Holyhead 1960

HALF LIVES
About ten years ago, when the Irish Celtic Tiger was distracting everyone by his antics, I decided to create a series of paintings about the grim period that proceeded it, which I thought we were in danger of forgetting. As well as living through these straited years, and emigrating myself, I had taught Irish (and British and European history) and I was acutely aware of how little there was written about that third of the Irish nation who departed - and of what there was, how lop-sided the coverage often was, being viewed exclusively from the British side of the water or the Irish side. My pictures, I hope, may do a little to redress this, but they stand as a pictorial marker of a forgotton people.

One of the problems of economic emigrants is that they grow up in one culture, learn its values and outlook, and then have to spend the second half of their lives in a society that has a totally different set of values. The emigrant culture they brought with them was a pre-industrial social one - rural and religious, male dominated with a proclivity towards physical force action, and clientship - and the society they entered was mainly secular, industrial and urban, rule bound with more equal gender relations. If these man and women are to succeed and flourish, they have to learn the new values of modernity, and this is not an easy task in mid life. It is often especially hard since they are saddled with a number of anti-adaptive attitudes and injunctions before they leave. The Church tells them that above all they must never lose their faith: never adapt! Patriots of all shades tell them:, 'don't forget where ere you roam that you're an Irishman' (sic) in its mildest, sentimental form, but are just as likely to accuse them of selfishly betraying the country as with Fanny Parnell's poem :' Let go the wretched emigrant, not such as him we need'. But it is these traditional values that have forced them to emigrate in the first place; and their abandonment in the last couple of decades that made the Celtic Tiger possible. And there is still a long way to go to create a modern Ireland.