WEST Clare on the Loop Head peninsula is where I’m blessed to live. I was reared on a farm, the eldest of four girls and my parents, who died young, instilled in me a love of farming and animals. Even though it was a dairy herd we had, I always loved horses.

My dad Patrick, RIP, always reared a foal. Everyone bred a foal on the farm at that time in the 1960s. So in the late 1990s, my late husband John McMahon bought me my first mare, Tessie Rossa, by Beau Royale, from a lovely lady Maura Keating. I suppose it all started from there then.