clutched in the other hand.

And then she put the portrait of Joe on social media. “I don’t often put my pictures up on Faceboook, but he’s very distinctive and I thought the colours worked well,” said Leila, aged 24.

And over in Cúil Aodha Joe declared himself delighted with the likeness. “I think it’s bloody fine,” he said. “I do a bit of painting with the acrylics, but if I tried to paint a picture of myself I know I couldn’t do myself justice.”

He was equally delighted to find himself a hit on social media a second time around thanks to Leila’s artistic skills.And Dan’s verdict was that the drawing of Joe had “captured his character perfectly” and described the portrait version of his photograph as “magnificent”.

Dan was present again on Sunday, when the artist finally came face-to-face with the men whose expressions she had become so familiar with on paper. Leila made the journey out to meet Joe, Dan, and Johnny for the first time and to unveil her artwork — where else but at the bar in the mountains at the Top of Coom?