Joe Ryan was born in London in 1985 and spent his first nine years in the East End, close enough to West Ham that he decided to support Chelsea instead. In 1994 he moved to Ballyfarnon with his mother and brother. An uncle and three cousins had come over the year before, his grandmother had a pub, and his mother took it on.

What he remembers of that childhood is space. Six children in sixth class, three boys and three girls, all of them running loose within reason. Huts built in fields half a mile from the house. Huts in the football pitch beside the school. Huts up the mountain. He says if his own two girls got a childhood like that he would be happy enough, minus a few of the later chapters.

Boyle, first through a Saturday morning

His introduction to Boyle was not the school. It was the Family Life Centre. After his parents separated he went to a Saturday morning group there for children whose parents had split up or died. School came in September 1998, when he walked into St Mary’s and announced he had never done Irish in national school. He had. He got away with it for six years.

His year in St Mary’s has since supplied this podcast with a fair chunk of its guests. Colm Degnan, Barry Cryan, Brian Battles, Dean and Joe were all in and around the same class, and as Joe pointed out, every one of them ended up self employed.

Fruit and veg, and then twenty years in Carrick

Two days before the transition year deadline he still had no work experience placement, so he walked up to the SuperValu and asked. He started that Monday on fruit and veg with Martin Walsh, better known as Stan. It went from work experience to part time, and then to a management course under Paul Kelly. Around 2003 or 2004 the store won the national Store of the Year, which was a serious thing at the time.

In July 2005 he started in MBNA in Carrick-on-Shannon, initially to save for a move to America that never happened. Twenty years later he is still there, now under the Avant Money name. When he started there were around 1,100 people working in the building. He describes the corn boils as something close to a bank holiday landing in the middle of the calendar: a marquee the size of the GAA pitch, chocolate fountains before anyone had chocolate fountains, a free bar, and the whole town of Carrick out afterwards.

“Whatever you put in, you get out.”

A conversation in a pub, and ten years of DJing

At Christmas 2005 Joe was talking away to Richie Burke after a night’s DJing and told him he would be great at it. He had never once thought about it before that conversation. In January Richie said he might have something in February, and by February 2006 Joe was behind the decks in the Anchorage. Richie and Stan showed him how to mix and how to talk on the mic, and he was gone.

It took him into the Super Sunday sessions, which he says he did not start and simply jumped onto around 2007. Twenty or thirty lads in blue and black T shirts taking over whatever pub had them, on bank holiday Sundays, occasionally heading for Sligo when the mood took them. There was no WhatsApp group. The system was a text to Darren Roddy that said “shots?”, because the old phone spell check turned pints into shots, and everyone knew to be in Regan’s twenty minutes after Mass.

His summary of the whole era is that nothing much happened and it was brilliant. A twenty first birthday, a bouncy castle in a half empty estate, people jumping out of top windows onto it, and a fine April day that people were still talking about years later.

Boyle Celtic

He played with the Boyle Celtic reserves from around 2010, reaching a final against Strand Reserves in Sligo in the first year and losing it. He can still list most of the squad from memory, which he does in the episode, with apologies to anyone left out. The regret is that the group never won anything together. He is still involved, now training the under six academy, and he is clear about what keeps the club going: people giving up their time, for decades, for nothing.

The coin flip

Ireland were playing a World Cup qualifier on a Wednesday night when Barry Simon asked Joe to come out to the Four P’s to watch it, and then asked him what he thought about Mattimoe’s. The pub had been closed for months. Barry did not want to take it on alone.

Joe went on holidays with his mind full of it. He downloaded a coin flip app and gave himself one throw. Heads he would take the pub, tails he would leave it. It landed on tails.

“I flipped it, it landed on tails, and I said I’ll take over the pub anyways.”

They opened on 15 December 2016. Neither of them had run a bar. Two nights before opening they were watching a YouTube video on how to change a keg. What they gained first, he says, was patience: things that would have had them raging in December 2016 barely registered by 2018.

The high point was Rock the Clock, run alongside Aaron in the Moylurg. A duck race, a family fun day, a bouncy castle, food and music up the town, and fireworks off the bridge. Joe remembers standing beside Barry looking up at a couple of hundred people on the bridge and thinking that two competing businesses had made that happen between them, which is not something you see in many towns.

Covid, both ways

The pub had been climbing every year since it opened. Then it stopped. Joe talks about the stop start of it, about the rule that you could not catch Covid if you had a meal in front of you, and about backing off a plan to serve food from the restaurant upstairs after a warning that they would be shut down for it. He would not do the same now.

At home it was the opposite. He and Grainne had just bought a house in Corrigeenroe, their eldest daughter was only a few months old, the summer of 2020 was wall to wall sunshine, and he was working from home for the first time. He calls it the best time of his life without hedging it. He still works from home three days a week.

Mattimoe’s closed at the end of 2022. Barry and his wife were expecting their fourth child, the lease was up, the pub had gone on the market, and Joe kept it going alone from September to December before calling it. Another child was on the way. He says if he had stayed any longer he would have burned out.

“I just hope that in years to come Mattimoe’s is talked about as fondly as those pubs were.”

What people get wrong about Boyle

Working in Carrick for twenty years means talking to people from Longford, Sligo and Cavan, and Joe has heard the same thing from a lot of them: that Boyle is a rough town. He does not accept it. The people are the thing outsiders are wary of, and the people are the best thing about the place. He reckons you could take two hours walking from King House to the Roscommon Herald without doing anything except talking.

He also noticed something behind the bar. A person from Boyle can list what is wrong with the town all day. Let somebody from outside it say the same words and the shutters come down.

Starting again

Joe and Grainne married in July 2022 and their own wedding did not go the way they hoped. A few months later, with the pub closing, they decided they could do a better job themselves. Luxury Wedding Supplies started in 2023: a photo booth, an audio guest book where guests leave voice messages for the couple, a sweet cart, LED letters and a post box for cards. They cover the country, and Joe has done Kilkenny, Castlebar and Donegal in a single weekend.

The first year was slow. The assumption that a Facebook post would fill the diary lasted about as long as it deserved to. Getting listed on Weddings Online changed it, and the business is now a finalist in two categories at their awards, Photo Booth of the Year and Newcomer of the Year. Bookings this year passed last year’s total before the year was out.

The detail he is proudest of is small. They design the photo print backgrounds themselves and ask couples to send on their wedding invitations so the design can match. At a wedding in Ashford Castle the bride, who had not booked the booth herself, walked up and asked if that was from her invite. He says that was nearly better than getting paid.

He also did the photo booth at the opening of the Boyle Arts Festival, with Chris O’Dowd in front of it, and spent months quietly working out the wittiest Bridesmaids line he could post. It did not go viral. His verdict on that is one of the most useful things in the episode: people don’t care, and the answer is one couple at a wedding seeing your booth and booking it for their own.

Timestamps

00:00 Welcome and where it all started

00:13 Born in London, moving to Ballyfarnon in 1994

01:28 A village childhood: huts, fields and six in sixth class

02:53 National school in Ballyfarnon

03:32 St Mary’s, the Family Life Centre and getting out of Irish

05:58 The class of Boyle: Colm Degnan, Barry Cryan, Brian Battles, Dean

06:24 Twenty years in MBNA and Avant Money

07:21 The corn boils in Carrick

11:06 Work experience in the SuperValu and the national Store of the Year

13:14 Becoming a DJ with Richie Burke and Party Time

15:14 The Super Sunday sessions

20:15 Stunts, Bebo and the Jackass years

22:16 Boyle Celtic reserves and coaching the under sixes

26:25 The coin flip that opened Mattimoe’s Bar

29:31 Learning the trade and learning patience

30:00 Rock the Clock and bringing life back to the town

33:24 Covid: the pub, the divide and the best summer of his life

37:52 Closing the doors at the end of 2022

40:07 Characters, and what people really talk about

45:03 Boyle’s reputation and Boyle’s reality

48:32 Starting Luxury Wedding Supplies

52:05 Competition, awards and getting the name out

58:10 Chris O’Dowd, the photo booth and the myth of going viral

01:02:40 What comes next

01:06:10 Tadgh Griffin, the Avengers and a lorry lit up like a Christmas tree

Guest Bio

Joe Ryan is a Boyle businessman and former publican. He spent twenty years working in Carrick-on-Shannon with MBNA and Avant Money, DJed around the northwest for the guts of a decade, and ran Mattimoe’s Bar on Bridge Street from 2016 to 2022.

He now runs Luxury Wedding Supplies, a nationwide wedding services business, and coaches the under six academy at Boyle Celtic.