Memories of penny wafers were recalled at Bunratty this week when the latest addition to the folk park, the Hughes ice-cream family farmhouse, was opened.
Mr Niall Fitzgerald has strong Limerick connections. He grew up on King's Island, went to school in St Munchin's and played rugby with Shannon. He spent his pocket money in Mrs Hayes's shop.
And he is now the chairman and chief executive of Unilever, the world's biggest ice-cream manufacturer which owns such brands as HB, Walls and Ben & Jerry's. "I still remember the thing I spent the first penny of my pocket money on, and it was a penny wafer. I still remember the HB blocks which you cut, and if you had two pennies you got the full cut but if you had one penny they then cut it again in half, and then they cut the wafer in half," he said.
Also at Thursday's opening was Mr William Hughes, a former managing director of HB. As a child, he lived in Hazelbrook House, built by his grandfather in Rathfarnham, Co Dublin, in 1898. Granite from the Dublin Mountains was used in the construction of the late Victorian four-bedroom farmhouse. Under threat of demolition a hundred years later, the house was re-created from its original materials in Bunratty Folk Park by Shannon Heritage, the tourism development subsidiary of Shannon Development.
"It is lovely, it is perfect, the facade of it is right. Going up those stairs, I might have been four years old. It all came back to me," the 81-year-old Mr Hughes said.
He added that his favourite ice-cream was the tuppeny wafer. vanilla flavour, of course. "They were a bit unhygienic but they were lovely." The farmhouse, complete with granite facade, is linked to the folk village by a short walk. "In general terms, we had been looking for a two-storey farmhouse. It was just on the plans. The happy coincidence was the HB people rang us and said they were removing theirs," Mr John King, chief executive of Shannon Heritage, said. Unilever donated £40,000 of the project's £175,000 cost. "It is something which the local company have been doing and have been very committed to and is part of the heritage of the business. We do that everywhere, all around the world," Mr Fitzgerald said.
Mr King added that there were plans to re-create a farmyard around the house.
"We have got a mix of rural and urban dwellings representing late 19th and early 20th century life. You can touch them, you can feel them and you can see people demonstrating the baking of bread, churning milk, making apple tarts. We will have a harvest day where you will see threshing."
The folk park is the biggest fee-paying visitor attraction in the State after Dublin Zoo. Last year some 370,000 people walked the village street, most of them foreign visitors. "A lot of people probably perceived it as a place for international tourists to go to. It is a secret jewel for Irish tourists," Mr King said. The original folk village building was a cottage removed from Shannon Airport to make way for a runway extension in the early 1960s.
Now there are 30 exhibits including a former Presbyterian church from Ardcroney, Co Tipperary, a schoolhouse from Belboir, Co Clare, and a byre from Co Mayo. At Hazelbrook House, visitors will get a flavour of HB's history. In 1926, the Hughes brothers - Mr William Hughes's father and uncles - began producing ice-cream to use up surplus milk at the family dairy.
The company was sold to the Grace brothers, an American investor group, in 1964, and to Unilever in 1973.
Today, HB employs 500 people and has 80 per cent of the Irish market where ice-cream consumption, at 10 litres per head annually, is the third highest in Europe.
"Per capita, consumption in Ireland has always been relatively high but it is growing higher and the more innovation there is, the more different flavours and different types and different varieties are brought, the more it attracts more people into eating it," Mr Fitzgerald added.