It’s one of the less well-known facts of the classic bike world, but as Steven Myatt has discovered, there was an Irish-made motorcycle – made in County Tipperary for about two years in the mid-Twenties. But who’s got a FM & O’C 200?

 

If you think of the British motorcycle, then in all honesty you are talking about bikes made in England rather than in any other of the four countries which make up the Union. I know of three, albeit very small, Welsh makes of bike, and can’t think of any in Scotland at all. Northern Ireland has a glorious manufacturing heritage but to the very best of my knowledge nobody ever built motorcycles there, despite motorcycling – and in particular racing – being hugely popular in the North.

Going just slightly beyond the British borders, into the Republic of Ireland, there has never really been a culture of industry and manufacturing. The Irish have always made their way rather differently, and even today, when the country is as rich as any in Europe, it’s far better known for its hi-tech industries than for actually making things.

So I was enormously surprised - and delighted, as you might imagine – when I discovered that there had once been an entirely native Irish motorcycle manufacturing operation. It wasn’t huge, and the total tally of bikes built wasn’t enormous, but at least they can lay claim to having had a motorcycle industry. Of sorts.

I came across the efforts of Mickey Feehan, Brendan Myles and Cob O’Connor quite by chance. Together with my family I was in the Cork town of Skibbereen, on a day trip from our house further up the coast, and in a bar I saw a handbill advertising the existence of a motor museum. I’m a sucker for motor museums, and wherever we go the other poor suffering Myatts know that dad will drag them, usually shouting and screaming, to every castle, ruined abbey and … motor museum that can be found. So I read this little scrap of paper with delight and marched the brood round to a narrow lane behind the town car park. There was a sign, above green-painted double doors, and to be honest it wasn’t an imposing entrance. Never mind; the Cars Of The Stars museum in Keswick looks like nothing at all from outside, but it’s great when you get inside.

It soon became clear though that there was a problem. The museum was undeniably shut, and it was starting to look as if it had been closed for a very long time. Heaven knows how old the flier I’d found in the bar had been. I walked round the back, down several narrow alleys, and found a couple of windows to peer through. I could see dust, cobwebs and motoring detritus, but nothing in the way of exhibits. As I was thinking of trying my shoulder against the front door, I heard a woman calling something quite unintelligible. She had come out of a house across the street and obviously wanted to know what I was up to.
I told her I was looking for the museum, and she snorted in complete derision and could tell me it had been closed for at least five years and the exhibits long since sold. It looked longer to me. I decided to give up, and thanked her, but as I was walking away she shouted after me. What there anything in particular that you wanted to know, she asked. After all, she added, her own brother, Michael, had been the caretaker, and what he didn’t know about the museum and its exhibits wasn’t worth knowing. She told me I could catch him for sure in Murphy’s Bar on O’Connell Street anything after six this evening. Wonderful.

Now, this could turn into a long story, so I’ll cut to what I believe they call the chase. I found Michael, no problem, and bought us each a pint of Guinness. Those were the first of, well, several that we were to consume that evening. I recorded the conversation on a little tape player I use, and to honest, while he did have a great deal of fascinating information, the fluency broke down a touch after a couple of hours. He meandered through the history of the museum, which was all well and good, but then he mentioned the Feehan Myles & O’Connor 200 and I really started to pay attention. What was that, I asked. The only motorcycle ever to be manufactured in the country of Ireland, he said. Both to satisfy my own curiosity, and for the edification of CBG readers (never far from my thoughts), I wanted to know everything he knew about it. And, thankfully, he knew a heck of a lot.

The story began in 1932, when Mickey Feehan was working in a blacksmith’s smithy in a village which is honestly called Hospital, a few miles west of Tipperary town, just into County Limerick (great source of jokes; ‘Where are you?’ ‘I’m in Hospital.’ ‘Are you sick?’ ‘No, I’m at home in the bath.’) He was in his late twenties, and one of his great drinking mates was his brother-in-law Brendan Myles. Brendan was at least fifteen years older, and was married to Mickey’s elder sister Mary – the middle one of nine children. Brendan had originally been a well-paid engineer, working on the railway engines, but now he worked as a labourer, offering his muscle to anyone that needed it. He had been a Fenian volunteer at the 1916 Easter Rising, and had been wounded in the groin by a Brit bullet. As a result he commanded great respect in the community. Brendan was originally from the small town of Killmalock, which was more important a place than one might have thought because it was a stopping point on the railway that ran south-west from Dublin to Killarney in the far west. Conor McGuire, the Attorney General of the Free State had alighted there once, and Brendan, who disapproved of his policies, threw a railway rivet at him. It knocked his homburg off and bruised his pride, and Brendan narrowly escaped capture by the Garda. 

Mickey had been boring Brendan to tears for ages, saying that he wanted to import a motorcycle from England. Although bicycles were common and popular, the motorcycle was a rare sight in Ireland, and especially so outside Dublin. Brendan wasn’t sure that he had ever seen one, but Mickey had ‘The Motor Cycle’ sent over to him by a brother who was working on the roads in Swansea, and was well up on the latest models. Brendan pointed out that such a thing would not only cost a fortune but would also attract a very high level of purchase tax, which was then a terrifying 70% on all goods deemed to be luxuries.
Mickey talked about getting the train to Dublin and the ferry to Liverpool, buying one, and simply riding it back without the authorities being any the wiser. He still couldn’t afford the purchase price though, he had to admit. Brendan pointed out that he did have solid contacts among the Republican community in Liverpool who could put him up and help him buy a bargain (possibly ‘acquire’ rather than buy – from a car park, and with the insurance of a Browning revolver). One evening, late on, matters were advanced further and Brendan agreed to go with Mickey to England, help in the acquisition, and come back on the pillion. The facts that neither of them had ever ridden a motorcycle, or that it was a very, very long way back from Dublin, on very primitive roads, didn’t figure in their thinking.
Somehow or other word got out though. One person who heard was Hospital’s village priest, Father O’Connor. Neither Mickey nor Brendan could ever work out how he came to hear about their plans, but Irish priests made it their business to know everything that was going on. Indeed, they still do, but with less success.

There was a stormy meeting between the three men. Father O’Connor confronted them in Paddy Cohan’s bar that next evening, just as they were settling into their third, or possibly fourth, pint. The priest had, it is said, been at the brandy himself before he had left the presbytery, and there was a lively exchange of views. The Father told them it would be a sin, on several counts, and they told him to mind his own business – in fact Brendan, no lover of the clergy, went rather further and lapsed into undisguised abuse.

After a while though the steam rather went out of their stand-up row, and the priest did the honourable thing and bought the next round. Tempers calmed and Mickey got out the latest copy of his magazine and showed O’Connor what it was that he was dreaming of. He agreed that it was doubtless a reasonable ambition to own such a thing – and then he broke through the argument by asking them why on earth they didn’t just set to and build themselves a motorcycle, being such clever young men and so experienced in working with metal.

This apparently stopped the discussion dead in its tracks, and as is the way with mid-evening discussions in licensed premises, they agreed to the impossible and decided to start the very next day. About six weeks later work began. Mickey had enough reference material to be able to make a simple rigid chassis, girder forks, and the tinware – mudguards, petrol tank, brackets, and so on. He made a frame for a spring seat and got his mother to upholster it. Bicycle wheels would do for now, it was decided, though Brendan did fit thicker spokes.

The motor was another matter, and that was always going to be a problem. One Saturday Brendan slipped off to Cork city on the train, and arrived back at the bar very late that night dragging a large sack which obviously contained something large, bulky and heavy. Sure enough, it was an engine. Apparently it was a 200cc single cylinder motorcycle engine, but more than that I couldn’t find out. I’ve no idea what it was from, though. Brendan swore that he had bought it ‘off a feller’, but there was always some doubt about its real provenance.
It took Mick about six months to finish his motorcycle, and by all reports it was a very successful project. It was surprisingly elegant and good-looking, and it worked. It never had lights, I was told, front or rear, but that bothered no-one. Its builder put in the miles on it and mended it when it broke. Soon enough he started work on another, correcting on that the faults that shown up on the original.

The new bike went on the road early the following year, in 1933. (tHere is some dispute about the chronology. Another source says that the first bike was built in ’33, and so we would now be in 1934. Unfortunately there’s no way of checking for sure but I’m staying with the original dates.) Soon Mickey was finding himself turning down offers for it. There was nothing else like it on the roads; there were horse-drawn carts, donkey-drawn carts, bicycles and even the occasional car – the doctor had one, and the bailiff had one, and that was all … though the Garda in Tipp did have a Sunbeam, it was seen very little outside town. Everyone it seemed now wanted a motorcycle.  

In all this it seems that Father O’Connor was the visionary, and it was he who suggested that Mickey should go into business. Furthermore, he suggested that – to the great surprise of the other two – the three of them should go into business together, manufacturing motorcycles. There was a large unused barn beside the smithy, which would serve as premises (once the roof was patched up), and he announced that he was prepared to finance the project so long as they had a properly constituted and legitimately-run business, and he had a majority shareholding in it. The other two couldn’t believe it, and though they wondered quite where the priest had got the sort of money that they thought would be needed, they could hardly say yes quickly enough. They weren’t to know that O’Connor was of independent means, his maternal grandfather having married into a wealthy, landowning Anglo-Irish family in County Waterford.

So the firm of Feehan, Myles & O’Connor was created. Father O’Connor would keep the accounts and, being an educated man, handle publicity – which would mean writing and having printed a brochure of some sorts, and placing adverts, first in the Cork and Tipp newspapers, and then – who knows – even in the Dublin press. He did his sums – at great length, and checked them again and again – and said that he thought that they could make between ten and fourteen motorcycles a year, and sell them for £45 each. At that level, he said, they would be breaking even. If they made sixteen bikes in a year they would be in profit, to which Brendan is said to have replied, ‘And if we make twenty we’ll be f*cking millionaires!’ – for which Father O’Connor castigated him severely.

There was still the problem of the engines. They couldn’t rely on Brendan turning up with a dozen engines in sacks. Mickey decided that the obvious thing to do was to take apart the one motor they had and simply have it copied. He sent Brendan to Cork with the various components and a list of engineering companies that could replicate them. It was going to be expensive but there was no other way. Father O’Connor insisted that they make at least cosmetic alterations to the cases and other external surfaces so that the shameless copying wasn’t too obvious.

It was about two months before Feehan, Myles & O’Connor sold their first machine. All those guys who had sworn on their grandmothers’ graves that they wanted nothing in life so much as a motorcycle – and had the wherewithal in their sock drawers at home. Mickey had suggested that they arrange some sort of credit, but Father O’Connor quickly pointed out that usury was a sin, and wasn’t to be countenanced.

 There’s no record of who did buy the first bike – whatever written records and accounts there might have been have now been lost – but it seems that after the first sale things picked up quickly. In their first full year they sold more than the 20 bikes which Brendan thought would make them millionaires; they took and fulfilled orders for 22. They didn’t come out with a huge profit though. Despite the Father’s best arithmetic efforts the bikes cost far more to build than they had budgeted – the difference doubtless accounted for by the engines. Also they found that the two of them, Mickey and Brendan, couldn’t handle the workload on their own. They took on a young lad to fetch and carry, and then another man, who had probably had some engineer or smithy training. They were in business though, and were keeping their heads above water.

Their customers seemed to come mostly from the towns; from Tipperary, Limerick and Cork. It isn’t known whether they ever fulfilled their ambition of selling a machine to a Dublin rider. At some point Mickey had made enough alterations to his model to designate it the Mark 2, though in fact he was constantly improving the way he did things, and no two bikes would ever have been exactly the same. The way responsibilities divided between the three partners seems to have been very successful. Mickey was undoubtedly the expert when it came to manufacturing and mechanical matters. Cob O’Connor was the level head, the strategist, and the financial controller. Brendan always had an opinion, of course, but he was having too good a time to rock the boat.

Then disaster struck, and it came from a very unexpected quarter. Father O’Connor was ordered to Tipp to attend an interview with his bishop. This wasn’t going to be good news. The bishop was very unhappy that one of his priests was engaged in commerce, let alone with business partners from the lower orders of society. He told a horrified O’Connor that it seriously compromised his position in his parish and brought the cloth into disrepute. The Father argued long and hard, arguing that there was great dignity in craftsmanship, and anyway hadn’t Jesus been a humble carpenter? The bishop had made up his mind. He ordered Father O’Connor to divest himself of his interest in the company.

It was terrible news to have to break to his partners, and I was told that while Mickey sat quietly, almost weeping into his Guinness, Brendan tried to persuade O’Connor to abandon his vows and resign from the church. That was never going to happen. Once a priest, always a priest. They tried to find someone to take his place in the company, but without success. Apparently Mickey even wrote to a number of bike manufacturers in England asking for help, but received no reply – perhaps unsurprisingly; what could they have done for a tiny business deep in rural Ireland? It was Mickey who said that the company would be run by the three of them or not at all, and if that was the bishop’s decision then so be it. Mickey was a devout church-goer and so accepted the edict; Brendan, being more of a free spirit, was furious, and threatened to knock the bishop’s mitre off with a railway rivet. Feehan Myles O’Connor had been in business for something just over two years, it seems, and probably made about fifty bikes.

In researching this feature I contacted both the motor museum at Clonmel in County Tipperary and the excellent Ulster Folk & Transport Museum in the north. Both had heard of the Feehan, Myles & O’Connor 200, and were able to add invaluable details, but neither knew of the existence of one. I tried to speak to the Irish equivalent of the DVLA, but they said that they couldn’t tell me anything thanks to their Data Protection act. The Irish AA had no information other than to say that they had considered FM & O’C 200s for their mounted patrols at some point, but for unknown reasons had bought ten BMW R12s instead – possibly because production of the Irish bike had ceased. What a shame.

Mickey and Father O’Connor lived to good ages and were eventually buried in the churchyard in Hospital. I couldn’t actually find their epitaphs on the lichen-covered headstones, but there is a small brass plaque commemorating O’Connor (as there are for several other long-serving priests) inside the church. I did find a portrait of Mickey, painted in the Seventies, playing a traditional fiddle in the back room of Paddy Cohan’s bar. Of Brendan I could find out nothing at all, and he seems to have disappeared from history. The bar, by the way, is now called Pat Cohan’s – Pat being Paddy’s grandson. Mickey married fairly late in life, in 1940, but managed to farther seven children regardless.

As far as I could see from a drive round the village – armed with a fistful of maps and notes - what was Mickey’s home has been demolished and is now the site of a particularly dreadful new housing development. I did manage to find the presbytery in Hospital, which is still in use, and – after wandering round completely lost for about two hours – the FM & O’C workshops. There is still evidence of blacksmithing in the smithy, but the workshop – set a few feet away to the south – seems to have been completely gutted. I don’t know what I was hoping to find – a full, ready-to-go motorcycle under a sheet? – but anything that hinted at motorcycle production would have been nice. There was nothing. A huge number of older buildings, from cottages to substantial Georgian houses, lie abandoned on the Irish landscape while everyone seems to have their heart set on lurid-coloured breezeblock haciendas. There’s no prospect therefore of anyone doing anything with the smithy and workshop, and I did daydream about buying it, turning into a home and called it ‘The OId Motorcycle Factory’. That’d be fun (though, to be honest, the countryside around that side of Tipperary isn’t the most attractive you’ll find in Ireland).

Inevitably I have to end this with an appeal; does anyone know any more about Ireland’s only motorcycle manufacturer? Has anyone got any photographs, or any of Father O’Connor’s brochures? Indeed, has anyone – I hardly dare ask – got a Feehan, Myles & O’Connor 200? If you have I’ll be round your house with a camera before you can order a pint of Guinness and a Jameson’s chaser.