Ernie O’Malley’s Mayo

Western Ways: Remembering Mayo through the Eyes of Helen Hooker and Ernie O’Malley

edited by Cormac O’Malley and Juliet Christy Barron

(Mercier Press, €19.99)

This is the latest item in a programme that is bringing back before today’s readers the work and writings of Ernie O’Malley, author of On Another Man’s Wound (Army Without Banners). 

Here, however, the focus is equally for once on his American wife, the artist and photographer Helen Hooker. It derives from the post-revolutionary years of O’Malley, married to Helen, with children, trying to settle back into his native Mayo, which they set out to explore. 

These were years when O’Malley was making a name as a writer on art, and the photographs are informed not just by the keen eye of the artist, but by a deep love of place and people. 

One senses there was nothing superficial for the O’Malleys about their endeavours. Sea, rock, bog, soil, people and creatures: all are captured in these newly conserved images. For a younger generation this book provides another kind of revelation: images of their grandparent’s way of life, of what some might have seen as poverty, but which was also distinguished by pride, and love, and kindness.