Small towns have long memories and in Clara locals pore over leader's political family tree, writes Ruadhán Mac Cormaicin Co Offaly.
JOE CULLEN recalls the 15-year-old he watched standing on boxes outside Sunday Mass all those decades ago and tells you this was a day the whole of Clara saw coming.
It is more than 60 years since the local Fianna Fáil cumann president joined the party, and his friendship with the Cowens dates back to the time they ran the pub, the butcher's and the undertaker's out of the old thatched house on River Street.
"It's a very proud day, and I always thought it would come. His father was another great man, and he'd be very proud of Brian," Cullen says.
It's the eve of Brian Cowen's coronation as leader-designate of Fianna Fáil. An impromptu meeting of the cumann has just wrapped up in the back room of Carey's, a ramshackle phone box of a pub fitted out in decor that looks like it hasn't been touched since the Civil War.
The open fire is crackling, and on what's left of the faded tiles are no more than a dozen chairs of torn blue leather. There's a great big trout peering down from its glass case above the door and a Tricolour pinned to the ceiling.
Amid the Offaly pennants behind the bar is a poster for a dance that was to take place on Easter Monday. In 1945.
The agenda tonight was a one-liner: the Taoiseach's homecoming. There's talk of bonfires and parades and flowing taps, but they've been on to Brian about it and he's been worrying about the fuss and the safety of the kids with all the lorries on the road.
That's Brian, they tell you. About to start running the country, and the man is worrying about the traffic.
Tonight, all the talk is of Cowen - the yarns, the songs, the razor wit. They all have favourite ballads of his, and speeches that stick in the mind. ("Do you remember the one on the square before the last election, 55 minutes of a speech," comes a voice from the fireside.)
They point to the seat he usually takes in the corner, "a man who might be back from Washington or Asia", sipping a pint and talking about the hurling.
He may be the centre of attention in Dublin, but in Carey's, they're as keen to talk about the local landmarks. Did you know he was the youngest secretary the local GAA club ever had, says PJ Rickard. And what about those debating competitions he won as a young man, asks Vinny Flanagan, who is "35 years a blow-in now".
Clara people reach for the same words when asked about Cowen: decent, down-to-earth, funny, generous, loyal, maybe a little bit shy. And clever.
"If you don't know Brian, you think he's the most serious, gruff man going. Brian is the most laid-back person, but don't underestimate him for two f***ing seconds. He'll read you in two minutes. He'll read what you're thinking. A highly, highly intelligent individual," says the family friend. (And when he's annoyed, you'll know when he pushes his glasses along his nose.)
"He's full of humour and a sense of f***ing divilment, desperately laid-back. But fierce intelligent. And if he could do you a turn, he'd stand on his head for you."
"To us, he's Brian," says Andrew Dignam, the cumann secretary. "He'll be taoiseach, and we'll salute him as taoiseach as a matter of course, but more as a slag than anything else. He'll be Brian when he's down here."
Small towns have long memories, and in Clara they speak of Brian's father, the late Bernard (Ber) Cowen, as if it was last week that he was talking to constituents over the kitchen table in the house up the road.
"Ber Cowen never stopped working. He was a farmer, a butcher, an undertaker, a publican, an auctioneer and a politician," says Dignam.
"I knew Ber fierce well," adds a friend. "A very decent, honourable man, and he'd sing a song, the same as Brian. Ber had a butcher's stall and he fed all of Clara at one time, when times was hard and a lot of places closed down."
The Cowens are steeped in Offaly politics. Brian's grandfather Christopher ("auld Christy" in Clara) was with Fianna Fáil from the earliest days, and bequeathed his seat on the council to his son Ber, who would later become the local TD.
Barry Cowen, Brian's younger brother and a councillor, recalls how his brother was eager about politics from the start, canvassing and honing stump speeches for his father when he was 16 years old. But their father's untimely death in 1984 thrust Brian into the hothouse of national politics at the age of just 24.
"I think politics might have been on the horizon for him, but the manner in which he entered politics wasn't of his own choosing, obviously," says Barry. "As he said himself, the reason he was in politics was that somebody else dropped dead. It's a crude way of putting it, but that's a fact."
Some see Ber in the way Brian carries himself, in his decency and his openness. They were close too. "He identified very much with his father, and had a fierce respect and grá for him. They had a rapport," says a family friend.
According to Sinéad Dooley, a councillor who runs Cowen's constituency office in Tullamore, he has been "extremely upbeat" in the past week, but his pleasure is also tempered with sadness that his father can't witness all this.
He lost two uncles recently, including Fr Andrew, a Cistercian monk in Roscrea who passed on his interest in the Irish language.
"He's a very private man [ but] I think it's very clear that it's something that's not at the back of his mind. It's at the forefront. No matter who you are, there are certain occasions when you look back and wish that people who are no longer with us could be there," Dooley says.
On the streets of Tullamore, it's hard to find someone who hasn't a good word to say about Cowen. Most seem to have met him. Even Sadiq, a taxi driver, manages through faltering English to talk about the county's "big day" and tell the story of the party where he met Cowen ("Free drink! Ha ha."). And the prospect of its first taoiseach is a big deal here: his picture appears 32 times in this week's Tullamore Tribune.
In the Brewery Tap, the pub he owns on Tullamore's Main Street, Paul Bell needs little prompting to enthuse about the man whose picture adorns the wall. Watching Cowen steer his press conference on the television in the corner, he tells you of an exchange that stuck in the mind.
"I asked him here one day, 'would you like to be taoiseach, Brian?' He just gave me this grin and a smile. As if to say, "what do you think?"