Dessie had a way of reading the mood of the water, of judging the flow and ripple of it, the spread and density of the clouds of insects along the foreshore, the smell of the lifting outshore breeze, the skim of mist along the surface of the water in the rising day, that allowed him to position himself in a spot where he’d be able to whisper the fish into his boat with hardly a need for a rod.

He was having a good day, drawing them from the water nearly at will. Some men will corner you and try their damnedest to tell you every single thing that ever happened to them in their life and you’d sooner cut off your own ears with a rusty blade than listen to them, but men like Dessie are like a kind of a channel, a conduit for all the wit and fascination beneath the firmament, and listening to them is like being weightless, painless, invisible almost you needn’t do a thing but sit still and be transported.ĭessie told me one Saturday morning about something that happened to him one time when he was out on Lough Derg fishing for pike. I often used to tip into town on a Saturday afternoon and before I went near the pub or bookies I’d call in to Dessie’s workshop where he had plant for hire and I’d sit in behind the counter with him and his young sons and he’d tell story after story.

I’m up on 80 now by all accounts, so it must be 20-odd years since I did a bit of building work for a man in Nenagh called Dessie Treacy.

The queen of dirt island by donal ryan