The man with a plan bringing hurls in a van

THE IMF and EU own the deeds to the shop, our balance sheet isn’t looking too hot and the staff have long since clocked out but Ireland is open for business, our Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, is fond of saying.

When you get a phone call from Flan Marsh in Clare, you realise it actually is. And you’re usually left smiling by the time you hang up.

The Broadford man has featured in these pages before. He lost his once successful and honest roofing business when the Tiger stopped roaring and new houses no longer needed protecting.

Instead of kicking his heels around the house he set up a hurley-making workshop in his backyard and eventually developed a new technology that stops the ash splitting and spinning off dangerously in all directions, often prompting trips to A&E departments adjacent to hurling strongholds. His shatter-safe hurley was born and it’s kept him out of trouble since, providing as he does now equipment for the Banner senior hurlers and half the county besides.

Major League Baseball — who bleed money every time a spectator is cut by a broken bat — called him up in east Clare and he dispatched a parcel of sticks to New York, where they put them under their microscopes; CSI Semple Stadium.

He pushed one into the hand of GAA president Christy Cooney who visited a local pitch. In short, he’s open for business.

But, despite his busy year, Marsh is not now leaning on his hurley like a lazy corner back.

He rings me this week from outside a signmakers while, inside, they work on his new van. Or as he calls it ‘the world’s first mobile hurley-making unit’. The plan is to pull up at pitches throughout the country and make hurleys for players, young and old, while they train.

He’ll take the measurements, specification details, preferences from the players as well as a template of the old hurley, and by the time the few laps are run and the drills are drilled, there’s a new hurley waiting in the car park.

Where did you go this one from, I ask into the hands-free?

“I’m an entrepreneur — these things come naturally to me.” [Loud laughter from east Clare]

“I got a van off my brother Thomas,” he says, “We put two sanders in it, an extractor fan for the dust, a blower for the dust and I can plug the whole thing into any power point. And if there’s none, I have my own generator.

“It’s the right job altogether. I needed to think of something to be honest. What’s the point sitting in my workshop waiting for people to come to me with work? I’m bringing the mountain to Mohammad rather than waiting for Mohammad to come to the mountain.

“I can make a house call now to a gang of lads sharing a house, or go to a pitch or go to a kids’ party and they can watch me making the hurleys, cos they’re mystified by the process. They’re looking at me going ‘Jayze, what’s your man doing now?’”

I know what they mean. Marsh insists the service will be invaluable.

“I wanted to give something back to the GAA. It saves the mothers and fathers having to drive to hurley-makers around the place and dragging rakes of kids around the place to get a hurley.

“You’re paying €28 for a hurley plus the cost of diesel to go out to a workshop whereas you give me €25 and it’s into your hand, made while you wait.”

What if Ireland trades its way back to the good days and more houses sprout up throughout Clare and beyond? Will Marsh rip the sanders out of the back, strap a ladder to the roof-rack and back it into a building site again as a roofer?

“I’ll keep my head down and my heart up now. This is the way forward I reckon,” he says, looking instead, like his county’s hurlers, no further than Sunday’s match. He’ll park the newly-pimped-out van outside the stadium before the Tipperary game.

And what did he tell the signmaker to paint on his gifted van? “Marsh Shatter Safe Hurleys, my goal is to see you score your goal.” He pauses and continues: “Get your ash... in a flash”.

And there’s laughter and a smile again.

* See www.shattersafehurleys.com for more.

Contact: [e-mail] Twitter: @adrianrussell