Farmer Sean Gleeson from Terryglass , Co. Tipperary, is not only an accomplished musician, playing all around the midlands and abroad, but he has another string to his bow in being a farmer carpenter, making and repairing traditional furniture.
Gleeson has made furniture such as tables, cabinets and stools and also repairs pieces of vernacular furniture, including settle beds, dressers and chairs when he has the time.
With a tradition of wheelwrights and carpentry in the family, he was encouraged to repair traditional pieces by his friend and neighbour, Tony Donoghue, retaining as much of the original as possible.
Pieces can languish in sheds for decades and people generally don’t see the value of them, according to Gleeson. Yet they can be repaired without involving a lot of time or money, he said. He currently has some dressers waiting to be restored.
Farmer carpenters were very common in the past, according to Donoghue, formerly a zoologist in the Natural History Museum in London who has been studying Irish vernacular furniture for over 20 years.
He is a contributor to the popular Facebook page, Irish Vernacular Furniture, and showcased the topic in his stop-motion animated short film ‘Irish Folk Furniture’ which took the coveted short-film jury prize for animation at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013.
“In most rural areas there wasn’t the clients for a cabinet maker. The tradition was always for farmer carpenters to repair their neighbour’s furniture.
“Simple furniture made simply by a local fellow was the norm. Many dressers, for example, were held together with nails, not the joints of a cabinet maker. It was the same too with the style and the painting. This often was local and surprisingly different from even neighbouring counties,” said Donoghue.
“In 2003, I surveyed all the vernacular furniture of my parish. Of 53 properties found to have vernacular furniture in my parish, 38 had open or glazed dressers.
“Of these, 13 were still in use in the house, the other 25 were in sheds or uninhabited houses. Many survived purely because they were useful for storing tools, animal medicine or cans of oil. Settle beds, by comparison, didn’t fare so well.
“For the whole parish, only one has survived.
“Even Sean was surprised at how easy it was to bring historic family items back into a useable state,” said Donoghue, who enjoys the repair and reuse of our rural heritage,” he said.