Cork artist Susan Mulcahy created the cover art for this year’s Holly Bough. She spoke to MARY CORCORAN about the inspiration behind the cover, her memories of Christmas growing up, and the unwavering support from her family in following her dreams.

Drawing has been a part of life for Cork woman Susan Mulcahy for as long as she can remember. “I suppose since I was a child, I’ve been drawing.

Me and my sister used to have our whole room covered in different drawings, like, every part of the wall.

My dad used to come down and tell us stories at night, and he used to look at all the different pictures, and he’d build stories with all the different characters we had on the wall,” says Susan.“We were always making magazines, doing logos.

We were obsessed with art. It was my favourite thing in school.”After the Leaving Cert, Susan decided to pursue a qualification in graphic design at MTU.“It was the best course, and I made all my friends there,” she recalls. “I loved it and it made my art become something practical that I could turn into a job.”While Susan was passionate about her course, she says that after college she didn’t have the confidence to immediately work in the area.

She had a job she really enjoyed in Brown Thomas, and she worked there for a number of years.

During a two-week holiday one summer, she decided to set up a wedding invitation business on Etsy. “I think I only sold one set of wedding invitations off it, but a couple of days later, one of my friends from college who spotted it, told me they were looking for a graphic designer in the company he was working for that did wedding stationery too,” says Susan. It was serendipitous. “Within a week of posting that Etsy listing, I was now suddenly a graphic designer.”Susan recalls her time at Wedding Scribblers and Babelfís as “the golden years”.

She became studio director, and says her confidence as a designer flourished.However, when the covid pandemic hit, she found working from home without the team a challenge.

In the evenings, Susan started to draw again, something she says she didn’t have time to do before the pandemic. She decided to set up an Instagram to showcase her pieces, and said that it was something of a surprise when people started wanting to buy her prints.

As interest grew, she started to rethink her career. “I took another two weeks off, and I decided to build a range of products for my first pop-up shop, which wasn’t really a pop-up shop at all. It was actually a car boot sale in Fountainstown in the middle of a car park. I built up a range of stuff, and I set up my stall next to a big, huge puddle. For the first hour, people were only asking if they could buy the fake plants that I had on the table and I was mortified. But actually, then it was like a really successful day. Lots of people bought lots of stuff, and it went from there,” said Susan.

It gave the artist the push to build a collection, and after a year of creating new works alongside working as a graphic designer, Susan decided to take a leap of faith and turn Saucy Pups into a full-time endeavour.

Four weeks later, she opened her first pop-up shop in Douglas Village shopping centre, something she says she couldn’t have done without the support of her family. “I had to design everything that went into the shop, the whole shop itself.

All the fixtures and fittings we were building in my kitchen. Everyone was on packing duty. That shop was a real family thing. They were helping me with deliveries and building everything and working behind the counter and stacking this up and everything,” she recalls.

Susan continues to run regular pop-ups, but since then has also had plenty of commissions including murals and stairwells, corporate projects, and homeware lines, in addition to her online shop.

Today, her distinctive work is recognisable by her use of bright colours and detailed patterns.“I like putting details into things. I like hiding details, hiding myself or people I know, or my dogs,” she says.

While Susan does much of her sketching on an iPad, she says her projects always start with a pen and paper. “For me, I think when you go straight to digital, your brain stops being creative.

I need to like scribble things down on paper first.”The process for creating the Holly Bough cover started with taking pictures of the Lough.“I went out, and I took some photos just for reference, but I could picture in my head exactly what I wanted it to look like. I sketched it out on a piece of paper first just to get the composition and the layout the way I wanted it, and then I moved to my iPad,” explained Susan.

The process involves building layers and added in all the small details like the feathers on the geese. “My vision of it was that it was the Lough without any people, which is actually unusual for me. I normally have people bustling around in the background, but I wanted this to be like very early on a Christmas morning when it’s just the ducks and the geese out there. And I just thought it’d be fun that they’d all be wearing Christmas hats and that they’d be all having their own little Christmas while it’s like still and the air is crispy and there’s nobody around.”

Susan vividly remembers driving past the Lough as a child at Christmas after her family would visit friends or relatives. “The Christmas lights in the crib are on, and the little kind of lanterns all around are lit, and it just gives me Central Park vibes with the lighting at night. And it’s always just a cosy feeling of, do you know that song, Driving Home for Christmas? They’re all kind of tied together in my head, just that feeling of being young, going home, and you’re cosy in the backseat of the car, and it’s Christmas time, and like the air feels like it’s Christmas time.

It’s all very exciting.”Family is central to Susan’s memories of Christmas, and her favourite memories bring her back to her family home.“My mum used to bake loads of Christmas cakes. The house used to always be smelling lovely and kind of citrusy and with warm, steaminess coming out of the kitchen, and you’d have to be really quiet, because, if you made any noise, the cakes would drop.”

Today, her family continues to be a huge support. “My family are the best part of my whole life...I have two brothers, Peter and Paul, and my sister, Helen; she’s like the powerhouse behind everything. She’s amazing... And my dad, like everything for all of the shops that I did, like he dropped everything. He was building units. My dad’s amazing.” Susan says her mum, who passed away in recent years, was always her biggest supporter. “She’s the most important person to me as well. And everything I do, I do for her.” Creating the cover for this year’s Holly Bough is a great source of pride for Susan.

“Seeing the covers by Jason O’Gorman and Fiona Foley, I thought it was so cool. I had my eyes set on it for years and thought, wouldn’t I love to do something like that. It’s like being a part of history of Cork. It’s genuinely an honour.”

See www.saucypups.com

Shane Lehane takes a trip down memory lane and explains why he believes the pub holds such an important place in the hearts of so many.

At Christmastime, my mind is drawn to what were once mainstays of the Cork landscape and experience, but which have somehow, one by one, faded into the ether, residing now only in fond memories.

I think about Norvan’s on the corner of Princes Street with its array of dried fruits and the wafting smells of coffee, not far from the tiered terrines of cream cakes in Thompson’s further down the street. The hustle and bustle of the multitudes in white coats in O’Donovan’s, serving the throngs buying their hams and turkeys.

I can picture the crib in Tedcastle’s window, opposite the Statue and just across the road, Cudmore’s selling its neatly stacked array of cigarettes and sweets, beside the Old Bridge Restaurant and the Swan and Cygnet. Kilgrew’s for tricycles, Smith’s Stores for toys, Mockler’s for furs, Day’s for fishing tackle, all once formed part of the Cork Christmas gambol.

A favourite was Madden’s delicatessen on Bridge Street where my father Tadg, with his steady hand and imagination, painted snowmen and snowflakes on the windows for the festive season.

In this memory sketch of my beloved Cork, there rests but a few venues that meet the standard for qualifying as pure, tried-and-tested, Cork establishments. I will include on my list, Bradleys on the North Main Street, Cronin’s Menswear on Oliver Plunkett Street and what, for me, is a refuge from reality and the most convivial pub in Cork, The Long Valley.

The present proprietor of The Long Valley, the endearing and unassuming Peadar Moynihan, will, in the forthcoming year, celebrate 100 years since the Moynihan family took charge of this city centre oasis. While the Dublin Joycean set might well laud Davy Byrne’s or Mulligan’s as classic eclectic Dublin haunts, Cork can boast its own haven of eccentricity and character in its literary and artistic retreat, ‘the Valley’.

The long narrow alleyway of the bar has, over the years, welcomed the full gambit of diverse Corkonians, whether donkey-jacketed coalmen, Evening Echo and Holly Bough vendors, wigged barristers, RTÉ presenters or bereted and bearded poets.

Peadar’s grandfather, John Moynihan, born in Killarney (1883-1955), worked in the family’s tailoring business in Cork having served his time in Saville Row, London, becoming a master tailor. The Moynihan’s tailoring business was located at the corner of Winthrop Street and Oliver Plunkett Street with its distinctive rounded façade (now Vodafone).

In 1927, John changed profession, invested in the pub two doors down and set to work as a publican at No. 10 Winthrop Street. The Long Valley was born.

The following year, in 1928, when the RMS Celtic hit the rocks at Roche’s Point, a fine table and an exquisite set of doors with decorative glass panels, salvaged from the wreck, found their way to the bar. Since then, a diverse range of now-vintage mirrors proclaiming spirit and beer brands, choice artworks, sculptural heads, prints and photographs have continued to fill the space to create its defining ambiance and character.

While many come to The Long Valley to enjoy their pint of Murphy’s or Beamish – (Guinness has always been lower in the pecking order) – most will come at lunchtime for the speciality of the house, the sandwich. The maxim ‘do the simple things well’ is at the very heart of The Long Valley’s famous sandwich-making prowess. Humphrey’s wife Rita (née Byrne), originally from Donoughmore, served her time under the mentoring eye of the much-admired manager of the Metropole Hotel, Douglas Vance.

Peadar remembers Rita speaking of her time there during the filming of Moby Dick in Youghal in 1954, and when at the Film Festival, the English actress Dawn Addams requested to have her bathtub filled with milk. Vance, unfazed by celebrity, refused the request on the basis of sinful waste. Rita inherited Vance’s work ethic and meticulous attention to detail. When she and Humphrey took over The Long Valley in 1955, the staff were attired in their signature white chefs’ coats and long black aprons.

Rita sourced the best and freshest of ingredients, the simple legacy that is still the open secret of the famous Long Valley sandwich. Over the years, steaming fresh loaves of quality handmade baker’s bread from Thompson’s, Larry McCarthy’s, Abernethy’s and of late, Jack Cuthbert, is the basis for this culinary doorstop showstopper.

The bread was sliced thickly by hand on the old meat slicer in the bar, while today Peadar has modified a modern slicing machine in the kitchen upstairs, removing every second slicing blade, to ensure the same double thickness in each tranche of bread.
The English Market has been the source of the meats; roast beef, corned beef, spiced beef, turkey, chicken and ham. Cahill’s Butchers in Ballintemple were also noted suppliers and the prime cuts would be roasted or boiled the day before and when cold, sliced fresh for the sandwiches.

I remember waiting patiently for the corned beef to be brought down the steep stairs from the kitchen above.
If there is a secret ingredient for the sandwiches, it rests with the egg mayonnaise.
It was Jim Jeffers who would arrive daily with a case of eggs, and his arrival used to be jokingly serenaded by Peadar’s late brother Seán, singing the Beatles’ line ‘here comes the egg man’.
Rounds of mature cheddar, Spanish onions, fresh heads of lettuce, and rosy-red tomatoes and other choice ingredients are all carefully prepared.

Peadar’s daughter Amy, who recently graduated from art college, is the fourth generation of the Moynihan family to serve behind the counter. Amy’s mother Mary also served her time there. Peadar emphasises that the Valley has always been blessed with tremendously hard-working and long-serving members of staff, not least amongst them, Marguerite Crean and Paul Downey. They join a long line of now-retired, loyal employees such as Anne O’Callaghan and the late Rose Mannion. Each has contributed to keeping the steadfast and special Moynihan sandwich tradition alive and well.

In late November, the traditional Christmas spiced beef would always, and still does make its time-honoured appearance, and by December 8, the gentle tones of Perry Como and a host of Christmas crooners fill the air. Peadar’s musical Spotify penchants reveal a serious over-devotion to Van Morrison, but such proclivity is mild when compared to the musical fanaticism of his father Humphrey.

An advert on the Cork Examiner on December 15, 1931 proclaims that Pigott’s of Patrick Street installed the ‘World’s Greatest Radio-Gram “H.M.V. No. 531 Superhet, 9 Valves, Automatic Record Change at The Long Valley Saloon Winthrop Street’.

It was on this or a subsequent electrical sound system that Humphrey took the music to a new level. With an air of eccentric panache, he characterised the Valley experience by blaring his favourite pieces from Wagner and his beloved German marching tunes at full volume.

My old pal Lucy Phelan worked for many years behind the bar in the Valley, and she was partly responsible for it becoming a spot for the School of Art students. Likewise, in his student days, the renowned journalist Fergal Keane worked as a barman, and the Valley was a favourite haunt of generations of UCC students and staff.

There is the account of the UCC student who, when writing home for additional financial assistance, used to placate his doting mother by reassuring her that he spent all of his spare time ‘walking in The Long Valley’. The celebrated journalist Con Houlihan was another who spent much of his student days ‘studying’ in the Valley.

He wrote ‘in the heart of Cork City there is a tavern called The Long Valley and in the years after Hitler’s war, if you wanted to staff a university, you needn’t have gone further than the downstairs bar. Overhead, the drink was a few precious pence dearer.’

The ‘Hayloft’ upstairs came into its own in 1945 when it was remodelled as an American Bar, complete with its own special cocktail ‘The Gorilla’ that drew the crowds but floored them as quick. In time, this became the loft filled with artists, sculptors and poets, a cauldron of inspiring creativity that persists with the present-day ‘Ó Bhéal’ Monday night poetry sessions with its five-word challenge and open mic.

There is always magic in the ordinary, if you know where to look.

As I sit in the Valley contemplating this piece, I catch a snatch of Joni Mitchell singing in the background on Peadar’s sound system; ‘don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got, till it’s gone’.

Over the last hundred years, The Long Valley has been ‘doing the simple things well’ and the dedicated clientele who frequent it fully appreciate its many qualities.

Perhaps we do not express it, but it is little wonder that those who have been exiled to Australia, the US or Europe, on their return home for Christmas will recentre themselves in The Long Valley for a pint and a spiced beef sandwich and feel the homely comfort of the special everyday.

We wish Peadar and his daughter Amy and his dedicated staff our heartfelt thanks.