Mitchelstown dairy farmer Maurice Walsh has described his involvement in Farmer in Charge, Monday night's makeover show on RTÉ One, as "a life-changing experience".
In the one-off special, Walsh leaves his farm life in Cork behind and heads for Angel Hair and Beauty, a struggling hairdressing business in Dublin's Tallaght.
Salon owners Nick and Claire Reddin have been working hard to make their business successful but they've been struggling. Now it's up to a farmer to show them how to turn things around.
And it's not that Walsh was looking to get himself on TV or up to Dublin. Far from it. He was oblivious when a TV production company came looking for candidates at last year's National Ploughing Championships.
"I didn't hear about it," he told TEN. "It was about maybe a week or two afterwards when I got a phone call from the production company saying that they were looking for a farmer to do this show.
"They had tracked me down from a website from Dairymaster, who had installed a new milking parlour in my farm. But when they asked would I be interested and I said, forget about it. There's not a hope.
"I'm up the walls here, I said. I run a one-man operation. I really don't have time for this.
But he kind of twisted my arm and said, look, see if you can come up with a bit of time to even consider it."
He agreed, and within hours a representative arrived in Mitchelstown. "It was one of those days," Maurice recalled, but within two weeks he was being offered the job. "What have I let myself in for?" was his understandable reaction.
"It was a life-changing experience," he now admits. "I was so glad I did it. I've no family or connections there so coming up to Dublin and seeing how urban people live. The hustle and the bustle, everything races along like mad, and the traffic!
"I can appreciate putting on my wellies in the morning now. I can walk across a field, I'm into my workplace and I'm working there straight away. You can spend hours going from A to B in Dublin. I thought: how do people live like this? But obviously they do."
Ultimately, the farmer and the Dubs hit it off, so much so that it proved difficult to say goodbye when filming came to an end and Maurice had to return to his farm.
"I worked up there in the salon with Clare and Nick for 24 to 25 days, and I got to know them," he says. "I ate my food with them. I drank and dined with them. Our families got to know each other as well.
"So when it was all over it was quite emotional. There's a great saying: don't cry because it's over, cry because it happened. The tears came. It was quite emotional."
