“The thunder and the singing of the birds

Are but His voice – and carved by His power

Rocks are His written words”

J. M. Plunkett ‘I see His Blood Upon the Rose’

“Houses of stone,

Archways,

Mill wheels

And weirs

And the flowing

Of waters below

Too many years”

Kevin Faller, from the poem ‘Hometown’

futue eos, si iocum non admittant – F*** them, if they cannot take a joke 

“Some of us die physically on the way,
  some emotionally, some spiritually, creatively.
  Nevertheless it’s a journey
  back to the spawning ground,
  instinctively drawn back to the womb’s safety,
  love and nurture. This is my journey”

Pat Bracken
  1951 – 2010
  Artist – Stonecarver - Puppeteer

“The jutting quays were a hive of activity. Already some of the boats were away and were swinging widely into the current of the river. The sun was heading for the Aran Islands and somebody had touched a pink brush to the clouds on the horizon. The bulk of the town on the other side of the river was alive with the winking diamonds of the dying sun on the window panes, and the cold grey stone of the buildings was mellowed and more beautiful. Even the towering bulk of the artificial manure factory looked blackly beautiful in the rays of the setting sun. The seagull’s feathers seemed to be magically touched with the exotic plumage of the tropics, and the daring terns were white blurs diving into the smooth waters”

Walter Macken (1915 – 1967) – ‘Rain on the Wind’

“BRIGHT CITY

I follow the light down the canal path,
across the road and on to the Claddagh.
In a blast of morning light which has turned
canal, river and estuary to mercury,
even the cars on the Long Walk are transfigured.


Five swans beat their way in across the bay,
heavy, sounding their own clarion,
as though carrying the world's beauty
in on their strong white backs this Saturday morning.”

Moya Cannon

“Milltown Community Council has given their help and encouragement to the Restoration of the Jockey's Monument. The monument is known thus as local folklore has it that Edmund Hopkins who was leading the hunt fell off his horse and was killed while jumping the ditch at this point. The monument dates back to 1686 and is the only known monument to have a direct link to the phrase "To Hell or to Connacht" as it commemorates the Hopkins family who were evicted from Leinster under Cromwell.”

Tuam Herald

But let’s not try to find too easy a scapegoat. For sure, religious orders and individuals did what they did in the name of some repressed, authoritarian and twisted version of their own ethos. But they also did it because Irish society wanted actively to stigmatise young vulnerable women, and to hide them from decent folk. We gave licence for everything that was done. Our state colluded. Public policy suggested that it was OK to treat people as criminals although they had committed no crime.

Fergus Finlay

“…there were, of course, people who knew. The families of the women and girls who were consigned to virtual prisons to hide the perceived shame of their pregnancies and illegitimate children. The individual nuns, priests and brothers who abused those in their care. The politicians and civil servants who allowed and supported the system.The members of the police force who assisted in tracking down escapees from institutions where effectively they were used as slave labour. The medical professionals who attended the inmates. Those who allegedly failed to register deaths lawfully. And whoever it was that carried those dead bodies to their graves in Tuam, and to all the other graves up and down the country where adults, children and infants were buried without decency or respect.”

Felicity Hayes-McCoy

“A friend of Arthur Griffith, he worked with the Sinn Féin newspaper Nationality in 1916. He died prematurely of a heart attack following a raid at the paper’s headquarters at Harcourt St”
Wikipedia