Dublin dealer and history enthusiast Ian Dowling has made a living from the art of picking and selling Irish treasures. For years he has travelled all over Ireland and the UK, hunting down and buying collectibles that tell stories of the country’s past.

 The Irish Pickers head to prestigious, interesting and historic places, hunting out and purchasing unusual objects previously hidden from the world. Narrated by Ireland’s own Ardal O’Hanlon (Father Ted, My Hero) , Irish Pickers follows Ian and his team as they uncover quirky gems that paint a picture of Ireland’s rich history – with famous tales, heroes and villains from years gone by, including St Patrick himself, featuring throughout.

Accompanying Ian on this Irish road trip is his best mate and trusty side-kick Mark Butterly aka ‘Butzy’. Together they visit everywhere from farms to stately homes, family businesses, private collectors, salvage dealers, and museums, looking for items of national and local significance. Items ripe for picking include ornaments, street signs, military artefacts, retro games, model cars, shop fittings, prints, posters, adverts and more. If it’s Irish and has a history, they’re interested.

Ian negotiates hard for the best deals from the vendors which he moves on for a profit once back in the Dublin office. But the boys are not alone in their search, with office manager Ali Foy helping to organise the business and delving into the provenance of the items. Retired dealer ‘Vintage Vinny’, so called because of his experience and contacts in the antiques game, lends Ian a hand in tracking down the objects and advising on where best to sell them. The four are joined by Vinny’s dog Max, who’s rumoured to have a nose for a bargain himself!

BLAZE brings you a new antiquing show - Rockstar style! Meet the Team:

IAN– the main dealer and the one with tons of knowledge on antiques, he knows what can make money!

BUTSY – he's a self-declared side kick, he is the roadie that makes things happen. He does the lifting and sifting for Ian. More importantly, he’s Ian’s best mate and his no.1 desired road companion.

VINTAGE VINNY– looks like a relic but what this man doesn’t know about antiques isn’t worth knowing!

ALI – the vital lynchpin that keeps it all together and seeks out the boys leads.

And GARY the landlord of the pub where the business is based – who keeps the bar polished and everyone’s glasses full as they review and appraise their finds.

#IrishPickers starts Thursday 19th March. 

In brand new series Irish Pickers, self-styled vintage connoisseur and historical dealer, Ian Dowling and best mate Butzy travel the length and breadth of Ireland on the hunt for unusual objects and collectables that tell the story of Ireland’s past. 

Dowling: ‘Picking is the art of buying items with the view to making a profit. For me, I like buying stuff that has a story attached. It’s not just about money but I also like to connect a piece with a new home. Hopefully, connect something that is unloved with somebody that will love it and treasure it for many years. And make a bit of profit along the way.’

Buying and selling collectables has been a life-long passion for the Dublin dealer who made his very first deal while still in primary school. 

Dowling: ‘I've always been able to buy something for a pound and sell it for two or three pounds. The first thing I ever bought was a baby monitor from a parish fete. I bought it for 50p and I sold it for £35. And that was me hooked.’

Though Ian made his first pick in a church fete his advice is to seek out private collectors for the best deals. In the series Ian and Butzy visit stately homes, family businesses, private collectors, salvage dealers, and museums to find those unique items.

Dowling: ‘If you can get access to a collector or a hoarder that's the best way to get a bit of value. If you go to an auction especially, you're competing with other dealers and it's much harder to make a profit.’

Making a profit is the name of the game and the duo hit the jackpot in Limerick City at the collection of a former music promoter and nightclub owner. Amongst the pop memorabilia from U2 and Thin Lizzy, there’s a piece with links to a famous English actor and hell-raiser.

Dowling: ‘The biggest margin I made in the series was from a bar Oliver Reed used to frequent after he had moved to Ireland. There's a photograph of him standing beside it. I bought that for seven hundred and I sold it for five grand.'

A bar is just one of the quirky gems that Ian and Butzy pick in a series full of weird and wonderful artefacts. The Irish Pickers are always on the lookout for these rare, one of a kind items as it means they're more likely to turn a much larger profit. For instance, there was one item that Ian found on the wall of a pub that is absolutely unique.

Dowling: 'We found a petition from 1876 signed by noble folk, you can tell from the names and address that they have quite a good social standing. They were petitioning to have the law changed in 1876 to allow you to marry your dead wife's sister. 

‘It's a really quirky piece and Ali (Ali Foy) – who manages the Dublin office and researches the provenance of items – looked into it a bit more and the law was changed a couple of years later. This petition may have actually brought about a change in the law, to allow you to marry your dead wife's sister.'

While there are lots of interesting objects of cultural significance in the show, the owners of these pieces are just as fascinating. In a show full of characters, one dealer particularly sticks out for Ian.

Dowling: ‘There was a publican and antiques dealer down in Dingle who owns Curran's pub down there. I don't know if you know Kerry folk, but they wouldn't want a young lad to come down from Dublin and beat them in a sense. He was probably the toughest negotiator, I came across, but I love that. There are so many interesting personalities out there and it's great to capture them.’

Ian’s art of the deal when it comes to negotiation with tough customers like the Dingle publican is pretty ballsy.

Dowling: ‘Number one rule. Really just go in with a low-ball offer. Go in so low that you should almost be embarrassed to ask. There might be shock and disbelief, but you flush out their response from the first. Then you can work out their bottom line and then you go from there and try and get a few bob off.’

Picking is not just about buying it’s also about knowing the right time to sell and when to hang onto an item, especially when it has real historical significance.

Dowling: ‘I did have a Good Friday Agreement that I really regret selling and I'd love to find another. The one I had was signed by all the parties involved in the negotiations, John Hume, Mo Mowlam, Tony Blair everybody. A huge piece of Irish history. I sold that too quick.

‘I'd love to own one myself and if I can find another one of those - which is going to be very hard - I'd treasure it.’

Quite a few chancers have walked through the doors of the World Famous Gold & Silver Pawn Shop over the years. Like that guy who tried to flog an old gun-shaped cigarette lighter for $5,000 but ended up taking 50 bucks (nice try, though).

But Rick Harrison and the boys have also dealt with some real high rollers, brandishing items valuable enough to make the soundtrack do that record scratch thing. And you know things are serious when you hear that record scratch thing.

Price tag: $750,000 

Rick Harrison was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning when a guy strolled into the pawnshop with Jimi Hendrix’s 1963 Fender Stratocaster guitar. Rick caressed it and practically started calling it his preciousss, while a guitar expert declared the item to be 'stupid cool' (a technical antique dealing term), so the seller must have felt confident he’d get his $750,000 asking price. But Rick’s $550,000 offer was anything but music to his ears, and he walked. 

Price tag: $1 million

It’s fair to say The Beatles were not entirely inconsequential to the history of rock music. So it was pretty exciting when someone brought in the original 1962 contract between the band members and manager Brian Epstein, and asked if Rick might, you know, be interested in buying it at all? Some CGI-style analysis of the signatures proved they were the real deal, but Rick balked at the million-buck tag. The seller missed a trick by not singing “You Never Give Me Your Money” as he walked out of there.

Price tag: $1 million

A million is a lot of money, but what if it means owning your very own giant killer robot? Suddenly it seems an entirely reasonable price, if you ask us. But the boys still passed on the Robosaurus, which could literally crush cars in its giant metal gnashers. Fun fact: it appeared in a 1989 TV pilot about a cop with the superpower of being able to blow his dead son’s toy robot up into a gigantic tool of righteous vengeance. Here’s hoping Netflix gives it the gritty reboot it deserves.

Price tag: $1.25 million

Yes, this was the actual white Ford Bronco which OJ Simpson tried to flee the cops in after being charged with two murders. The car chase was filmed live and watched by an estimated 95 million people worldwide, so Rick looked understandably ready to pinch himself as he got behind the wheel and took it for a spin. Despite this, the grisly context of its fame meant he had to pass (plus, just check out that price tag).

Price tag: $2.5 million

Rick looked ready to shed a tear when he was presented with a silk suit once worn by the first president of the United States of America. The initial asking price was $3 million, but Rick couldn’t bring himself to cough up even when it dropped to $2.5 million. Still, he at least got to bask in its almost holy presence, and besides – as Rick himself put it – 'it didn’t fit me anyway.'

Brand new series Irish Pickers follows vintage conoisseur Ian Dowling and his best mate Butzy, as they go on a rummage around Ireland for treasures to buy and sell. It got us thinking… wouldn’t it be cool if they stumbled across the long-lost Irish Crown Jewels? Why, yes. Yes it would. 

Yes and no. There were a pair of gem-encrusted treasures, consisting of a star and a brooch, that were known as the “Irish Crown Jewels”. But they weren’t actually used during coronations. Instead, these flashy items – emblazoned with diamonds and rubies and emerald shamrocks, and basically looking like something Liberace might have worn if he hailed from Cork – were worn at initiation ceremonies for the Order of St Patrick, an old order of knighthood.

Somebody nicked them, is what. It was on 6 July 1907 that staff at Dublin Castle realised the jewels had vanished from their safe. Blame fell on Sir Arthur Vicars, the Ulster King of Arms, who was meant to be looking after the precious items. To be fair, he had displayed Mr Bean-levels of incompetence in the run-up to the theft, once waking up after a drinking session to find the jewels hanging around his neck. Another time, a posh pal of his stole the jewels and sent them to Vicars in the post as a joke. What larks! 

Funny you should ask, but yes, it very much appears there were. In the aftermath of the theft, some speculated that the authorities knew exactly who had nabbed the jewels, but had covered things up because Dublin Castle was also where local gay aristocrats apparently got together for illicit raunchy shenanigans behind closed doors. In the words of a clearly livid politician called Laurence Ginnell, the police had found evidence of 'criminal debauchery and sodomy being committed in the castle', and wanted the whole matter hushed up to avoid a scandal

Two names brought up in connection with both the theft and the alleged orgies were army captain Richard Gorges (dubbed 'a reckless bully, a robber, a murderer, a bugger, and a sod' by Ginnell), and Frank Shackleton, brother of famed Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. Honestly, we’ll probably never know who did the deed, although Frank Shackleton WAS later convicted of fraud and Richard Gorges DID later get done for killing a policeman, so the idea of nabbing some jewels probably wouldn’t have made either of them clutch their pearls and reach for the smelling salts. Just saying.

Chances are they were broken up and sold off, gem-by-gem, many decades ago. But that’s boring, so let’s instead imagine they’re in an old snuff box under the stairs of a junk shop in Limerick, just waiting for the Irish Pickers to dig them out. Now that would be worth a celebratory Guinness or two.

BLAZE: What inspired you to open the shop?

Rick Harrison: Around 16 years ago, I decided if I get one of these reality shows, it'll probably be good for business. So I pitched the show and eventually got it on television. But for years, everyone kept telling me that no one's ever going to want to watch a show about four bad guys and a bunch of antiques. 

BLAZE: Since 1989, when the shop opened, what are the biggest changes you've noticed over time?

Rick Harrison: Like Darwinism, you evolve or you die. The volume of customers has just changed dramatically. Before I had the show I used to get about 100 customers a day, then that grew to more a thousand customers a day. And now with Coronavirus, that number has changed significantly.

BLAZE: What would you say has been the weirdest item that you've ever sold?

Rick Harrison: Okay well, this guy comes in the shop with three human skulls in a duffel bag.

It turned out he went to dental school and they used to use real human skills, and he bought a bunch of them at an auction. I obviously couldn't buy them, there'd be 10 cop cars in the parking lot.

Also, someone in the UK tried to sell me this coffin with an air pump on it, they gave them to new mothers during World War II, and there was a pump to make sure the babies didn' get gas. 

BLAZE: What was the rarest item that you've come across? 

Rick Harrison: I have a 12th century stained glass window in my house, it's from the UK. 

I also have an eighth-century Viking bracelet that was founded in a Viking gourd in a field in England and I wear it all the time. 

BLAZE: Do you ever buy off items for yourself?

Rick Harrison: Well, I've been a really big book collector, I collect a lot of the books that you see on the show. I've even just bought one in Italy for $100,000. I'm a mega nerd!

I went out with John Merrick and Katy Perry one night and I didn't even know who Katy Perry was. That's how much of a nerd I am. 

BLAZE: Do you have any negotiation tips?

Rick Harrison: Be willing to walk away!. If you're not willing to walk away, the other person's just dictating the price to you. You need to know when to walk away from the deal if it doesn't feel right, even if you really want that item. Your business's reputation is everything! 

BLAZE: Have you ever come across a really difficult customer?

Rick Harrison: A lot! There's normally a lot of people that come in with their family heirloom and they were told that grandma's got a perfect diamond ring. And then I have to explain to them; 'No, grandma was cheap.' It's a fake!

BLAZE: Who has been your favourite visitor to the shop?

Rick Harrison: It has to be Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top

BLAZE: When would you say is the best time in the year for pawning items?

Rick Harrison: Definitely the Chrismas period! People are looking for bargains everywhere. 

Here's a crazy fact... "there's no such thing as a used diamond". So there's always a very good chance your newly bought diamonds were already in a pawn shop. 

BLAZE: If you were president for a day, what law would you pass and why?

Rick Harrison: I would set up a voucher system and any kid can go to any school they want to go to. The government shouldn't be running the school systems. It's an issue because education is so important. 

BLAZE: And is it true that you pitched an idea for a documentary series on the White House? 

Rick Harrison: Yes, I wanted to do a reality show documentary series on the blue-collar workgroup at the White House. I wanted to know more about all those jobs in the White House that no one knows about. 

MARY NZEH

Anyone who watches Pawn Stars will know three key things about Rick Harrison. One, he’s a savvy entrepreneur. Two, he’s a master haggler. Three, if you spray-painted him purple, he would look exactly and precisely like iconic Marvel supervillain Thanos (which is why it was pretty exciting when someone brought an Infinity Gauntlet prop into the shop that time).

But this is just scratching the surface of all things Rick. Here are some other highly important facts all fans should know about the big guy.

Yep, Rick has come a long way since he and his dad founded their shop back in 1989.

Thanks to the runaway success of Pawn Stars, he’s now rich. Proper, 'I have 29 cars' rich (that’s an actual quote by the way). While he’s always been ambitious operator, he never imagined how what a phenomenon the show would become. 'I was hoping to get a season or two to help our business,' he once said in an interview. 'I never thought we'd be in 152 countries and 38 languages.'

Brace yourself for an origin story worthy of a movie. When Rick was a young boy, he was stricken with epilepsy. Severe, debilitating epilepsy which made him feel like a 'thousand power lines' were zapping and crackling inside his skull, and confined him to bed for weeks at a time. 

In those pre-Netflix, pre-Playstation, pre-YouTube-rabbit-hole days, bed-ridden Rick devoured books. Lots of books, particularly John D Fitzgerald’s 'The Great Brain' series, about a plucky kid’s zany money-making schemes. Think Del Boy, only younger and more from Utah. Reading about this prepubescent entrepreneur had a huge impact on Rick’s world view, encouraging him to pursue his own business success. Imagine if Harry Potter had been around then; Rick would presumably be some sort of warlock now. 

Think Pawn Stars was Rick’s first time on telly? Well, you wouldn’t just be wrong – you’d be wrong twice. Rick and the pawn shop were filmed for a PBS documentary way back in 2001. Then, in 2003, an episode of Comedy Central’s Insomniac series saw comedian Dave Attell take a tour of the shop. The footage is on YouTube, so you can see how different Rick looked back then (while also having the terrible realisation that 2003 is now so far in the past, it’s basically like watching a Dickens adaptation). 

We know Rick always thinks big. But he really went all the way a few years ago, when he came up with the idea of a documentary set in the White House. 'I wanted to talk to the gardeners, the housekeepers, the curator of all the historical items around the White House,' he later said in an interview. This wasn’t just some passing shower thought either – Rick used his celebrity clout to pitch the idea to the White House Director of Strategic Communications. Sadly, it didn’t come to anything, so we’ll just have to wait until Rick gets even bigger clout by becoming Governor of Nevada. On that point…

Rick has openly pondered the prospect of a career in politics, although he also recently said he was 'leaning towards no'. One thing he definitely won’t be doing is running for mayor, for an excellent reason. 'The city council meetings would drive me crazy.'

 Listen to them talk and you'd think that the lads at the World Famous Gold and Silver Pawn Shop on the Las Vegas strip know everything. Yet while the Pawn Stars crew are smart cookies, sometimes the prize items they covert and buy are worth less than a packet of double chocolate chip Marylands and they get ripped off. Sometimes that's just the way the cookie crumbles.

Other times, the guys spot the fakes and know better than to part with cash for the fakery. Being a pawn shop in the most money-thirsty city on Earth, plenty of forgeries have come through the doors of the shop over the years...

Here are some of the most memorable:

50 million years old. Cor, that’s old, innit? Like, really, REALLY old. Imagine owning a piece of Baltic amber with a perfectly preserved tarantula inside that’s 50 million years old. And then imagine being told that it’s a fake made entirely of plastic.

That was the reality some poor sucker called Madison had to face back in 2014. Even the authentication papers he had from a professional entomologist (insect nerd) were fake. 

Maddy had wanted fifty grand for it. He got… nothing. He didn’t leave the store with nothing, though. He actually left with minus two hundred dollars after paying for the ‘gemstone’ to be professionally examined by the Gemological Institute of America. Bless.

Not only was Beatle John Lennon a top drawer musical artist, the man was also a pretty talented artist-artist. He went to art school and everything. Being one of the world’s most famous ever men and, well, dead - his drawings are now worth a pretty penny. 

Forgeries of his drawings, however, are worth significantly less.

The series 13 episode ‘Under Pressure’ saw a very proud music fan bring in his ‘very rare signed John Lennon artwork’. The drawings consisted of six miniature pen-drawn self-portraits which the buyer picked up for a cool $10 from a charity shop. But you know that saying about things being ‘too good to be true?’ Well, yep. That.

The guy wanted $20k. Rick was keen but before he was willing to talk numbers, he gave the thing a look. Something was off about the paper… then he realised. It was Kodak printer paper. Something which didn’t exist in John Lennon’s lifetime. It was a fake. As for the customer? It was a hard day’s luck.

Claude Monet was a French artist who was born in 1840 and generally regarded by the art world as being one of the founder members of the hugely influential Impressionist movement. His paintings sell for tens of millions and adorn the walls of some of the world’s most prestigious galleries. They generally don’t find themselves being hawked in Vegas pawn shops.

So when one found its way into the store, it was - of course - a forgery. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be featuring it here, would we? How did the expert know? Well, it was surprisingly easy to tell, as it goes. The back of the canvas was clean. Meaning no paint had seeped through. The materials that Monet used would have bled through. It was a fugazi. 

If you had a ‘one in a million’ item, how much would you want for it? Exactly, you’d want one million for it. That’s what the cock-sure chap who strolled into the shop with a framed photograph of Abraham and Mary Lincoln wanted. A cool one million bucks.

Now the fellas in the shop were never going to hand over a mil, but they admired the seller’s chutzpah and bartering strategy. They were keen but, as they sensibly do, they wanted proof that the snap was genuine. So they called in an expert who examined it and, using special facial recognition software, the woman deemed it a fake. 

The man with the photo was faced with the prospect of changing his asking price from $1m to around the price of a cup of coffee. He did no such thing, though. Instead, he did what any optimistic gambler does in Sin City after losing a hand and decided to double down. 

He refuses to believe the expert, opting to tell her instead that, in fact, he is more of an expert than she is. 'It's your career,' he tells her. 'You have the right to discredit yourself if you want to.' 

The dude left empty-handed. Well, not entirely empty. He was holding a totally worthless fake photograph of Abe Lincoln.

Presidents, eh? They’ve been quite the colourful bunch, and we’re not just talking about Donald Trump’s skin complexion. Take Abraham Lincoln, who was a competitive wrestler in his younger years. Then there was Warren Harding, who infamously had sex with his mistress in a White House wardrobe. We should also mention President Lyndon Johnson’s penchant for holding meetings with aides while sitting on the toilet (and there’s you thinking office Zoom calls can be awkward).

While Rick Harrison and co haven’t received any memorabilia connected to these particular stories – Lincoln’s leotards, say, or Lyndon Johnson’s can of Febreze – they’ve certainly had their pick of presidential items in Pawn Stars. To commemorate this year’s not-at-all-divisive-or-bonkers US election, let’s look back at six of the most fascinating to turn up on the show.

Proving that tacky merchandising tat isn’t just a modern phenomenon, this 19th Century 'inauguration handkerchief' commemorating President Benjamin Harrison raised smiles in the pawn shop. But that was only because Rick Harrison and his clan are apparently distant descendants of the president – the item itself really wasn’t worth very much. Still, it does make you hold out hope for other unlikely inauguration-themed memorabilia that might be out there. An Obama inauguration shoehorn perhaps? A Nixon inauguration blancmange mould? Here’s hoping.

Lincoln’s definitely one of the top-end, Taste the Difference presidents, quite unlike the many others who’ve fallen into obscurity (we’re looking at you, Millard Fillmore). This means anything tied to Honest Abe is highly collectable, which is why Rick Harrison was understandably excited about an actual photo signed by actual Lincoln. And not just any old photo, but the very photo that was the basis for Lincoln image featured on the one cent coin. 'Please for the love of God take my money,' Rick almost-but-didn’t-quite-say, purchasing the pic for a hefty $100,000.

When a lady walked into the store clutching a film can simply labelled “FDR, 1882 – 1945”, there were high hopes it contained rare, never-seen footage of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the only US president to be elected four times. Unfortunately, it turned out to contain not-rare, highly-seen-before footage that was already in the public domain. And if that proved frustrating for the seller and the Pawn Star boys alike, it was nothing compared to…

When is a chair more than a chair? When it’s Abraham Lincoln’s dining chair which he rested his god-like backside on. Faced with the exquisite bit of vintage furniture, Rick was keen to check if this was the real deal or, to use another President’s favourite phrase, fake news. He brought in an expert and bluntly asked him, 'Is there a possibility that Abraham Lincoln’s butt touched this chair?' Unfortunately, there was no way to absolutely verify the claim, which was disappointing. Still: nice chair.

Sadly not a fantastic/horrifying example of human taxidermy, but actually a massive chunk of foam depicting Ronald Reagan’s beaming face. The seller had apparently nabbed it from the 1980 Republican Convention when he was a teenager, then clearly spent the next few decades trying to explain to friends and family why there was a giant Ronald Reagan head looming in the corner of his bedroom. 'My mom’ll be happy I’m getting rid of it too,' he said, eagerly accepting the $300 offer.

When a seller presented a golf ball to the gang and said it once belonged to President Lyndon Johnson, he was naturally asked how it came to be in his family’s possession. The answer was marvellous: 'He hit my dad with it down in Mexico.' Yes, President Johnson had carelessly shot the ball in the seller’s dad’s direction, thwacking him with it. The fellow quickly pocketed the offending ball, and thus it became a family heirloom. A truly tee-rific story.