John Lynch

Ireland's most famous cow led the St Patrick's Day parade with a whiskey inside her, and she lived to forty-eight. Her name was Big Bertha. She was a Droimeann, an old Irish breed with a white stripe down the spine, bought as a calf at Sneem fair in County Kerry on St Patrick's Day 1945 and named after the German siege gun on account of her temper. Jerome O'Leary farmed out by Blackwater Bridge, and Bertha became the nearest thing he had to a family business. She calved. Then she calved again. In 1986, past forty, she dropped her thirty-ninth, Bertha Junior, by a three-year-old Charolais bull, and RTÉ sent a crew to film the mother, the newborn and a farmer who could not stop grinning. The reporter asked, quite seriously, about the forty-year age gap between the parents. Jerome did not see the problem. Guinness put her in the book twice: oldest cow ever recorded, most calves in a lifetime. Then she went to work. Jerome joined forces with two local men who had cancer, and Bertha went on the road: cattle shows, fairs, pubs. She had more engagements than most of the Dáil. Every March she was Grand Marshal of the Sneem parade, walking the whole town down its main street, and before each one Jerome gave her a drop of whiskey to steady her nerves, which is the most Irish sentence ever written about a cow. Between them they raised tens of thousands of pounds for cancer charities. National radio broadcast live from the pub for one of her birthdays. Few cows get a birthday. Fewer get one on the wireless. She died on New Year's Eve 1993, three months short of forty-nine, with two of her own calves still in the herd, the elder of them thirty-five. They waked her in the Blackwater Tavern, and the historian Turtle Bunbury, who wandered in that night by chance, found a full pub standing to drink to a cow. Then she was stuffed, so she could carry on raising money dead, which is a work ethic most of us will not match. A Cork distillery now makes a gin from whey and calls it Bertha's Revenge. Thirty years on, Ireland's Department of Agriculture produced a paper modelling a cull of sixty-five thousand dairy cows a year for three years to hit its emissions targets, two hundred thousand animals, more than a tenth of the national herd, at two hundred million euro a year. When it leaked, the Department said it was a modelling document, part of a deliberative process. A plan, in other words, that it had been caught holding. Bertha ate Kerry grass under Kerry rain for forty-eight years. She gave milk and thirty-nine calves, marched a town down its street every March for the sick, and took a whiskey for her nerves like a Christian. Nobody in Sneem ever called her an emissions problem. They called her Grand Marshal.