My time in Maynooth was not terribly short, but it was terribly uneventful. When I had my video interview with the couple I housesat for, they seemed to be perplexed as to why I wanted to go to Maynooth. Now that I’ve been there, I understand why they were bemused.
Don’t get me wrong – Maynooth is a pretty town.
But aside from St. Patrick’s College and Maynooth University, there is nothing there of note.
Well, the ruins of the castle of Silken Thomas, the rebellious Earl of Kildare.
The juxtapostion of the partly destroyed, ancient castle, next to the mundane modern bungalow really struck me. If Thomas haunts the ruins of his castle, what must he make of mundane modern life going on all around him?
I tried to find a nice way to tell the lovely young people who are looking for a housesitter, that really it wasn’t Maynooth in particular I was interested in. Rather, the dates and the location suited me, and most importantly, it looked like a good place to continue with my ‘sleep vacation’. I came across the term ‘sleep vacation‘ recently. It perfectly describes what I am looking in housesitting and travel right now. A place to hang out with no pressure to ‘do’ anything.
Indeed, it was a peaceful week. The most exciting thing to happen was that I couldn’t get the child lock off the oven door. Defeated by a system designed to foil a two year old. Sounds about right.
The cats were not cuddlers like dear Moose, but they were friendly enough and aside wrestling to the point that it sounded like WWIII had broken out, were pretty low maintenance.
My little travel wooden cat friends, given to me by a dear friend in Cuenca, have been joined by the crocheted mouse one of my Irish friends gave me.
I went to church again. It was a nice space, but not particularly memorable, except for the tower which was originally part of the Earl of Kildare’s Castle, c.1450.
There are the usual dozen or so bums in the pews, which were numbered. The pews, not the bums.
This is probably a remnant of the Victorian restoration. The original chapel was destroyed in Thomas’s rebellion.
The interior had a nice beamed ceiling.
It was the last Sunday in Advent and I was hoping for some music I could warble along to, accompanied by the lovely organ.
I did recognize one of the three hymns, but the other two were unknown even to the congregation. It was literally only the guy who gave the sermon and the usher who were singing.
The sermon was all about how wonderful it was for the Virgin Mary to have her body appropriated as a vessel, although the lecturer was careful to assure us that she had ‘consented’ to this invasion. I guess he had never heard about consent being vitiated in a situation of such a gross imbalance of power.
Yup. It will be another 26 years before I set foot in a church again.
After Maynooth, I had a four day hiatus, so I booked a hotel in Dublin. I had a gorgeous view from the room’s balcony, although it was too frosty to use it much. The travel friends liked it.
Mostly, I played tourist.
I have visited the Museum of Decorative Arts and History before, but went back to see a small exhibit of the stained glass of Harry Clarke, an Irish artist. His father had a stained glass and church decorating business, so unsurprisingly, a lot of his early work was for churches.
I thought the depiction of the symbols for the gospel writers around the head of Christ were particularly evocative – Luke as a bull, Mark as a lion and John as an eagle. Poor Matthew has to keep his human form as an angel.
But even in the religious art, the Art Nouveau influence crept in.
It is in full bloom in the secular works he created, such as this exquisite panel, based on the poem by Heinrich Heine “A Meeting” about a meeting between merpeople lovers.
It was commissioned to hang in a window in a patron’s home. Lucky patron.
I also love that the family of Richard Mulcahy chose to have him immortalized in glass, rather than the more traditional stuffy oil painting.
Mulcahy fought in the 1916 Easter rising, served as Chief of Staff in the IRA during the War of Independence and succeeded Michel Collins as Commander-in-Chief of the National Army during the Irish Civil War. He was born the son of a postal clerk.
Further on in the museum were images that were not so beautiful, and Mulcahy featured in some of them. Because it is a museum of Irish history as well as Irish art, there was a lot of real estate devoted to the numerous Irish uprisings and rebellions. Once we hit the age of photography, we were confronted by the all too familiar horrific images of the carnage of WWI.
Warning – some of the images that follow are very graphic and disturbing.
The Uprising of 1916 and War of Independence on the surface, seem heroic and inspiring. But brutality by the British was answered by reprisals by the Irish.
The British answered with their own propaganda, including what we now know were staged images.
During the negotiations to end the War of Independence, and establish an Irish free state, the Irish turned on each other. The Provisional Government supported the proposed treaty with the British. The treaty allowed the six, mostly Protestant, northeastern counties to opt out of the treaty, which they did almost immediately. The island was partitioned and Northern Ireland remained part of Great Britain.
The civil war was won by the pro-Treaty National Army, but not without more atrocities, patriot against patriot. Any tendency I had had towards being dewy-eyed over Richard Mulcahy, immortalized in stained glass above, was killed in a moment, when I read that as Minister of Defence and Commander-in-chief of the Provisional Army, he ordered anti-Treaty activists caught carrying weapons to be executed. Seventy-seven anti-Treaty prisoners in total were executed. These were people who had fought side by side in the war of Independence.
In reprisal, the anti-Treaty IRA started killing republicans. Nine of them were tied to a landmine and blown up, as just one example. The writer, Erskine Childers, who had been a friend and ally of Michael Collins, but opposed the treaty, was caught with a revolver given to him by Collins. He was executed.
Michael Collins himself was assassinated by anti-Treaty forces.
Photos of the body of the national hero were published and he had a state funeral.
The most moving exhibit was a letter from Liam Mellows, an anti-Treaty prisoner, on the eve of his execution. Mellows had fought for Irish Independence since he was 16 years old. He and three others were shot in reprisal for the anti-Treaty assassination of Sean Hales.
You get the idea. It was a lot. By the time I exited to a display of Browning guns with a video display, inviting visitors to pick them up and ‘become a soldier’ I was appalled and sickened.
It gave me a lot of food for thought though, especially after Trump started making noise about annexing Canada and the Panama Canal, and threatening Greenland. I am always surprised when people dismiss this as posturing or even a joke. Ask the Austrians in 1937 if they feared their historic allies, the Germans. Ask again after the Anschluss in March of 1938.
I have two grandsons in the Canadian Armed Forces. Would I give their lives to fight what would undoubtedly be a losing battle to preserve Canadian sovereignty?
*Need to look at pretty things now*
I proceeded on to the costume display, furniture and furnishings.
Who knew coal scuttles could be works of art?
I particularly enjoyed the display of the products produced by second year Jewelry and Objects students from the National College of Art and Design.
They were invited to make art from antique silverware that was due to be destroyed.
The Spoon Garden art was fun too. Anne-Marie Reinhold won the competition sponsored by Design and Crafts Council Ireland and the National Museums of Ireland to commission a piece of work in remembrance of the pandemic.
She created vegetable shaped silver spoons and silver seedlings to exemplify how important nature became to her during Covid times, and in realisation of how privileged she was to be able to be outside in her garden.
On my way out, I re-visited the galleries devoted to the works of Alison Lawry, commemorating the history of the Tuam Mother & Baby Home, and the Magdalene Laundry system for sinful women – or women and girls no longer wanted by their families. The revelations of abuses carried out in these systems traumatized Ireland and resulted in an apology from the Taoiseach, (Prime Minister), Enda Kenny.
Fallen women, girls ‘who got themelves into trouble ‘ – that is, got pregnant out of wedlock – were sent to these places to expiate their sin in work and to have their babies. No word of course, of any punishments levelled at the fathers. I find it ironic that one of these Roman Catholic penal gulags was named after the ‘fallen woman’ Mary Magdalene whose sins Christ himself ignored or forgave.
The bodies of 796 babies and children were discovered at the Tuam home, many in a disused sewer system. Yes. So much more godly than permitting abortion or, at the time, birth control. But then, those good christian nuns also denied denied baptism to the babies of these sinful slut mothers, so they weren’t worthy of a christian burial anyway.
Lowry gives them a sort of post-mortem christening with nine paté de verre (glass paste) christening robes.
And that was at just one such ‘home’. The Magdalene Laundries were run by the Catholic Church after the British left Ireland, mostly by orders of nuns. Some 30,000 women passed through the brutal system in the 200 years during which it operated.
The unmarked graves of 155 women were discovered in the convent grounds of just one laundry, which were supported by the State and operated until 1996.
I’m sure many critics would dismiss Lowry’s art as ‘female’. She uses textiles of all kinds, and glass and other natural substances. This piece commemorates the hair cutting that was a form of punishment. Lowry often accompanies the pieces with quotations from scripture.
Later, at the Hugh Lane Gallery, I saw a portrait of Kathleen Clarke. She was a founding member of a women’s paramilitary organization in the struggle for Irish Independence, the first female Lord Mayor of Dublin and played a pivotal role in the founding of the Irish Red Cross.
Supporting the rejection by the Leinster Art Gallery on the grounds of blasphemy, of a 1942 painting by Georges Roualt of ‘Christ and The Soldier’, this feminist, revolutionary woman who campaigned for social change, said that the painting was ‘offensive to christian sentiment’.
I’m not sure how it is offensive. The only factor I have seen identified is its ‘modernity’. But I expect Clarke was a big proponent of the Magdalene Laundries and the Mother & Baby Homes. Christian values you know.
We are all prisoners to the belief systems we are indoctrinated into as children, by the state and by religion, even down to what style of art is acceptable and ‘normal’. And when the state and religion are in bed together, very, very bad things happen. As someone said, “Bad people will do bad things. But it takes religion to make good people do bad things.”
When I visited the Hugh Lane Gallery I saw more of Harry Clarke’s stained glass, as well as that of others, including Wilhemina Geddes (the first three panels).
But for me, nothing could beat the enormous stained glass window done on commission to hang in the house of a judge in Dublin.
Absolutely stunning and mesmerising.
There was a section devoted to An Tur Gloine (Tower of Glass), founded in Dublin in 1903, at the height of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Sarah Purser, an artist and a major force in the Irish art world at the time was in large part responsible for its existence.
The idea was to provide an alternative to buying foreign stained glass for churches, and also to encourage Irish artists working in stained glass.
The modern approach to stained glass had a lot of detractors.
Sarah Purser had a falling out with W.B Yeats (who she called ‘Willie’) when he wrote an article deploring An Tur Gloine caving to demands for a more conventional stained glass window to fulfill a commission.
The museum had a number of the rejected studies. Others have found their way across the world. I was interested that one is in St. Bartholomew’s Church in Ottawa.
The grumpy guy, second photo, bottom right, is meant to be St. Christopher. The nuns who commissioned the window wanted the saccharine, chocolate box version they were familiar with. No doubt they found this modern take to be blasphemous.
Purser’s portrait of Yeats had me falling in love with him even more than I was, having already fallen in love with his poetry.
Isn’t he literally the portrait of the romantic poet? The kind of man who wrote:
“How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face”
There was a sort of companion piece of Maud Gonne, whom he loved madly and who was the inspiration for much of his romantic poetry.
He proposed marriage many times, but she always refused him. She thought him insufficiently radical in his Irish nationalism (Gonne was herself was a radical nationalist, christened the Irish Joan of Arc), but also because she believed his unrequited love for her had fueled his poetry:
“…you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.”
She married an Irish republican and military man, but it only lasted a year. Gonne had a daughter from a previous marriage. When Yeats was in his fifties he proposed again to Gonne (now a widow) and when she refused, to her 23 year old daughter, who also refused. Ew.
Why do heroes always turn out to have feet of clay?
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