Joe Mahon is Irvinestown’s best-known ambassador and greatest PR man, well-known for thinking up all sorts of wacky ways to make sure the town he loves so well is in the public eye.
He comes from a clan who have made a great contribution to this can-do north Fermanagh town, with the Mahon family in the hotel business in this great cross-community town since the remarkable Joseph Mahon bought the premises back in 1883.
As local legends go, they don’t come any bigger than ‘Wee Joe’ Mahon – a real one-man-marketing machine.
This All-Ireland Cocktail Shaking Champion of Mahon’s Hotel is the man who has brought a singing dog, racing pigs, turkey trots, real leprechauns and wolf whistlers to the north Fermanagh festival in the highly popular Lady of the Lake Festival.
These are just some of the wacky stunts that have captured the hearts of the Fermanagh people and brought great joy and pleasure to the thousands of visitors who throng to Irvinestown for the ten-day event.
In 2016, Joe was the brains behind a pretty controversial sheep dung spitting competition that eventually attracted up to 40 contestants, and it continued in 2023. That year’s event got publicity all over the world.
“Naturally, it was dry dung spitting, but it generated great interest,” said Joe with a grin.
Sitting in the busy family hotel, Joe’s forensic memory reels off stories as good as any seanchaí.
He is a walking, talking encyclopaedia of his hometown, and he has some cracking yarns about his famous fellow townie – the late great Barney Curley, the bane of those creatures called ‘bookies’!
More than anyone else, Joe has put his beloved hometown on the world stage and has raised almost £1million for the town since his father started the Festival back in 1978.
2012 was a very special year for Joe’s beloved singing dog, Shep, which was celebrating his 12th birthday, so naturally Joe organised a street party for the canine which won the Rex Factor, paws down.
“Shep was born on July 12. His mother had nine pups, and they were drowned, and then Shep was born the next day on July 12.
“The 12th was in Ballinamallard that year, and I got the local Orange Lodge band to come back from the 12th.
“I dressed up as King Billy on a horse, and Shep followed me around, and the local Lodge finished off the party, and the whole town was wedged that day,” said the man who has a rare talent for “packing them in”.
“In 2012 we had the Twelfth in Irvinestown as part of the festival and we worked with the local Lodge in decorating the town, and had up red, white and blue flags for the day, and then took them down when it was over.
“It was a great day – everyone enjoyed themselves, and there was no trouble. We have always had very good cross-community relations in Irvinestown.
“In Irvinestown, there is an organisation called ‘The Trustees’. My grandfather was one of the founder members of it, and it was set up in 1916 when the market rights of the town came up for sale.
“Seven Catholics and seven Protestants got together, and they bought the market rights.
“Over the different years, they bought the Market Yard, the Old Creamery, and developed them over the years and rented property out.
‘That was the foundation stone of the town, and it has carried on ever since. It remains very active in the town.”
His genial marketing genius means that Irvinestown is never too far from the headlines, and he has mastered the difficult art of coming up with something new every summer.
But Joe comes from real business blue-blood stock. His grandfather, Joe Mahon, sold a pub in Ballyshannon and bought the present hotel site with 40 acres of land for £350 in 1883.
From that small beginning, their descendants have grown to be a major force in Irvinestown – a place that has always had exceptionally good cross-community relations.
As Joe explains: “The Mahons came from Ballymagroarty in County Donegal, and there are still headstones [there for the Mahons] and we always had a great affinity with the Ballymagroarty/Cashelard areas.
“We are here 141 years, and we had big celebrations here last year. The family was based where the hotel is, and Vincent, my daddy, was born here.”
But Joe’s grandfather, Joseph, was the man who began the business dynasty in Irvinestown.
“Joseph was born the youngest of ten children in the townland of Ballymagroarty, in 1867, and his parents were Patrick and Mary Mahon.
“Patrick was a schoolteacher and also owned the Erne Hotel in Ballyshannon, so the trade was in the family.
“Some time in the 1880s, Joseph and his brother, Hugh, left Ballymagroarty and walked over the mountain through the night with their boots under their arms, and arrived in Pettigo, where Charles Stuart Parnell was holding a rally.
“They continued to Belfast, and then to Liverpool, where they worked in bars.
“However, Joseph had stayed overnight in Irvinestown, and came back to buy a farm and the present hotel in 1883.
“Joseph married twice – to Margaret McKenna, with whom he had two children, and then to Minnie Montague, with whom he had ten more.”
Joe (Jnr.) added: “The family of 12 were Molly, Jim, Fr. Joe, Don, Nora, Fr. Dermot, Fr. Hugh, Vin, Dr. Des, Kevin, Eileen and Malachy, and they have all passed on.
“My father, Vin, was born in 1920 the eighth child of Joseph (Snr.), and the sixth child of Minnie Montague.
“He trained as a radio officer in Hull, Yorkshire, and went to work on the SS Canberra on the P and O Line.
“On the outbreak of World War Two, he joined the British Merchant Navy, as did his brothers, Jim and Don.
“Jim landed in New York after the war, and was killed in a hit and run by a car.
“Daddy’s boat was sunk three times, and Don sent a photo of the boat he was on to daddy, and he wrote, ‘The ship that Hitler could not sink’, and by the time daddy got the photo, Don’s ship had been hit. Don was later drowned, in 1941.
He continued: “Daddy was missing for eight weeks at the end of the war, and there was a radio in one of the rooms, and at 9pm every night, they used to read out the deaths of who were killed in the war.
“Granda and granny were sitting, waiting to hear his name read out, as they had not heard from him in eight weeks. And then, one Christmas Eve, my daddy appeared at the front door. He had made his own way back from Norway after his ship had been sunk.
“That was a very emotional time for granny and granda,” added Joe.
“During the Covid pandemic, I found old videos, and Stephen Lawn transferred them [to something we could watch today], and it was a video of the whole of Irvinestown.
“It showed my grandmother and grandfather sitting out in front of the hotel, and my grandfather died in 1951, and granny in 1961.
“After being torpedoed numerous times, my father joined the Trans-Atlantic Sea Plane base in County Clare, and was one of the first to guide the fledgling flying boat service from the USA to Shannon, and he came back to run the family hotel and farm.
“Like my grandfather Joe, Vin married twice. His first wife, Maisie Garrity, died of a brain haemorrhage in 1963, at the age of 38.
“He then married Maureen Kearns, and had three children, who run the hotel today – Paul, Ashling and myself.
“My father never spoke of his days in the Merchant Navy. But he always had a great interest in flying boats, new technology and industrial heritage, building up a collection of artefacts in the hotel when many others were throwing them out.
“He could type faster with two fingers than many with ten during his Morse Code training. And he started up the most successful Lady of the Lake Festival, which is continued by his family.”
Sitting in the busy family hotel, Joe’s forensic memory effortlessly reels off a stream of engrossing stories.
“Meanwhile the hotel grew steadily, and it took off during the war years. Irvinestown grew very much during the Second World War, as you had the US Air Base at Castle Archdale, which was just out the road.
“It was one of the few places, to this day, where the first part of the Remembrance Parade goes to the Catholic graveyard first. There are a lot of war graves up there.
“That is pretty unique, and there are quite several Americans buried up there. But Irvinestown has always had great cross-community relations.”
Today, the hotel which is also an interesting museum for local history is going as strong as ever.
“This is the third generation of Mahons to be in the hotel. There were 11 in my father’s family; I grew up here, and was born upstairs, in Room 4.
“All of the Mahons were born in Room 4, and I was the last of the Mahons to be born there.
“Two hours after I was born, I was passed around the bar, and I have been there ever since,” said 62- year-old Joe.
“From when we were children, all of us were lifting glasses around the bar. I remember P. and Laurence McMulkin, who were butchers in the town, and they used to get three bottles of Guinness and a Powers.
“P. would have got two bottles of Guinness, and Laurence got a Powers and a Guinness, and I used to bring it over to them on a seat that was called ‘P and Laurence’s seat’, and I got a penny of a tip.
“There were loads of characters in the town in those days and some big families.
“The McCarneys used to have a float in the Festival, and there were 13 children, and the sign they had on the float was, ‘Cheaper by the dozen’!
“Then you had the Curleys. I knew Barney well, and he was a great gambler, and a proud Irvinestown man, and he was once going on to be a Jesuit priest.
“He pulled off a great betting coup with a horse called ‘Yellow Sam’ in a National Hunt race in 1975, in a remote place called Bellewstown in County Meath.
“The horse was named after Barney’s father, who was called Yellow Sam!
Another great character was Danno Devanney, who won an All-Ireland JFC medal with Fermanagh in 1959. Joe saw at first-hand the respect he commanded in the county of their deadly rivals from Tyrone.
“I remember Irvinestown were playing Dromore in a U-16 match, and I took him [Devanney] down with me in the car.
“I went down, and I could not get over so many people who wanted to shake my hand.
“Ted Maye is another great local character as well. He writes plays for the local Festival, and we all have acted in it, and the money goes to charity.
“He is also involved as a Director in the Arc Healthy Living Centre, which promotes community wellbeing and involvement in all kinds of ways.”
After qualifying in Hotel Management, Joe came back home in the early 1980s and took over the family business after his father Vincent had passed away in 1979.
The bar is crammed with memorabilia, and Joe’s favourite is a horse tricycle behind the bar with a photograph of his father sitting on the horse in 1916.
So, what gives Mahon’s such a homely atmosphere? Joe says it’s the unique family atmosphere, as generations of the same Irvinestown families have worked there in a business that currently employs upwards of 50 staff.
“I was also very friendly with the Wattersons of the Royal Hotel in the centre of Omagh, and they are a family hotel as well, and when it was sold I think it did more harm to the town than the bomb in 1998.”
Joe and the hotel had the traumatic experience of a Continuity IRA bomb going off in 2000.
“We lost six bedrooms, lost the kitchen, and half of the restaurant. The one thing I will never forget is I put something in the paper saying, ‘We are closed for three weeks’.
“But everyone around the town, after two weeks, kept asking: ‘When are you opening?’, and I could not get over the amount of people who drove here from all over the country.
“It was like a big wake, and I could never get away from the front door, and it was a really moving gesture that I will never forget.”
Today, things are much more tranquil and prosperous these days.
“We have 25 bedrooms here, and we run 25 more over at Necarne Castle, and it is full every weekend.
“We put in a lift there recently for people who have been coming here for more than 40 years, but who are not able to climb the stairs.
“A lot of families have worked here for generations, like the McElholms, Kellys, and McGuigans, and there are a few generations of them, and that is the way it has been down through the years, as we employ local people.
“It is a very homely place, and we insist on carpet on the floor and in the bar, and is warmer and cosier than any type of wooden floor.
“If you look up the town, there are no empty shops, and the town is always busy.”
But how did Joe become involved in the famous Lady of the Lake Festival?
“My father wrote to the Council in 1978 looking for funding for a festival, and he got the same answer as I did – that was there was no money available.
“So, all the businesses in the town got together, and put their own money into it, and it has become a really great community event over the years.”
The Lady of the Lake was a symbol of plenty, and Paul Brady, whose mother was a McElholm from Irvinestown, headlined the first Festival back in 1978.
Joe got involved in the Festival in 1984-85, and has been its heartbeat ever since. His first big attraction for it was pig racing, in 1990.
It took all of his cajoling skills to persuade local farmers to rent out their precious porkies for a unique competition.
“At first they chased us, but we got around them gradually.”
Each pig was sponsored, and each business had to run with his or her pigs, and it was the first of its kind in the country.
But Joe’s wackiest scheme was when he took out a £30,000 loan from Lloyds of London as a £30,000 reward for a Leprechaun!
In more recent times, Joe has remained at the centre of the Lady of the Lake Festival with a variety of ideas for bringing visitors to the town – quite apart from the iconic hotel, which remains a mecca for Fermanagh, Tyrone and Donegal patrons at weekends.
Last year saw ‘Transformers Take Over’ the Lady of the Lake Annual Fancy Dress Parade on Thursday, July 13, with everyone encouraged to get working on their costumes and to ‘transform’ themselves.
The festival theme followed that the Transformers had crash landed on Earth and were taking over Irvinestown from Friday, July 7 to Sunday, July 16, which just so happened to coincide with the 44th Festival.
The annual truck run came back for the final day of the Festival, on Sunday, July 16, starting at the Bawnacre and travelling around Fermanagh, passing through Lisnarick, Ederney, Kesh, Enniskillen and Ballinamallard before returning to Irvinestown, with the run once again in aid of Marie Curie.
“I look forward to the trucks every year. We started doing the truck run 23 years ago, and over the years we have made more than £900,000 [for Marie Curie]. I’d love to hit £1million,” Joe said.
But Joe had to revive the sheep dung spitting competition just last year, as a German film crew were keen to film it.
“Ten of them came over here and made a film about the sheep dung spitting, and they stayed for a week. There have been 800,000 views [of their film] on Netflix, he claimed.
“It is balls of sheep dung that we gather up, and we dry them out in the boiler house, and put them in your mouth and see how far you can spit them, and it was on July 11 for the Fair Day last year.”
Meanwhile, the Festival has broken the world record for the largest number of lorries in one place at one time, when there were a total of 679 gathered in 2016, when the world record then had been 400.
Joe pointed out: “We did not register it as a world record, because we would have to dip into the money we raise for Marie Curie.”
This year’s Lady of the Lake Festival runs from July 11 to July 21. “The Twelfth Parade is in Irvinestown this year, so that will be even more interesting.”
Some of Joe’s schemes, you just could not make up – but the singular Joe Mahon did, and has been using his wit and inventiveness to help make his beloved native place into somewhere really special for many years.
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