Popular Cashel artisan butchers are keeping it in the family

Set on Friar Street in the heart of Cashel, O’Dwyer’s Butcher’s Shop is a bustling and friendly family business run by Martin and Marion O’Dwyer for almost 50 years.
The kind of place you’ll bump into someone you know and have a chat as you select steaks or lamb chops for your evening meal.

On the far side of the shop is a long butcher’s counter, on the other a line of refrigerators with artisan cuts of meat, prepared and ready to cook.

Along the back wall is a deli counter and in the centre of the shop you find artisan breads, local honey, jams and chutneys as well as fresh fruit and vegetables. It is a foodie heaven.

I have come to meet father and daughter, Martin and Una O’Dwyer. Una’s company, The Butcher’s Daughter, produces black and white puddings, and sausages from recipes developed in her family’s butcher’s shop.

CRAFT BUTCHERS
Both Una and her younger sister Fiona, who also works in the shop, are members of Craft Butchers of Ireland. A farming family, they supply their own beef from their farm just outside Cashel on the Boherlahan road.
It all started in 1967 when sixteen-year-old Martin became an apprentice butcher with Tommy St John in Thurles.

“I served my time there for four and half years at two pounds a week. You got a week’s holidays and the bank holiday Mondays. Once a week there was a half-day at 4 o’clock. At Christmas time Tommy would hand you a ten-shilling note. You could be killing turkeys and geese until 1 and 2 o’clock in the morning,” says Martin. “Tommy was a great mentor and I learned all my butchering skills there,” he said.
Martin and Marion opened the shop in Friar Street in 1973, the year Ireland joined the European Economic Community. They had been looking around for a place in Cashel for some time and happened to see a For Sale sign in the window of a private house on Friar Street. “I did the best I could to make a deal with them,” says Martin. “He was happy and I was happy.”
The butcher trade at that time was much simpler. Every butcher killed their own beef, lamb, and pork. There was very little chicken; people killed their own birds.

For the first five years Martin killed the animals and pigs at an abattoir in Templemore. Then they bought the land where they are now and built their own abattoir, and a bigger abattoir in the late 1980s.

Una remembers working in the abattoir when she was nine or ten.
“That time the animals were skinned on the ground before the carcass was hung up,” she says.
“I remember learning how to skin. Cutting right up to the hide and keeping the animal sterile by making sure the skin was rolling back away from the cut.”

NEW APPROACHES
Una was around ten or eleven when new regulations came in requiring cattle to hang before skinning them. She remembers thinking, “What are we going to do? How are we going to do that? But you learn that there are always new approaches to doing something.”

The new regulations meant that along with having to hang the cattle they could not kill pigs in the cattle abattoir. It was either close it down and buy in from the factories or build again. So, Martin built a new abattoir where they are now, just for cattle and sheep and they buy in the pork.

As well as changes in regulations, customer tastes were changing too. The O’Dwyers adapted to those changes as they came. At one time animal organs were in great demand.
“You wouldn’t have one scrap of them left,” Martin recalls.
“There’d be sheep killed once a week, but you couldn’t put all the livers out on the counter. You had to hold some or they’d be gone, and the regular customers would be left short. And now nobody wants them.”

Martin was one of the first butchers to present oven-ready roast rolls of beef. It began from a conversation while Marion was getting the Sunday roast ready. She suggested doing it in the shop. “I was well trained as a butcher,” Martin says. “We were always trying to get better and better, Marion and I. We never stopped trying to come up with something new.
“Marion never stops that, she is always trying and thinking of new ways.”

AMBITIOUS
Much bigger butchers were rejecting the very idea of presenting oven-ready. “Traditional butchering was changing and we were ambitious to be the best we could be,” he says, to which Una adds, “You were always looking for new ideas.”
One such new item in the shop are the beef truffles which are beef mince with a centre of cheese and herbs. “Grand for someone looking for something quick to cook after a day’s work. Put them in the oven and 20 minutes later they’re done, and they’re lovely,” he says.

Martin notices that “A lot of men come in now and try different things and would ask how to cook them. A man came in there today and was asking how to cook something like a stir-fry. I told him to go down to Marion there at the cash and ask her and be sure to follow what she says. She showed him the vegetables and flavourings in the shop. He was as happy as Larry going out.”
“It’s good to have some fresh vegetables there for people. There’s nothing like fresh food or vegetables. We have other products as well, local honey and jams. The nearer you can get honey to your own house the better.”

QUALITY OF THE MEAT
But the quality of the meat is the most important part of what the customer gets and how the animal is treated is crucial to that.
“Animal welfare is very important to us. It’s a bonus for the shop that our animals go straight to the abattoir from our farm. No food miles there,” Martin says.
“The consumer wants to be able to go into the shop and get their meat; but they want to see the integrity coming behind it.”
Having learned it from her father, respect for animals is a value Una is keen to pass on to her children. “I was out with the lads lately and there was a man hunting the cattle along the road. He was on a quad and they running. I told the lads, ‘You’ll never see Grandad on a quad at the cattle,” says Una.
She recalls absorbing the farm and butcher skills as a child.
“There were four of us, four daughters. We lived over the shop and it was normal to be working in it. I particularly enjoyed it, and I did Food Science and Technology in UCC.” The values and skills she had absorbed from Martin and Marion enabled her to foster and direct her
Food Science knowledge. The butcher trade had changed with many butchers closing their abattoirs. They bought in the cuts that they wanted and no longer needed to make sausages from the off-cuts.

“We always made our own sausages, so when I came back from college, I took over the sausage end of it. While I was using Martin’s machines and electricity, I was buying the ingredients and selling the sausages back to him, just to see how well it would work for me. That’s how I started,” says Una, “selling to other butchers, slowly but surely. To see if there was a business in it. With Martin in the trade, he knew a lot of butchers and so I got a lot of feedback.”

SAUSAGES
Una tells me that Seán Kelly in Newport was making puddings and sausages as well and was very helpful. Butchers are open enough to each other and support someone starting out. Now The Butcher’s Daughter range of sausages, and black and white puddings can be found in outlets from Dunnes Stores, FRESH foods and Nolan’s of Clontarf, and multiple shops in Munster. Such is their renown that many customers travel great distances to buy their sausages. Una’s hard work and skill have been rewarded, learned from her family’s business, O’Dwyer’s Butcher’s in the shadow of the Rock of Cashel. The values she learned from her parents are being passed on to her own children, a whole new generation of butchers to come, perhaps the butcher’s grandchildren.