Graham Roberts works hard, and he has always worked hard. Aged four, he was scoring a penny every time he washed a fish box for his dad. Aged six, he was helping out with everything. Today, in the Connemara Smokehouse, it is the boss himself who hand-fillets the fish, salts it, smokes it. This is artisanship.
He admits to a “desire for perfection”, and he knows that there is only one way to get there: “I believe in hard work”. He was born in the New Forest in 1975, and moved to Connemara four years later, where his father caught fish and established the smokehouse on the pier. School was followed by training at the BIM Fisheries College in Greencastle, in Donegal, and apart from a detour when he trained as a greenkeeper in Scotland – he won the best student award, unsurprisingly – it has been fish, and fish smoking, and Connemara, ever since.
He was pretty much in charge of the smokehouse as a teenager and, with his wife, Saoirse, he took over completely in 1997, His tenure has been marked not just by superb smoked fish, but by an impish need to innovate, which has led him to create smoked tuna recipes and products that are perhaps the clearest expression of his signature style, using both cold- and hot-smoking techniques. Rick Stein buys it for his Padstow restaurants, a genuine accolade.
Mr Roberts is still young, but he is a man who seems to see time in a long continuum, with himself a part of a bigger process, and in this regard he is atypical of our frenetic modern world. To see him in the smokehouse at Bunowen Pier, way, way out there in Ballyconneely, way, way out there in Connemara working with his hands, is to see something operating with a almost mythic timescale.