What John B Keane talent will pen the Letters of a West Cork Auctioneer for the late Charlie McCarthy?

Tommy Barker finds some synchronicity in story-telling for all ages

The late West Cork auctioneer Charles P McCarthy from Skibbereen; A Squash and a Squeeze by Julia Donaldson and Alex Scheffler

Births, deaths, and marriages are the core of our human essence: Where would we be without the first, the third as ‘pairings’ is discretionary at least, and the second comes to us all.

The same trio of life events also play out big style in how we live, where we live, in newspaper columns and in the wider property market too.

Until a few unconnected deaths occurred in the past week (a school mate from the 1970s, and the widely-known West Cork estate agent Charlie McCarthy: See below), this monthly column was shaping up on the theme of upsizing/ downsizing.

It was headed that way, after getting a copy of the children’s book A Squash and a Squeeze, about a woman who grumbled “there’s not enough room in my house.” The warm-hearted, slightly bonkers fable and its unlikely resolution to her space/storage dilemma (to use the property parlance) is by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, the same duo who later wrote the best-selling The Gruffalo back more than a quarter of a century ago.

You might have heard of it?

The Gruffalo only sold over 17 million copies: it was translated into over 100 languages, including in Irish and titled ‘An Garbhán’, by the poet Gabriel Rosenstock, being published by An Gúm back in 2000, the year after it first came out.

Coincidentally, a related new title, Gruffalo Granny, came out this September by the same warm-hearted Donaldson/Scheffler duo, and will ensure that your columnist — as a grandparent to an 18-month old — will have to reinvest in the entire Gruffalo canon, and more.

It prompted random rambles down memory lane for this property reporter, including reading books to my own children fadó fadó... books by UK couple, Colin and Jacqui Hawkins who later featured in these pages when they sold their Victorian home Duncarrig House in Summercove, Kinsale back around 2011.

Ironically, one of the Hawkins’ many titles was Whose House? ... Another day’s column perhaps?

In the midst of this mental meandering came news of the death last weekend of one of West Cork’s best-known auctioneers, Charles P McCarthy, to give him his company’s trading title.

In the property game as Charles P since 1968, he was Charlie to everyone else, irrespective of their relationship to him: family, friends, property buyers, vendors, British Lords, Irish rebels, castle keepers, cottage dwellers, island owners, and rival estate agents.

And, he was Charlie to journalists and to writers too, across Ireland, the UK and wider afield, given that his field and fiefdom was wonderous West Cork, an easy place to sell and tell tales about.

If the late and great John B Keane were to have met Charlie, he’d have knocked great craic out of him, lifted some of his expressions, heard yarns to match Keane’s classic The Field.

Perhaps Keane could have added Letters of an Irish Auctioneer to his series which began with Letters of a Successful TD, followed by Letters of an Irish Parish Priest/Love-Hungry Farmer/Country Postman/ Matchmaker and more.

However, Charlie caused problems for this writer, given my starting-off brief in the mid-1990s was the burgeoning property market, with a focus on Munster, Cork and, on Charlie’s ‘back yard’, West Cork, which for years he had dominated, where some of the best stories (and properties, and sales) were to be had.

I was never stuck for a story and background briefing with Charlie and, bar when he had a professional obligation to confidentiality, he’d talk and entertain and inform and generate great copy and quotes.

My problem was that Charlie would talk to anyone, including all my newspaper rivals; we weren’t ‘exclusive’, to use that dating term, but I’d like to think we had a good rapport.

Prior to my arrival covering property, Charlie McCarthy had already been a phenomenal contact for property journos and editors like Cliodhna O’Donoghue in the Irish Independent, Orna Mulcahy in the Irish Times, Mark Keenan across many titles including the Sunday Times, Gillian Nellis in the Sunday Business Post and many others.

His name was ‘out there’ in Irish and UK media as having a finger on the pulse, and having celebrity names, power-brokers and multi-millionaire money-bags in whatever he had as a little black book of clients and contacts.

Charlie was a social networker before that term got debased.

He was old school too, having been generations in the selling business. His father had had a Morris Minor dealership in Skibbereen for a period, recalling earlier decades when country auctioneers might also have been publicans, and undertakers and other ‘key’ roles in small and intimate communities.

I got to know dozens of the breed right across the country in the mid/late 1990s as a ‘foxer’ job I had was doing a series of interviews nationwide for the auctioneers’ body the IAVI (now, morphed into the SCSI) for their End of Year property market survey.

That report was considered ‘authoritative’ for the time, matched by statistical surveys and a repetitive theme in the late ‘90s was commenting on double digit house price inflation and commenting ‘this can’t last.’ (it did, until it didn’t, with a bang, around 2007/2008…)

Thankfully someone else did the statistics crunching for house types, regional variations, land values and con-acre letting, investment yields, industrial lettings, the hospitality sector, etc.

I did the interviews and writing, each late autumn phoning 60-75 estate agents nationwide for the task in hand and a 10,000 word report with headlines that used to make national news.

The country has since heaved, literally and metaphorically, with property market comment, reports, stats and shocks.

My memory of those late 1990s reports was of a simpler time but, more rewarding, of a steep learning curve and chats with incredible characters in the profession.

Many of those interviewees have since passed on — like the late John P Younge who specialised in pub sales to mention just one here.

Skibbereen-based and worldly-wise, Cork’s Charlie McCarthy was one of the best of those interviewed and of his peers, reflected by the crowds at his funeral and wake at his family home on Skib’s North Street, which filled the street on a wet evening, and prompted 1,000 Charlie McCarthy stories.

If only, if only, there was a Letters of a West Cork Auctioneer…

Hmmm….