Ballyheane butcher Clive Lavelle has continued on a winning streak for his famous sausages.
The latest awards this Ballyvary native has added to his accolades are the ACBI gold medal for his traditional sausages and two silver medals for his pork and apple and black pepper and chilli sausages. Those awards came in July this year and only a couple of months earlier, in May, Clive was a winner in the ACBI BBQ competition for his homemade burgers and was awarded the silver medal for his beef chilli grill sticks.
Clive’s Butcher Shop in Ballyheane, formerly known as Staunton’s Butchers, is owned and run by Clive Lavelle who has extensive experience in butchering having commenced his career in 2000 as a means to getting out of school. However, he soon learned that butchering was a career he loved and was good at. His first job was in Brogan’s Butchers on Station Road, Castlebar where he worked for four years before moving on to Leneghan’s on Linenhall Street in 2004. He continued butchering in Leneghan’s for a further three years during which time he entered and won the All-Ireland Young Butcher of the Year competition.
While Clive was very happy working in Castlebar his close friends were heading down under for a couple of years so he took his butcher’s apron and joined them on a trip of a lifetime. Travelling abroad with a skill is always an asset and Clive was one of the first of their group to gain employment, in a butcher shop in Brisbane. Soon one of the shop’s long-term employees left meaning that Clive had to jump into his boots and learn the ropes very quickly. This was a challenge he relished and where he learned how to make sausages. On any given day he would make up to 15 different types of sausages by hand as well as learning about smoking them the old German traditional way.
This was a fantastic learning curve and after two years in Australia Clive returned home, but without a job to come home to.
It was then that his first cousin Ciaran Staunton approached him with a business proposition that he couldn’t refuse: “He asked me that if he built me a butcher shop would I run it for him. I jumped at the chance. I ran it for him for about one and a half years and then I decided in January of this year that I would take it over on my own, so I changed the name to Clive’s Butcher Shop and thank God the shop is going from strength to strength,” an excited Clive told the Mayo Advertiser.
To sample Clive’s award winning sausages and all the other meats available at Clive’s Butcher Shop pop into him beside Staunton’s filling station in Ballyheane.
