11.50 by 15in. (29.2 by 38.1cm)

Title: CURRACHS FISHING (OFF ACHILL), c. 1936
Note: This is the first Irish painting that Ernie O’Malley bought. The Achill men are out on what is obviously a day when either the Mackerel or Herring are in shoals. The Inishturk currach was traditionally rowed by three men and the Achill ones are built with double gunwales. It’s a stormy enough sea, and the artist has put the scale of the human against the might of the sea and the scale of Sliabh Mór behind them to emphasise the daily challenges to those who go to sea in these fragile craft. It’s heroic in its scale even in a smallish work like this. The painting is very much “en plein air “, as the canvas is the size which fitted the artist’s painting box which he’d carried, laden with pigment and brushes, to enable him to observe the landscape before him, which in turn gives it an immediacy and vigour typical of working in this method. The artist, my father, first met O’Malley around 1918 when Ernie had been organising for the IRA. Both Ernie O’Malley and Maurice MacGonigal served in the Dublin Brigade, Ernie in the North City and Maurice in the South City. My father had been recruited earlier to Fianna Éireann by Bulmer Hobson,and then graduated into the IRA. His and Ernie’s circle in the IRA included Seán Lemass, Frank Aiken, James(Jim)Ryan, Seán T.O’Kelly and Eamon de Valera. My father was captured in Christmas week 1919 and released at the Truce in 1921. He was first interned in Kilmainham but due to concerns that he might escape into Dublin and vanish he was transferred with Seán Lemass to Ballykinlar in Northern Ireland. Ernie and he remained friends until the former’s death in 1957, although marriage and families for both, and Ernie’s tempestuous life meant they saw little of each other from the late 1940s on. I do recall Ernie calling to the house when I was a child, it was like a small storm blowing in through the front door, he arrived I recall with my father’s cousin Lily Foley, Countess McCormack who’d come over from New York for family reasons. I think my mother had to retire to bed for a few days after they left although she was no shrinking violet either. I remember my father commenting on Helen Hooker, Ernie’s wife whom we met occasionally when I was child, he said,” she was so powerful she could drill holes in granite just by thinking about it”. When I met Helen again in later life, my father’s words came back to me...he was right! Ernie and my father were, as I recall, in a group of that generation of terrifically able and powerfully minded people, who at a very young age had changed or helped to change the course of this Nation’s History. Ernie was, my father told me, lively and alert to the Arts & Literature from a very young age and he said they spent many a long day arguing about the Arts and its role in shaping a modern Ireland. Ciarán MacGonigal September 2019

oil on canvas

signed lower right; with Victor Waddington Galleries label on reverse