Sean and Kieran Murphy have big plans for their small business. Paul O'Doherty talks to the owners of the family business in Co Kerry
If Sean Murphy didn't sell ice-cream, he could have been a performer. With his Dick Van Dyke persona and a cupboard full of voices, he could easily succeed as a Robin Williams warm-up act. His older brother Kieran, the ice-cream maker, is the scientist-in-hiding - another funny guy who, like his brother, laughs infectiously, having mastered the nuances of Irish humour.
The pair were born in New York to an Irish father and a German mother. Their father owned the US franchise for a Swiss homeopathic company, built it up from virtually nothing, and then sold it. After college in Austin, Texas, Sean joined the company as a salesman while Kieran was in Boston working as a marketing director for a small software company. Kieran decided to take a six-month career break in his parents' "vacation house" in Dingle. That was 1995. He's still here.
A couple of years later, Sean got a strange call from Kieran begging him to move to Dingle. However, Sean had other things on his mind. "I was single and living in a really cool city with a good job. So, my first reaction was 'no'." Then he met the right girl and his life changed. "I started to think about living in a one-bedroom apartment with my wife and sending my kid to school through a metal-detector which is the reality of living in San Francisco unless you're fabulously wealthy."
Dingle suddenly seemed a lot more palatable, and moving to Ireland was apparently easy. Wiebke, now his wife, "was working for the same company as me in Germany. I quit and she quit and we moved to Ireland. It was a crazy thing and we knew it. It was her first visit to Ireland. We both came over to make sure it was the right choice. And it was. Dingle is just incredible. And it's safe. People send their kids around the corner for sweets - this is shocking, I'm still having trouble getting used to it. If you're essentially a city person and you have to live somewhere surrounded by cows, Dingle's the place."
Initially, the brothers and Wiebke lived in the same house. Their task: to make ice-cream. "We got a little Krupps ice-cream maker and every recipe book we could find that had ice-cream recipes in it. And combined them and then tweaked it and tweaked it." Each day they would make a batch of ice-cream, put it in the freezer, wait 24 hours and then taste it, before repeating the process.
Their research complete and the recipes perfected, Murphy's Ice Cream opened in May 2000. "We went around 100 different names and came back to Murphy's Ice Cream. There's something about putting your name on something that's very powerful. We want to say we're an Irish product without putting green things on it and still be quite modern.
Each flavour is marked as Gaeilge across a distinctive Mediterranean blue tub. Risíní (rum raisin), fanaile (French vanilla), caramal (honeycomb), seacláid (Belgian chocolate), brioscaí (cookies and cream), sú craoibh (raspberry sorbet), and caifé (coffee, Kahlua and chocolate chips) leap from the fridge like set-dancers. With a decent seating capacity, the shop also sells coffee, homemade cakes and Valrhona chocolate.
It's an adult ice-cream at very adult prices (€6-€7 for a 500-ml tub). This doesn't worry Sean, who admits: "You just can't beat Unilever on price. These guys are so big. They've got oceans of scientists whose job it is to figure out how to make cheaper ingredients taste pretty good. We know that the Valrhona chocolate is the chocolate we like the best. So, ok, we can't beat any of the other guys on price at our level - but we can beat them on quality."
In 2003, they won two medals for their ice-cream at the UK's Good Taste Awards, and in January 2004 they launched their tubs countrywide. Two months ago, they had a favourable response at a Selfridges promotion when Sean drove the van across on the ferry to England, stocked with all their most popular flavours. However, with the Irish market expanding far quicker than they expected and a supermarket hook-up the next priority, exporting to England is a long way off.
When doubts arise about their business venture they ask each other the following questions, according to Sean: "Would you like to be anywhere else in the world except for Dingle? And would you like to be doing anything else aside from making ice-cream? Is there anybody else you can think of who could do this better? And the answer is no."
• Murphy's Ice Cream Parlour, Strand Street, Dingle, Co Kerry. 11 a.m.-6.30 p.m. and 7.30-10.30 p.m. daily, March to October (066-9152644, www.murphysicecream.ie)