Episode 3 Ar Bhealach na Gaeltachta

HE LAUGHS

DRUMS PLAY

John Pitt Kennedy was my great great grandfather.

He was a military engineer.

He was born in Carndonagh and educated in Foyle College in Derry.

He started out his career in Greece.

But in his 30s, he came back to Ireland,

and he saw the deplorable state of Irish agriculture.

There was a growing population.

They were dependent on one crop, really.

And he wanted to, by example,

show that farming could improve.

And that is why he was so important in Irish agriculture

in the famine years.

John Pitt Kennedy revolutionised Irish agricultural education.

He was put in charge of all the primary schools in Ireland.

And he purchased 60 acres of land in Dublin.

And the aim of this place

was to teach teachers the principles of good agriculture.

And these teachers would then go out into the primary schools

and teach children the principles of good agriculture,

such as crop rotation, best management of land,

animal husbandry, all that kind of thing.

He was obviously a very able man, very industrious man.

He was a Protestant Unionist.

He did his utmost to better the lot of peasantry,

the poor. He was a very charitable man, I think.

During the famine, he was in charge of famine relief,

and in places like this,

soup was given out to starving people.

And what was his role post-famine?

Post-famine, he was still trying to push for

agricultural education. He wrote a number of books and papers on it.

And I think he should be regarded as one of the most important people

in agricultural education in that century.

DOGS BARK AND WHIMPER

# Dogs are everywhere Almost everywhere

# That I go... #

# They leave their scent behind them

# Everywhere they go... #

I'm a member of Northwest Mushing, and we compete all over the country

and abroad as well.

It's just a fantastic sport for people that are into dogs

and it's just addictive sport.

You can't... Once you've started, you can't stop.

-How long have you been doing it here in Ireland?

-I've been doing it six years.

I started off, I got two Siberian Huskies.

They were the first two dogs I got.

Then I got a few Alaskan Malamutes,

and I was having bother exercising them,

and I found out that you can do this sport, so I started from there

and I haven't looked back.

Are there many others in Ireland that are out with teams of dogs?

Our club, the Federation of Sleddog Sports, has 100 members

at the moment. And it's growing every year.

From one dog to eight dogs competing against each other.

It seems to be picking up. Every year, there's more and more members.

And it's getting bigger and bigger.

It's not huge yet, but we're trying to get the World Cup here next year.

It's called the Triple Crown, and

England, Scotland and ourselves are competing against each other in it.

And we're trying to get the European Dryland Championship here in 2016.

So, we're putting a bid in for that next year and see how we get on.

But if the World Cup goes well,

we shouldn't have any bother getting it, you know.

And what sort of speed would a team like this get up to?

You could get up to 20-25 mph on downhills

and 15-20 on the flat, you know.

The more meat them boys can get, the better.

They're canine athletes, you know.

# Sometimes I have to wonder

# About the dog in me

# Oh, dogs are everywhere

# Yes, dogs are everywhere

# Yes, dogs are everywhere

# That I go, that I go... #

-Hello, Donal.

-Hello, Frainc. How are you?

Aw, hello.

Well, we found Quiney tied to a scrapped car

below Donegal town three or four years ago.

We got a phone call about him.

We went down to find him and he was in a very bad state.

He had overgrown hooves and basically just tied with very little rope.

-We took him in that time then.

-Poor fellow.

-He's looking well now, though.

-He is. He's in very good health now.

He's in the best of shape and he's working for the sanctuary...

Excellent. How did you get involved with donkeys, then?

Eh, my grandfather always had donkeys,

and when I came back from Scotland and England,

I just bought a bit of land and we started keeping a few donkeys

and the sanctuary evolved from there just.

And how many donkeys are you keeping at the minute?

We have 54 donkeys at the minute in direct care,

and we have over 200 rehomed since we started.

Why are there so many homeless donkeys in Ireland?

Away back in the '60s when the tractors came in,

donkeys became pretty scarce. And then when they were scarce,

people... you know, they were more sought-after.

When the Celtic Tiger came in then, people bought them as pets.

And then, the way the economy's gone now, with the decline,

they're dumping them, they can't afford to keep them

and a lot more of them are turning up on our doorstep,

and people are looking for new homes for them.

Quiney here's such a placid animal.

What's the role of the donkey in Ireland today?

Well, I suppose most donkeys are now kept as pets.

There's very, very few working donkeys in Ireland,

but if you went back 30 or 40 years,

there was thousands of donkeys working in Ireland.

You know, they worked on the farm all week, and a lot of them then

even took people to church or chapel on a Sunday in a cart.

They did everything. They were the tractor of their day.

And Quiney has really become the ambassador for the sanctuary?

He would be, aye.

Quiney's face has been all over the world at fundraisers

in Australia to America, and he would be one of our adoption donkeys

and an awful lot of people adopt him.

Well, it's been wonderful

to meet you and the very famous Quiney as well.

-I'll move along. It's starting to rain.

-Bye now.