We had a shop in a small village called Prosperous. It wasn’t a very prosperous shop. But we’d be working there at the weekends mostly standing in and helping out for my parents. My mother mostly ran the shop. But my father was given the task of taking the newspapers to one of the local villages and distributing them from his car after the mass in Staplestown church, so to get out of going to our Mass my brother and I would sometimes go with him. And I hated that I would be seen there as well. Because the local girls who were going to the school would see us with this kind of Del Boy operation and it wasn’t very cool. And it was extremely embarrassing for us. 

I don’t know how my father got the task of selling newspapers through a car window because that was not his job. He never worked in our shop himself. The practice was started by my grandfather to get newspapers to this place that didn’t have a shop.

So he was distributing the Independent and Sunday World, Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, and all those things to the good people of Staplestown and my father was given the task of carrying it on.

Then one sunday ..a gang of lads came in and they held both myself and my friend Ger Ennis who was in the shop with me at the time, both at knifepoint, before robbing the shop and they got away. It was something you’d never expect to happen in a very small rural Irish village. The gang were soon caught by the police because their car ran out of petrol and they were brought to court. However one of the gang escaped to the UK on the ferry. And unfortunately, there was some incident, and he fell overboard into the Irish sea and died.

Mike OToole is a Photographer, Film maker and Creative Teacher. Lürzers Archive recognised him twice as being among the 200 Best Advertising Photographers Worldwide, and he has won awards for his work from The Association of Photographers (Uk) and  Communications arts (USA) and The New York Food Film Festival. His work in the field of Commercial Photography has been featured in publications ranging from Conde Nast Traveller , The Wall St Journal, and The Washington Post .