Young-at-heart Tom breathes new energy into antiques

Tom O’Loughlin has just turned seventy, but instead of retiring he has just relocated his antique business to a new premises in a move that to him is like starting anew.

It is this ‘get up and go’ attitude that has probably kept Tom young at heart and determined to continue a business that many might have abandoned in these recessionary times.

But Tolco Antiques on the Headford Road has been around for forty years and Tom can’t imagine not having to go into the shop every day. Nor can he contemplate stopping his regular shopping trips to England, where most of his stock is sourced.

An indication of Tom’s strength of character is his speedy recovery from a recent knee operation. Basically, he got a new knee and his doctors have been amazed at his fast recuperation. Yes, he was on crutches for a while but last week he was just using a walking stick and no doubt this week, he is back driving and walking around unaided!

Like many of his generation, there was no talk of third or even much of a second level education in Tom’s youth. Once boys reached 14 they were expected to go and find a job, any job that would help the family finances and for the O’Loughlin family in Lough Cutra in Gort, it was no different.

Tom says he was lucky to have got a job with Coen’s, a large furniture shop and building supplier just outside Gort.

At that time, some employees were put up in dormitory type accommodation and given three square meals a day. There was very little pay – ten shillings Tom remembers – but for his parents it meant there was one less mouth to feed at home.

“We were well trained but the money was very little. There was very little left over when you paid to get into the dance on a Saturday night. There was nothing left to hand over at home . . . with so little pay, it wasn’t expected,” he recalls.

He transferred from there to Taylor’s, a well established antique shop in Boyle, County Roscommon with an excellent reputationIt was there that Tom really developed his love of furniture, especially pieces with history attached. Taylor’s too had a building supply section but Tom preferred the furniture end of it. The pay was slightly better there and he managed to save enough for the seven years.

He was just 22 when he landed Down Under. In the early 1960s the Irish were in great demand in the construction industry and there was plenty of work in and around Brisbane and, later, in the Snowy Mountains on a hydroelectricity and irrigation scheme.

It was hard work but he enjoyed it and the pay was good. That enabled him to buy land that he sold at a profit just before he returned home. In turn, that helped him open his first shop in Galway, in Kirwan’s Lane.

“It was a very slow start and there wasn’t much money around when I opened up in 1971. But business grew steadily and in 1976, I bought a site three miles from the city on the Headford Road and I set up in a premises there. We had a lot more storage space and people could park and it was more suitable for the type of furniture we were selling.”Tom had only intended coming home from Australia for a visit, his first since he left home. But he stayed in Galway, partly to help his uncle John O’Loughlin who had a draper’s shop in Prospect Hill.

“They couldn’t drive and I could and I felt that if I returned to Australia I would be abandoning them,” he says.

There was another reason Tom stayed at home. He had met the woman he knew he was going to marry. Except that, at the time she was a mere girl just short of her 16th birthday.

Breda Byrne used to babysit for Tom’s sister, Ann, in Dublin and the minute he clapped eyes on her, he was hooked.

“I was 29 and she was a bit young, but I was happy to wait,” he says with a twinkle in his eye.

Breda, who hasn’t lost her Dublin accent, quickly pipes in “Well, you didn’t wait long!”

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.