Cormac Hennessy

Cormac Hennessy was born in Ennis, County Clare, in a house where the rent was always a week behind and his mother kept what little there was in a tobacco tin on the dresser. He left school at sixteen and went in with a local auctioneer who handled farm sales and house clearances, and he stayed in that trade, on and off, for thirty-one years.

The work was the clearing of the dead. When somebody passed and the family wanted the house emptied, Hennessy came with a van and a notebook and went through a life room by room — the furniture, the delph, the holy pictures, and always, somewhere, the papers. The papers told him more than the family ever did. He learned to read a life by its drawers: who had a few pound put by and who had a drawer full of final demands; who owned the roof over their head and who had signed it away to the bank for a conservatory and a car. He came to believe that there were only two kinds of people in the end, and the difference between them had almost nothing to do with what they earned.

He found his first thrift book — a foxed Victorian edition of Samuel Smiles — in the parlour of a man who had died clear and content at ninety-one, with the house paid and a little left for the grandchildren. Hennessy took it home and read it in a night and was angry, because nobody had told him, and because it was all there, and had been there for a hundred and fifty years, while the shops sold shelves of books that said less and charged more.

He is retired now, and writes. He is not interested in making you rich. He is interested in you not being owned.