Megabytes by John & Sally McKenna April 2001
In Season St Tola Goats Cheese
St Tola, as featured on Bernadette O'Shea's Pizza Defined.
Photo by Mike O'Toole
The best farmers and artisans implicitly understand and appreciate animal and environmental welfare (see also Singer but no Songwriter); they wear it as immediately and as naturally in their work as they wear their wellies. Siobhán and John McDonnell, for example, who have taken over the making of the superlative St. Tola Goats Cheese, in Inagh, County Clare, wrote to us recently. 'We are up and running again for the season, but it is hard to predict what will happen with the foot & mouth scare', they write.
'Hopefully it will bring people to their senses and make them realise that we must respect our animals and our environment and not push them to extremes. Also hopefully people will appreciate the seasonality and regionality of products and not expect all food products to be available all of the time in a uniform manner'.
Write that above the gates of every farm in the country, for the McDonnell's have encapsulated in those few sentences every emotion and belief that can not merely save our agriculture, but which can make it better than ever.
And the St Tola itself? It is, as ever, sublime, tenderly sweet, fragile, utterly unique, one of the great artisan cheeses. There is nothing else like it.
Email: info@st-tola.ie
