Mary O’Halloran has never looked at the GoFundMe page that the well-wishing regulars of her bar set up for her when the pandemic hit. Accepting charity is an alien concept to her. “It’s a very Irish thing,” she says. “If you are raised the way we were, you don’t take something from someone. You work for it.”
Propped on a stool in her bar, Mary O's, in New York's East Village, the Mayo woman appears stunned at the attention she has had over the past few days. O'Halloran, who has lived in the city for 30 years, is torn between feeling shocked and feeling humbled by people's reaction to her appearance on the photographer Brandon Stanton's Humans of New York website and Instagram, Facebook and Twitter pages.
I want to make sure that everybody gets the scones exactly how they would get them if they ordered them from Mary O's before this actually happened. That's how it has to be
Their followers were touched by the story of her struggles to look after her family and her beloved bar when Covid hit, especially as her husband, a longshoreman, was stranded on the Aleutian Islands, off Alaska, for nine months, after flights were suspended.
True to her nature, O’Halloran just got on with it, even though it wasn’t easy. With bills mounting up, children to be home-schooled, and a feeling of helplessness permeating the city, she took solace in her kitchen and began to make and sell Irish soda-bread scones to her mother’s recipe.
“I knew in the back of my head it would probably work, but I still needed that real big push, and the confidence, as well, to try something new. I mean, there wasn’t billions of dollars of sales, but still, people supported it.”
Selling the scones to her regulars, combined with ad-hoc catering jobs, kept the wolf from the door. Then, after much persuasion, O'Halloran set up a web page to sell her scones on, with shipping all over the United States. At $18, or about €15, for six, she was never going to get rich from them, but she found something else in the simple pleasure of baking for others: a connection.
As the months went by, the story of O’Halloran’s persistence spread. One of her regulars wrote to Stanton at Humans of New York and nominated O’Halloran to feature on the page. It was no surprise to her patrons that she was chosen, but O’Halloran was stunned – and the initial surprise was nothing in comparison with the shock that reverberated around Mary O’s just hours after Stanton hit send on his initial post about O’Halloran.
He had asked how she would like Humans of New York’s followers to be directed towards supporting her. Charity was not an option as far as she was concerned. “I said to him, ‘Sure, the only way that you can direct them to me is through the scones.” Stanton pointed out that she’d said herself there was no money in them, but O’Halloran was adamant. “There is something about the scones,” she said – and it appears she was right.
Less than 24 hours after Stanton's posts went live, O'Halloran's new Shopify account had processed more than $1 million worth of orders, averaging 100 boxes a minute. The orders are still arriving – they now total about $1.3 million, at $30 per half-dozen – and O'Halloran is thrilled, if reeling. But she had been warned. Stanton "was saying to me that it would hit people hard. I see now he knew exactly what would happen, because he is used to dealing with his audience."
Many of the people who bought the scones would be unperturbed if they never received them, as they just wanted to support O’Halloran. But she is adamant that she’ll be baking every single one – all 260,000 or so of them – herself, and ignoring everybody who’s suggested that she invest in a commercial kitchen and take on staff to meet such a big order book.
“I want to make sure that everybody gets the scones exactly how they would get them if they ordered them from Mary O’s before this actually happened, genuine and from the heart,” she says, “because that’s how it has to be.”
And so the community that is so important to O’Halloran came together once again, getting the baker access to the gargantuan ovens at her son’s high-school and church kitchens. With her band of helpers, and goodwill in spades, orders will be winging their way to tens of thousands of homes across the United States in no time at all. Sadly, delivery to Ireland is not an option. Yet.
