Pigs

Kept by the family at Cootehall, the pig connected everyday provisioning with the work of preserving food and the exchange of gifts among neighbors. Its annual slaughter also became a memorable household occasion, marked by Francis (Frank) McGahern’s good humor and by the sharp sensory details the narrator retained.

Setting and Feeding

A wooden house for the pig was built between Cootehall Garda Barracks and the river. The animal was fed mostly on potatoes, with windfall apples from nearby orchards added in autumn. The apples cost nothing and were said to sweeten the bacon. Potatoes served several purposes in the household: Francis (Frank) McGahern had planted them in hopes of making money, but they were too plentiful to sell successfully, and he sometimes gave bags away as presents.

Slaughter and Preservation

Each year a local farmer came to kill the pig, shave it, and divide its sides into quarters. The meat was salted in tea chests kept in a small room off the living room; newspapers were spread beneath the chests to catch seepage. After several days, the sides were wrapped in gauze to protect them from flies and hung from hooks in the ceiling. This sequence turned one day’s killing into a supply of preserved meat for the household.

Household and Neighbors

The day of the slaughter put Francis (Frank) McGahern in as good a humor as the big match days. In the evening, the narrator carried around the neighboring houses the parts that would not cure, including ribs, cutlets taken from the bones, and liver. When those households later killed their own pigs, they returned the favor with their own share of the bounty. The pig thus belonged not only to the family’s food stores but also to a reciprocal local practice of sharing meat.

Memory and Sensory Detail

The narrator remembers most vividly the pig’s piercing screams, the blood collected in a white enamel basin for black pudding, and the sweet taste of fresh cutlets called grisceens. Those details preserve the event as a mixture of killing, processing, eating, and exchange: the animal’s death is not abstracted from the food it yielded, while the finished meat remains embedded in the routines of household and neighborhood life.