From age 16 he developed a wide reputation throughout County Clare and beyond for his putative skills as a bonesetter, travelling long distances to attend patients, and treating a constant stream of sufferers at his farmhouse in Dunsallagh East, where he lived and worked all his life.
In a nationally renowned case in 1912, he was acquitted by jury of a charge of manslaughter, arising from the death by gangrene of a man whose injured leg he had set and bound; an autopsy determined that the limb had not been broken.
After announcing his support for the party manifesto, he accepted the nomination, pausing to set a delegate's dislocated ankle before hastening back to attend patients elsewhere in the town.
Projecting himself and his party (which organised fifty branches throughout the county) as 'non-political' – he described the farmer's three enemies as the weather, the markets, and politicians – he retained the seat in the 1938 general election with a slight increase in first preferences.
[1] His attendance in the Dáil and at political meetings generally was notoriously poor; through fourteen years as a TD he spoke in the chamber five times, never after 1939.