I met his son about a month ago at the official opening of his latest enterprise in Galway City. I was only there because I knew the father well and got great yarns from him about the great Irish fairs and markets of 30 and 40 years ago.
I was there out of respect for that great "tangler" and what he managed to do in hard times. I'd never met the son before. But after 15 minutes of talking briefly with him, and observing him, I decided he was a tangler too, just like his father, though operating in a different Ireland in a different era.
It was an interesting experience, and through it all I had in my mind a thickly folded wodge or wedge of greaseproof paper. I'll explain that in a minute.
The son is everything the father was not. He's a metropolitan man where the father was a rough countryman on the surface.
The son, somewhere down his thirties, is a suave specimen that you'd know has been around several blocks in his time. He has that kind of well-shaven, glossy face that comes from the best of food.
He was wearing one of those slightly shiny lightweight suits, gray and beautifully tailored, which you only see on businessmen of poise and purpose. His father always wore a tweed sports jacket with a single vent in the back, twill trousers and ankle-high brown boots.
In the very early mornings when the father was working hardest his face was often stubbled salt and peppery. If it was raining he would be wearing a yellow oilskin overcoat. He was dressed to his trade.
The son does not work out of doors at all. The place where he does his tangling always is carpeted, luxurious, indoors, no overcoat needed.
But he's a tangler all right. I spotted that very quickly. He's as good at it maybe as his father was in his time.
The son is some kind of information technology professional and what they call an entrepreneur nowadays in the complex IT world that I know little about. As I understand it he has a string of compact companies that supply customized software services to a whole range of companies both in Ireland and abroad.
In the brief chat I had with him he told me, for example, that over 3,000 workers in an Australian factory were at that very moment being paid their wages, including overtime payments and bonuses, through a software payroll program developed by one of his companies and now being sold all over the world. And he said the same program was now being used to pay most of the British troops fighting in Afghanistan.
As he talked, effortlessly charming all round him in the hotel suite, I still kept seeing that wodge of greaseproof paper that effectively raised him.
"I knew your father well," I said. "He was a great man."
The son said he was away in college from very early in his life and never really got to know his da.
"He was well worth knowing," is what I said before he went away with quick sharp steps to chat to some important politicians who were attending the launch.
And the father was indeed. He raised a family of seven children in a small sturdy home on the edge of a town in East Galway. He was as good a tangler as there was in Ireland in his time, and that is why almost all his children went to college and did well for themselves afterwards.
Watching the son working the room, somehow predatory behind the easy smile, I wondered if he even knows what his father did for a living back then, does he ever think of that. He would probably tell you, if he met you, that his father was a cattle dealer when he was growing up.
But that is only a small part of the story.
His father was a tangler who worked the cattle and horse fairs all his life. He lived on his wits and his judgments and his cuteness at the heart of those elemental commercial cockpits that happened in the market towns of Ireland when the fair days dawned.
He had not as much as one acre of land like the real big time cattle dealers had by the hundreds of acres. He was a tangler, buying and selling two or three times over on the one day.
He was a tangler with a tiny old pickup, heading out of the fair-day towns before dawn even broke, meeting the farmers driving their stock in to the fair, dealing with them on the side of the road, cajoling, charming, conning the most of the time, cunning always, and flashing his huge wad of notes in their faces as he made his bids for the heifers and the bullocks and the calves.
He told me, when I talked to him, that you had to have a wad of hard cash to put a gleam in the farmers' eyes. That was real money. They would never accept checks back then in the fifties and sixties.
But they loved even the sight of banknotes, those men that had so little themselves and, because he was so good at what he did, he often bought his cattle away out in the country for a lot less than he would be able to sell them for a couple of hours later on the fair itself.
That was the core of his trade. That was his living in the good times and the bad times.
He was a tangler and he was a good one, and that is why his son was able to go to college and tangle in a different world nowadays.
And the old tangler told me that the first rule of the trade was that you had to have, of course, that huge wad of banknotes, good times and bad. That was your only real credential in a harsh world where money was scarce so often as hen's teeth.
And you had to have the 50 pound notes and the 20s and 10s on the outside of the wad to put the glitter in their eyes. And then the fivers and pounds and 10 shilling notes. It looked great.
And what the farmers did not know was that the heart of the wad, the real core of it, was composed, not of banknotes at all but of rectangles of greaseproof paper scissored out in the kitchen by the wife. And he told me there was many's the time when his kids were growing up that there was far more greaseproof paper in the wad than bank notes, and there was one hard November when he was down to his last 14 pounds.
"But by the end of the day I had nearly 40 thank God." I clearly remember him saying that to me.
He dealt in any kind of stock that could be bought and sold and make a profit. It was mainly cattle, but also horses and donkeys and goats and even greyhounds.
He once owned a horse that finished third in the Grand National two years later, but he only owned him for about three-quarters of an hour before selling him on. And he was a rogue because there were times you had to be, especially, he told me, in relation to the horses.
If you bought a jaded-looking nag on the edge of the fair, for example, it was amazing (and cruel of course) the changed appearance of that animal if a small stick of ginger was inserted under the tail! Then the horse sweated up, stepped high and lively, looked and behaved like a real bit of blood.
And there were cases where tanglers would put a pebble down a horse's ear to make it begin to shake its head in a high-spirited fashion. Dreadful stuff by today's standards, and he said he never did that but those men, all with big families, were truly trading on their wits with those huge wads whose hearts were only greaseproof paper.
Could you call them the stock exchange traders of their time and season? You probably could.
Sometime towards the end of my 45-minute stay at the son's launch I saw him pay for a silver tray of coffee and sandwiches and fancy little cakes for the wives of two of the politicians. He flashed a credit card at the waiter, and there was a golden glint from it. The waiter put it in a small machine before handing it back.
And the son put it back in a slim-line leather wallet and continued talking and smiling with the ladies. Very suave, very assured, very professional . . . but for sure a tangler in a different league.
And I thought of his father's huge wad again as I walked away.