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British novelist Graham Greene, author of such classics as Brighton Rock, The Third Man and The End of the Affair, visited and stayed on Achill Island a number of times in the late 1940s. He wrote parts of the novels The Heart of the Matter (subsequently banned in Ireland) and The Fallen Idol in the village of Dooagh, and Achill Island is also said to have inspired Greene to write some of his best poetry.



Graham Greene retained a special affection for Achill Island, which he mentioned frequently in his letters and notes, although this was largely due to the circumstances of his visits. Graham Greene was introduced to Achill by his mistress, Catherine Walston. The story of Graham Greene's relationship with Catherine Walston, the vivacious American wife of millionaire British MP Harry (later Lord) Walston, has been chronicled in William Cash's book 'The Third Woman' (pub. 2000) and was turned into a film, 'The End of the Affair', by Neil Jordan in 1999.



Catherine Walston rented a cottage in Dooagh, on the western part of Achill Island. By all accounts it was a rustic retreat for the wealthy society hostess, with no electricity, one outside tap for water, and a corrugated iron roof on the traditional stone cottage. It stands in stark contrast to the other locations at which the affair was played out - including the Paris Ritz, the Italian isle of Capri, and aboard film director Alexander Korda's yacht The Elsewhere. Sadly for Graham Greene enthusiasts and historians, the cottage in Dooagh on Achill Island has now been demolished.



Catherine Walston was undoubtedly herself introduced to Achill Island by Ernie O'Malley, the Castlebar-born former IRA leader during the 1916-23 uprising. O'Malley, who turned to art and literature after the Civil War, had married the wealthy American heiress Elen Hooker. Elen and Ernie O'Malley lived at Burrishoole Lodge, located between Achill and Newport. The Lodge was situated close to the historic Burrishoole Abbey, the 15th Century Dominican Priory with links to Granuaile (Grace O'Malley), the infamous 15th century Irish pirate queen. Ernie O'Malley's marriage to Elen took place behind her father's back, but on learning of her daughter's plans Elen's mother did send a close and trusted third party to report on the suitability of the O'Malley family (Elen's younger sister Blanchette was married to John D. Rockerfeller III). That emissary was the Hooker's former nanny, Sarah Sheridan, who was also grandmother to Catherine Walston. It has also been claimed that Catherine first met O'Malley in the US, before she married Harry Walston.





Whatever the circumstances of their introduction, Graham Greene's future mistress Catherine Walston (their affair began in 1947, according to William Cash) and her husband Harry Walston certainly stayed with Ernie and Elen O'Malley at Burrishoole, and the two couples reciprocated visits regularly.



According to Cash, Catherine Walston was 'almost certainly' having an affair with Ernie O'Malley up to and even including the time she also became involved with Graham Greene. Locals on Achill old enough to remember the elegant American Catherine Walston and her old petrol-hungry Ford car recall her usual companion as the local ladies man O'Malley rather than the tall, suave Englishman Graham Greene. Walston and O'Malley would often stay up late drinking whiskey at the bar of the Clew Bay Hotel ('Gielty's') just opposite her cottage in Dooagh. Greene is remembered as a quiet man, presumed to be taking 'writing holidays', and who was a poor bar billiards player in The Pub ('Lourdies') in Dooagh.



It is likely that Greene and O'Malley would have met at this time, through Walston and her social circle, but equally likely that neither would have known about each other's true relationship with the American. Indeed, early in her affair with Greene, Catherine Walston asked him to use his extensive literary connections in London to secure introductions for Ernie O'Malley, who was visiting England as poetry editor of the Dublin literary magazine, The Bell.



Commentators frequently observe about Graham Greene's work that it has a very religious aspect to it. Greene himself, despite his adultery (Catherine Walston was only one of a number of mistresses), was a committed Catholic. His circle of friends included many Catholic priests as well as the English 'Catholic-literary-mafia' that included Evelyn Waugh and T.S. Eliot. He was introduced to Catherine Walston shortly after her conversion to Catholicism in 1946 (Cash claims that Walston's conversion was due to the influence of Ernie O'Malley) and it appears that religion - and particularly Catholic notions of guilt and sin - were to feature strongly in their relationship. The following verse, part of a love poem ('After Two Years') written by Graham Greene to Catherine Walston, was quoted by Cash as evidence of the significance of Achill Island to their affair:



In a plane your hair was blown,

And in an island the old car

Lingered from inn to inn,

Like a fly on a map.

A mattress was spread on a cottage floor

And a door closed on a world, but another door

Opened, and I was far

From the old world sadly known

Where the fruitless seeds were sown,

And they called that virtue and this sin

Did I ever love God before I knew the place

I rest in now, now with my hand

Set in stone, never to move?

For this is love, and this I love,

And even my God is here.





Graham Greene and Catherine Walston first stayed on Achill in 1947. Greene claims that their first visit that year, coming at the start of their affair, ensured that it would continue. Writing to Catherine in 1949, Greene says: 'Somehow I feel an awful reluctance and ache of heart when I address the envelope to Achill. That was where we began [...] we probably would never have done more than begin if we hadn't had these weeks, but only an odd couple of days in England [...] I wish I could make you feel, not just by faith, how missed you are the moment the door closes and how life begins when the door opens.' (quoted in William Cash, 'The Third Woman', p117)



Achill was a hugely symbolic place for Graham Greene, the location where not only his most significant affair began in ernest, but also the location he associated with the introduction to a new world, the 'opening of a door' as he put it. The door that opened for him in Achill was to bring an intensity of love and passion but also obsession, jealously, guilt and despair. Achill Island allowed Greene to cut himself off from the old world of his own and Catherine's marriages and families, from the literary world in England, and from the deceit necessary in their social circle in order to continue the affair. As Greene wrote in 1950, 'I long for somewhere like Achill or Capri where there are no telephones' (Cash, p119). Achill, where Greene baked bread and cooked eggs in a pan by a turf fire in Walston's primitive cottage, represented life stripped to its bare essentials. The remoteness of Achill and the anonymity the couple enjoyed there contrasted sharply with the guilt-ridden complexity of their social life in England.



The peaceful sanctuary of Achill Island fired Graham Greene's creative imagination, allowing him to work on the books The Heart of the Matter and 'Fallen Idol', and to begin the work that was to become The End of the Affair. On returning to London after a second trip to Achill in the summer of 1947, Graham Greene presented his editor with the completed manuscript of The Heart of the Matter. Greene said that the last part, written in the cottage at Dooagh, was 'good'. He added to Catherine: 'If you'd taken me to Achill two years ago, it would all have been good perhaps (Cash, p129).



Graham Greene was so taken with Achill Island and the surrounding area that he even considered giving up writing books, marrying Catherine Walston and the couple buying a country hotel, The Old Head at Killsallagh, Louisburgh on the south side of Clew Bay. The Old Head was another west of Ireland retreat for Greene and Walston, and also, later, for the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and his young son Daniel Day-Lewis. The hotel (now converted to holiday apartments) is located directly across the bay from Ernie O'Malley's Burrishoole home, and O'Malley and Walston had often stayed there. It is unlikely that Graham Greene would have considered buying the hotel had he known its significance for Walston. In the end, he never married Catherine. The affair lasted some twelve or so years, and though his fondness for Achill Island remained his visits ceased long before the end of the affair.

Ernie O'Malley was born in Ellison Street, Castlebar, Co. Mayo in 1897. One of eleven children, Ernie and his brothers and sisters would spend most summers at the O'Malley family's rented house near Rosbeg, Westport, from where he would explore the area around Clew Bay, a wide bay that runs out to Clare Island and Achill Island on its northern shore. In later life Ernie O'Malley would speak fondly of his time spent around Clew Bay as a young boy, both exploring the area and listening to the stories of the West that the O'Malley children's nanny would tell them:



..."we knew the country on either side of the Bay, from grey hungry Connemara to Mulranny. The bare, once ice-covered drumlins gave the land a gloomy look when the sky was clouded or when rain-winds tufted black clouds. But sun made the cold land and the dark green glint and become lush; it shone on the crowded islands, lifting them out of the water, making the cliffs recede ... In rain or sun we loved this country; its haunting impersonal bareness, its austerity, aloofness, small lakes, the disproportionate bulking of the mountains, smells of shrivelled seaweed rotting in grey dirt-spume, brine, storm-wood, tarred rope and riggings; sea-wrack and mud after an ebb tide.... Our life was ringed by the Bay; it was a huge world to us."

(On Another Man's Wound, pp19-22)

In his book 'The Singing Flame' Ernie O'Malley recalls visiting his childhood haunts in March 1922, in his role as Director of Organisation for the Republicans. This trip was made in the early days of the occupation of the Four Courts in Dublin and O'Malley was assessing the support and resources of the Republican faction:



I went to Connacht on a tour of inspection, visiting country I had not seen since I was a boy, country which had always been a vivid, living memory. I motored from Sligo along the coast out to Erris on the rough Atlantic, where our boyhood hero Ferdia had come in; the mountains of Achill and the cliffs could be seen in the distance as I took the road to Mulranny. Clew Bay again, a circular sweep of water running inland, turning at Westport to go out to sea once more, passing beneath the bare-looking climb of the Rock [Croagh Patrick]. The islands shining in the rough water. I spent from early morning until midday looking at the bay near Mulranny. My work could wait. I might never see the bay again. I visited the military barracks in Castlebar, now occupied by our men. I inspected the companies on parade in the barracks square where once from the high wall of Lord Lucan's demense my brother and I had often watched the British soldiers drill. The towns in the west seemed to have a strange grey lichen appearance; there was no warmth in the buildings."

(The Singing Flame, p73)

Ernie O'Malley's parents moved from Co. Mayo to Dublin in 1906 and he was educated at a Christian Brothers school before winning a scholarship to study medicine at University College, Dublin. Ernie, whose elder brother Frank had joined the Royal Dublin Fusiliers to fight in the first World War, was deeply affected by the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland. He joined the Volunteers, the organisation that became the IRA, but with his parents opposed to his political activism Ernie O'Malley left home in 1918. He had twice failed his medical exams, but excelled as a Volunteer and became a full time IRA activist under the direction of Richard Mulcahy, IRA Chief of Staff from 1918.



Between 1918 and 1921 Ernie O'Malley worked in Tyrone, Offaly, Roscommon, Donegal, Clare, Tipperary and Co Dublin, organising and activating local volunteers against the British Crown forces. The activities mostly took the form of attacks on local barracks, and after one such attack on the HQ of the British Auxilliaries at Inistioge, Co Kilkenny, Ernie O'Malley was captured and imprisioned at Kilmainham Jail, Dublin. He escaped in February 1921.



Later in 1921 a truce in hostilities was followed by what O'Malley saw as the compromise of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which would establish an Irish Free State of 26 counties with substantial, but incomplete, 'independence'. The IRA split into the pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty factions, with O'Malley coming to the fore of the hardline anti-Treaty faction.



Ernie O'Malley rose to the rank of Assistant Chief of Staff of the IRA in control of the Northern (Ulster) and Eastern (Leinster) Commands. He was arrested during a shoot-out in November 1922 in which he was shot several times and very badly wounded. It has been suggested that had Ernie O'Malley not been so critically ill following his arrest, it is likely he would have been executed. As it was he gradually recuperated during two years of imprisonment, though he retained bullet fragments in his body for the rest of his life.



In the 1923 general election Ernie O'Malley stood as a candidate in the Dublin North constituency in which Mountjoy jail stood. He was duly elected but never took his seat in the Dáil, which would have required him to take an Oath of Allegiance to the British Crown. Two months later and with some twelve thousand Republicans held in jail following an anti-Treaty ceasefire, Republican prisoners began a hunger strike in support of their pleas for unconditional release from jail. O'Malley joined the hunger strike, holding out for 41 days until the strike was called off. Ernie O'Malley was released from prison in July 1924, one of the last Republican prisoners to be freed.



Following the defeat of the anti-Treaty faction in the Civil War, Ernie O'Malley spent most of the next two years travelling Europe, recuperating from the effects of his wounds and the hunger strike as well as developing his intellectual interests. He visited art galleries in Spain, Italy and France, and on his return enrolled again as a medical student at UCD in Autumn 1926. Again he failed his second year exams, though his legacy to the University was the establishment of UCD's Dramatic Club.



In 1928 Ernie O'Malley travelled to the U.S., initially on a fund-raising trip for the new Irish newspaper, the Irish Press. In California he met the family of Irish actor Peter Golden and with them travelled to the thriving bohemian community at Taos, New Mexico. Staying in Taos as tutor to the Golden children, Ernie began writing his memoirs and some poetry, immersing himself in the artistic environment. Novelist D.H. Lawrence had lived in Taos, and artist Georgia O'Keefe was living nearby in Abiquiu, New Mexico. O'Malley also travelled to Mexico, becoming a firm friend of the American poet Hart Crane and beginning a lifelong acquaintance with the photographer Paul Strand. On travelling to New York in 1932 O'Malley was introduced to the Yaddo Corporation, a country house retreat for artists, writers and composers. In its time Yaddo residents have included James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Saul Bellow, Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker. O'Malley stayed at Yaddo for six weeks, working on his memoirs.



In 1933 Ernie O'Malley was introduced to Helen Huntington Hooker, daughter of a wealthy Connecticut businessman. Helen was an aspiring sculptor, and was immediately attracted to the engaging Irishman with his daring tales of the Revolution. At this time O'Malley spent four months in Chicago as an Irish representative at the World's Fair and, returning to New York, also worked at the New York Public Library on Old and Middle Irish. Despite his itinerant lifestyle, Ernie O'Malley continued to mix in bohemian circles through his friendship with Paul Strand and links with the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keefe circle.



Back in Ireland many of Ernie O'Malley's former IRA comrades were now part of the Fianna Fáil government, and the prospect of receiving a military pension from the Irish government convinced O'Malley that a return to Ireland was feasible. Having outstayed his visa in the U.S., O'Malley returned to Ireland in 1935.



On returning to Ireland, Ernie O'Malley immediately headed for Achill Island, where he spent a week along with his old Republican comrade Paedar O'Donnell, his wife Lile and others. O'Malley also issued an invitation for his sweetheart, Helen Hooker, to join him in Ireland. Hooker's father disapproved of O'Malley, but Helen nevertheless travelled to Dublin in 1935. Her mother sent a close family friend, Sarah Sheridan, to report on the suitability of the O'Malley family for marriage into the Hooker family (Helen's sister Blanchette had married John D. Rockerfeller III). Sheridan, formerly the nanny to the Hooker children, was also the grandmother of Catherine Walston, the wife of millionaire British MP Harry Walston and who, allegedly, was later to have an intimate relationship with Ernie O'Malley. Helen and Ernie married in London in September 1935, with Sarah Sheridan in attendance.



In the spring of 1936, Ernie O'Malley's memoirs of the Irish Revolution were published in London by Rich and Cowan under the title 'On Another Man's Wound'. The book had already been rejected by more than a dozen U.S. publishers. Following its publication in London, agreement was reached with U.S. publisher Houghton Mifflin to publish the book in the U.S. under the title 'Army Without Banners'. On Another Man's Wound, the first volume of Ernie O'Malley's memoirs and the only one to be published during his lifetime, has become a classic of revolutionary literature.



The book's publication in Ireland was accompanied by a libel action from a former IRA volunteer and TD, Joseph O'Connor, who claimed that a passage in the book falsely accused him of cowardice in refusing to take part in an IRA raid. O'Connor won the case and the defendants - O'Malley and his Dublin publisher, Sign of the Three Candles, plus the newspaper the Irish Press which had serialised the book - were forced to pay a total of £550 in damages. When bailiffs seized possession of the County Mayo house that O'Malley and Helen were renting, Helen's father offered to pay O'Malley's share of the award. In the end, Ernie O'Malley borrowed £400 to settle his share of the damages.



In the autumn of 1937 Ernie and Helen O'Malley, who had by now given birth to a son, Cahal, rented the Old Head Lodge, Killsallagh, at Louisburgh on the southern shore of Clew Bay, County Mayo. A year later, after searching for a suitable family home, the O'Malleys moved into Burrishoole Lodge. The Lodge, located between Newport and Mulranny on the northern shore of Clew Bay, was an eight bedroom stone house situated across a lagoon from Burrishoole Abbey, the 15th Century Dominican Priory. Ernie O'Malley was particularly pleased that the location had links to the Clan O'Malley and his ancestor Grace O'Malley (Granuille), the notorious 15th Century pirate queen who controlled the waters of the Mayo coast. The Lodge, with its views of Clew Bay and Croagh Patrick in the distance, appealed to Helen and Ernie's artistic instincts, and Helen extended the building to include a studio for her sculpture. After initially renting Burrishoole Lodge, the O'Malleys purchased the buildings and 40 acres of attached land in 1941. The property was extended with the purchase of a further 30 acres of land in 1942.



During the war the O'Malleys worked hard on farming their land at Burrishoole (Ernie O'Malley had tried to sign up for the Irish army but was rejected on medical grounds). However, they still craved artistic and intellectual stimulation, and Ernie O'Malley wrote to a friend in 1941 complaining about the lack of [high] culture in the west: 'Helen and I have to go there [Dublin] every now and then to meet people who speak our own language. Here, nobody is interested in creative work ... I have nobody to speak the language of books, literature, or criticism' (quoted in Richard English, p53). A year earlier O'Malley had written to a friend: 'You have to be very self-supporting to live in the Irish countryside, I mean intellectually self-supporting. There is no art, no library worth a small curse, no one who writes or paints near you: very few people who read' (Letter, summer 1940). O'Malley did, however, greatly appreciate the local culture and immersed himself in the task of collecting and chronicling traditional tales and folklore from the Clew Bay and Achill area.



It was about this time (early 1940s) that Ernie O'Malley developed friendships with the painter Jack Yeats and the poet Louis MacNeice. O'Malley was to champion the painting of Jack Yeats, producing exhibitions and purchasing many works himself (both Ernie and Helen O'Malley were keen collectors of art, with Ernie O'Malley purchasing works by, among others, Paul Henry). In 1945 O'Malley was instrumental in helping stage a Jack Yeats exhibition in Dublin (the Jack B. Yeats National Loan Exhibition), loaning his own paintings and even writing the introduction to the exhibition catalogue. On being introduced by Catherine Walston to John Rothenstein, director of London's Tate Gallery, O'Malley set up a meeting between Rothenstein and Jack Yeats in December 1945. O'Malley tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade Rothenstein to host an exhibition of Irish painters in England with a reciprocal exhibition of British painters to be shown in Ireland. Another Irish artist championed by Ernie O'Malley was Evie Hone, with O'Malley opening her exhibition of paintings, stained glass and drawings at Dublin's Dawson Gallery in 1945.



Despite the births of two more children (Etáin in 1940, Cormac in 1942), by the mid-1940s the O'Malley marriage was becoming strained and in 1946 Helen asked for a divorce. During this year Ernie O'Malley was spending his time between the Walston's residences in Cambridgeshire and London, Burrishoole, and Catherine Walston's cottage at Dooagh, Achill. In addition to pursuing his (unsuccessful) plans for reciprocal Irish and British art exhibitions, he continued to write both his memoirs and other works. In the summer of 1946, O'Malley had published an article on the Irish painter Louis le Brocquy in the English review, Horizon.



It has been commented that having played his part militarily in establishing an independent Ireland, much of Ernie O'Malley's later life can be seen as a prolonged attempt to establish an independent Irish culture to accompany the new political entity. As well as championing Irish artists such as Jack Yeats and Evie Hone, and his own work of collecting folk tales and rural stories from the Clew Bay and Achill area, Ernie O'Malley also contributed to a number of literary ventures. O'Malley became involved with the journal The Bell, the Irish periodical established in 1940 by Seán O'Faoláin and edited from 1946 until its demise in 1954 by O'Malley's friend and former IRA comrade Peadar O'Donnell. The Bell aimed to review and comment on the society and culture created in the wake of the Irish revolution, and O'Malley became its book editor in 1947. It was Ernie O'Malley's involvement with The Bell that prompted Catherine Walston to ask her new lover, Graham Greene, to use his literary connections in London to secure introductions for O'Malley.



Ernie O'Malley also participated in a number of Irish intellectual bodies including the Irish Academy of Letters and the Bibliographical Society of Ireland. The Academy aimed to promote creative literature in Ireland, and was created in 1932 with founder members WB Yeats and GB Shaw. Ernie O'Malley was also a member in 1945 of the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, a society whose purpose was to secure artistic works and historic objects for Irish national or public collections.



Among Ernie O'Malley's many initiatives to articulate and promote a distinctly Irish culture was a project involving his good friend the American photographer Paul Strand. The two men planned a joint project for a book, taking a village or group of Irish villages and Paul Strand taking the photographs and Ernie O'Malley providing the text. Sadly it never materialised.



One project that had huge significance in expressing and promoting a vision of life in post-Revolutionary Ireland - both the beauty of the country and the way of life of the people - was the film 'The Quiet Man'. Based on a short story by Irish writer Maurice Walsh and filmed on location around Cong in County Mayo, The Quiet Man was released in 1952 and remains for many the classic Irish movie. Both the film and the original short story bear more than a passing debt to J.M. Synge's masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World, with its story of a 'playboy' who arrives at a small cottage from afar with a reputation for having killed a man. The hero woos a local girl despite her attachment to an overbearing local man - and despite the attentions of an older local woman - and the story turns on a climatic fight. JM Synge's play itself was partly based on the story of Achill man James Lynchehaun.



Director John Ford had invited Ernie O'Malley to act as an assistant on the film, advising on local ways and customs as well as offering specialist input for the scenes involving local IRA men. As Des MacHale's excellent book, 'The Complete Guide to The Quiet Man', points out, Maurice Walsh's original story 'The Quiet Man', published as part of the collection 'The Green Rushes', had a significant IRA involvement but this was minimised in the film for political reasons. Ernie O'Malley's title in the credits for The Quiet Man is 'IRA Consultant'.



Ernie O'Malley and the Irish-American director John Ford, who had a keen interest in military matters, got on famously. According to female lead Maureen O'Hara, John Ford: 'had a great deal of respect for Ernie... . He had such respect for Ernie. They would natter away like old buddies... . They liked each other. They were friends.' (quoted in Richard English, 'Ernie O'Malley', p65) It is possible that Ernie O'Malley was involved in John Ford's decision that he and the cast of The Quiet Man - including John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara - would break from filming to take part in a concert to raise funds for the 'County Galway Volunteer Memorial Fund'.



One interesting coincidence with an Achill connection is that when John Ford tried to get backing to make 'The Quiet Man', the studio RKO Radio Productions made him sign a deal for three movies with the proviso that if the first one made a profit, RKO would finance The Quiet Man. For that first movie John Ford chose to make 'The Fugitive', which was based on the novel 'The Power and the Glory' written by Graham Greene, who was to work on Achill and to have an affair with Ernie O'Malley's close friend, Catherine Walston.



A second Achill Island connection with The Quiet Man is the legendary film star John Wayne. During filming of the movie in 1950 the cast was able to explore the County Mayo countryside. John Wayne, who had strong Irish roots, later observed: "I have made many films in and out of Hollywood but I have seldom enjoyed my work so well. In the odd spells I had free from the camera, I took stock of what the countryside provided in fishing and hunting. It's a sportsman's paradise. I do a lot of deep-sea fishing and I thought I was up in all the thrills of the game until I saw them after shark in Achill. That, I thought, was the highlight of my visit and I would like to come back some time and do a little of it". (quoted in Des HacHale, 'The Complete Guide to The Quiet Man', p38) We can only speculate whether it was Ernie O'Malley, who got on very well with John Wayne and who visited Achill frequently, that introduced The Duke to sharkfishing on Achill Island.



Ernie O'Malley's friendship with John Ford extended to collaborating on a second film, 'The Rising of the Moon', in 1956. Again filmed in the west of Ireland, O'Malley was again working as a technical adviser although some accounts suggest that Ford wanted O'Malley on the set more for his presence and company rather than as a consultant.



In the early 1950s Ernie O'Malley, still drafting the second volume of his memoirs (the first volume dealt with the Easter Uprising and its aftermath; the second with the Civil War) set about another project: he was concerned that a Republican version of the events of the revolution should be recorded. In 1953 he gave a series of recorded talks, later to be broadcast on Radio Eireann, detailing encounters between the IRA and British Crown forces during the Anglo-Irish war. O'Malley continued researching the 1916-1923 period, and in 1954 the newspaper the Sunday Press provided him with a driver and photographer to pursue research and interviews around the country with former Volunteers. This work was published in a series of articles in the paper in 1955 and 1956, and collected together, along with material from the Radio Eireann talks, into a book titled 'Raid and Rallies' which was published posthumously in 1982.



Ernie O'Malley suffered a heart attack in 1953, and his health - which continued to be affected by the bullet fragments in his body and the toll of his hunger strike - deteriorated after this time. He died in March 1957, aged 59. He was accorded a state funeral with full military honours, with those in attendance including President Sean T. O'Kelly and Taoiseach Eamonn de Valera. His first book, On Another Man's Wound, was republished in London in 1961 and again in Dublin in 1979. The second volume of his memoirs was published under the title 'The Singing Flame' in 1978.



Ernie O'Malley has been commemorated in his native Castlebar with the erection of a fountain in The Mall. The fountain surrounds a bronze sculpture by Peter Grant of the mythical Mayo figure of Manannan. It is based on a smaller piece of sculpture that was part of Ernie O'Malley's collection.









Fountain featuring Peter Grant sculpture of Manannan, The Mall, Castlebar



As a postscript to the legacy that Ernie O'Malley left to the arts in Ireland - which included his championing of artists such as Jack Yeats, Evie Hone and Louis le Brocquy - there was speculation in 1979 that a museum may be erected in his honour in Castlebar, Co Mayo. This followed an approach to the Irish government on behalf of O'Malley's former wife, Helen Hooker O'Malley Roelofs, expressing her desire to donate over 600 works of art to the people of the west of Ireland. Tragically, and for whatever reason, nothing came of the offer.

John Millington Synge (1871-1909), the writer and playwright, epitomises the trend among artists and writers at the turn of the 20th century to look to the west of Ireland for inspiration and for an 'authentically' Irish subject matter. It was a trend that also saw the artist Paul Henry and his painter wife Grace travel to Achill Island in 1909 and, some decades later, was part of the attraction of his Mayo homeland for writer Ernie O'Malley. Both Paul Henry and Ernie O'Malley were readers of JM Synge, as was the English novelist Graham Greene before he travelled to Achill in 1947.



JM Synge was born in Dublin in 1871 to an upper-middle class Anglo Irish family. Synge's Ascendancy background was to have a substantial influence on the reception of his work in the politically-charged atmosphere of Ireland at the start of the 20th century. The fiercely Protestant Synge family had produced no fewer than five Church of Ireland bishops since settling in Ireland in the 17th century. The Synge family owned land in Co. Galway and Wicklow, including Glanmore Castle and estate in Wicklow. JM Synge's brother, Edward, worked as a land agent on the family estates as well as for other landowners, and earned notoriety for a particularly heartless eviction of two elderly and infirm sisters at the height of the Land War in 1887. Edward was also active in evicting tenants in Co. Mayo, where he was land agent for Joseph Pratt's 18,000 acre estate which was centred on Enniscoe House. Synge's grandfather the Rev. Dr Robert Traill, who died of famine fever in west Cork in 1847, was reportedly a fervent anti-Catholic bigot. And interestingly, one of Synge's uncles travelled to the Aran Islands in the mid-1850s as a Protestant missionary with the aim of converting the islanders away from Catholicism. He was run off the islands for his inflammatory mixture of evangelical fervancy and exploitative fishing of the sea-stock.



A sickly and sensitive child, JM Synge would grow up to withdraw from the excesses of his family's bigotry and the Ascendancy attitudes of his class. Educated largely by private tutors he went on to study at Trinity College Dublin and the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He turned from music to literature and in 1895 travelled to Paris to enrol at the Sorbonne with the intention of becoming a critic of French literature. In 1896 he met W.B. Yeats, who was in Paris to found a French branch of the Irish League. The atheist JM Synge further compounded the distance from his family's Protestant and Unionist beliefs by flirting with Irish nationalism, though his membership of Yeat's Irish League was shortlived. It was in Paris that Yeats, 'the strategist of the Irish cultural revival', issued this famous instruction to JM Synge: 'Give up Paris, you will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.'



Yeats' singling out of the Aran Islands as a culture and a way of life worthy of consideration by a writer was no random selection. The west of Ireland had been identified by the Celtic revival of the late 19th Century as the home of an authentic 'Irish' culture and way of life, the country's uncorrupted heart and natural home of the Gaelic language. And the Aran Islands, as islands off the west coast of the west of Ireland, were even more likely to encapsulate these pure and ancient Celtic cultural and spiritual values.



J.M. Synge first landed on Aranmor (Árainn), the largest of the three Aran islands, in 1898. He stayed for two weeks at the Atlantic Hotel by the quayfront in Cill Rónáin before deciding that the island, with its frequent steamers carrying visitors from the mainland and its begging children, had left behind the Celtic arcadia he was hoping to find. He summed up his disappointment with Cill Rónáin and Árainn in the Introduction to his book 'The Aran Islands', the journal of his time on Aran:



"Kilronan, the principal village on Aranmor, has been so much changed by the fishing industry, developed there by the Congested Districts Board, that it has now very little to distinguish it from any fishing village on the west coast of Ireland". (J.M. Synge, 'The Aran Islands', p3)

This disregard for the actual reality of the way of life in fishing villages on the west coast of Ireland - indeed, in any villages in the west of Ireland - would come to haunt J.M. Synge later in his short life, in the reception given to some of his plays. It is interesting that Synge spurns the development of a fishing industry - a development aimed at ensuring the survival of the people on the west coast - as somehow unpure and non-Celtic, and yet his own uncle had been run off the Aran Islands for exploitative fishing of the sea-stock there. In fact Synge glosses over the facts of his uncle's mission to Aran 43 years previously, mentioning only that an old man on Kilronan had recognised the family resemblance.



While on Aranmor Synge was shown a holy well famed for curing blindness and epilepsy. An old man told him the story of the well, a tale that J.M. Synge would use for his play 'The Well of the Saints'. After a fortnight Synge travelled from Aranmor to Inishmaan (Inish Meáin), the middle-sized of the three Aran Islands. He wrote of this journey:



'... It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction to find myself moving away from civilisation in this rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went on the sea.' ('The Aran Islands', p3)

The curragh, the traditional wood-and-canvas fishing vessel of the west of Ireland, also featured strongly in artist Paul Henry's work on Achill Island (click for image 'Launching the Curragh').





It was on Inishmaan that J.M. Synge found the pure and untainted 'Irish' people and way of life he had been seeking. He imagined Inishmaan as the last remaining example of a pre-modern, pre-religious Celtic arcadia:



'...The thought that this island will gradually yield to the ruthlessness of 'progress' is as the certainty that decaying age is moving always nearer the cheeks it is your ecstasy to kiss. How much of Ireland was formerly like this and how much of Ireland is today Anglicised and civilised and brutalised...' (from Notebooks, published in Collected Works, Volume 2, p103).

While on Inishmaan J.M. Synge struck up a friendship with an elderly islander, Pat Dirane, who was able to converse in English (Synge's Gaelic was not yet good enough for him to understand the native speech). Dirane told Synge many stories, some of which Synge documented in 'The Aran Islands'. One such story, told in the kitchen of Synge's cottage, recounted the tale of an unfaithful wife and was to form the basis of J.M. Synge's 1902 play The Shadow of the Glen.



Synge reported on most aspects of island life in 'The Aran Islands', including an interesting account of an eviction and a perhaps more telling report on an island funeral. While his account of the eviction fails to acknowledge his own brother's activity as a land agent in the neighbouring county of Mayo, the report on the funeral contains a barely disguised attack on the Catholic church; after describing the keening of the mourners, he observes:



'Before they covered the coffin an old man kneeled down by the grave and repeated a simple prayer for the dead. There was an irony in these words of atonement and Catholic belief spoken by voices that were still hoarse with the cries of pagan desperation.' ('The Aran Islands', p32)

It was, and remains, unclear whether Synge's antipathy towards the Catholic church was simply the Anglo-Irish Protestant bigotry he had learned from his family or whether it was in the name of some imagined pagan, Celtic community that pre-dated Catholic (and Protestant) religion on Ireland. After the burial ceremony Synge was told a story from an elderly islander about the poteen ('moonshine') drinking that takes place at island funerals. He was told of one time when two men collapsed unconscious in the graveyard after drinking heavily, and one of the men died later that night. This image of drunken debauchery at an Irish funeral was later used by Synge in his controversial drama 'The Playboy of the Western World'.



Immediately after his first visit to Aran in 1898, J.M. Synge stayed at Lady Gregory's Galway estate Coole Park. Lady Gregory, one of the leaders of the Celtic literary 'revival', was the wife of Dublin MP William H. Gregory, whose amendment to the 1847 poor relief bill (the 'Gregory clause') accelerated the mass evictions - clearances - of starving Irish peasants during the Great Famine. Synge was party to plans by Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats to create a national theatre for a new generation of distinctively Irish drama.



This project, the Irish Literary Theatre (later the Irish National Theatre), opened in May 1899 in controversial circumstances. In an ominous precedent for J.M. Synge, the first production staged at the theatre sparked a riot and vociferous protest. The play, W.B. Yeats' The Countess Cathleen, was set during the Great Famine and featured two peasants who sell their souls to two devils in return for gold to buy food. When their aristocratic landlady, Countess Cathleen, hears of this she offers the devils her own soul in exchange for those of the starving peasants. The play from the Anglo-Irish Yeats offended the native Irish - and the growing nationalist political sentiment - on a number of levels, not least the anti-Catholic heresy of one of the peasants kicking apart a small shrine to the Virgin Mary. Protesters also objected to the portrayal of a particularly servile Irish peasantry, and the play reawakened bitter memories of 'souperism' - the practice by which Protestant ministers and landowners would offer soup to the starving Irish during the famine on condition that they renounce Roman Catholicism. 'Souperism' was practised on Achill Island by the Protestant Mission at Dugort, although it is reported that those islanders who did 'sell their souls' for food at the Mission immediately returned to the Catholic church as soon as the Famine subsidided.



J.M. Synge, meanwhile, returned to the Aran Islands for a month in September 1899, and again in September 1900, when he witnessed the tragedy of a drowning which would form the basis of his short play 'Riders to the Sea'. This play had a strong impact on the artist Paul Henry, who also witnessed the grief accompanying a drowning while on Achill Island. Paul Henry painted several versions of the event (click for image) and even quoted from Synge's play in an addition to the title of 'The Watcher' in a 1911 exhibition. In September 1901 Synge again visited Aran for a 19-day visit.



During these visits to Aran Synge's belief in Inishmaan as the last remaining example of an authentically Celtic way of life, as opposed to the corrupted culture of the larger Aran island of Aranmor (and the rest of Ireland), became more entrenched:



"... I am in the north island [Aranmor] again, looking out with a singular sensation to the cliffs across the sound. It is hard to believe that those hovels I can just see in the south are filled with people whose lives have the strange quality that is found in the oldest poetry and legend. Compared with them the falling off that has come with the increased prosperity of this island is full of discouragement. The charm which the people over there share with the birds and flowers has been replaced here by the anxiety of men who are eager for gain. The eyes and expression are different, though the faces are the same, and even the children here seem to have an indefinable modern quality that is absent from the men of Inishmaan." ('The Aran Islands', p69)





We can see here how the apparently anti-modern, anti-commerce beliefs of J.M. Synge could be interpreted, by Irish nationalist sensibility, as yet another instance of the Anglo-Irish landowning Ascendancy attempting to keep the native Irish in medieval poverty. Synge appears to be suggesting that improvements in economic and social welfare in the west of Ireland come at the expense of the charming and authentically Celtic way of life. His antipathy towards such development and the types of social structures that this 'progress' engenders, was revealed in 1905 when Synge accompanied the artist Jack B. Yeats on a tour of the west coast of Mayo. Synge had been commissioned by the Manchester Guardian, an English newspaper, to write a series of articles on the distressed state of the Congested Districts, and Yeats was to illustrate the series. Synge wrote of his experience:



"... Unluckily my commission was to write on the 'Distress' so I couldn't do anything like what I would have wished as an interpretation of the whole life ... There are sides of all that western life, the groggy-patriot-publican-general-shop-man who is married to the priest's half-sister and is second cousin once-removed of the dispensary doctor, that are horrible and awful ... All that side of the matter of course I left untouched in my stuff [the newspaper articles]. I sometimes wish to God I hadn't a soul and then I could give myself up to putting those lads on the stage. God, wouldn't they hop! In a way it is all heart rending, in one place the people are starving but wonderfully attractive and charming, and in another place where things are going well, one has a rampant, double-chinned vulgarity I haven't seen the like of." (letter to his friend Stephen MacKenna,1905, published in Collected Works, Vol. 2, p283)

In fact Synge was to put 'those lads' on the stage, albeit with a slightly more muted disdain, in the work 'The Playboy of the Western World'. The Playboy was set in north Mayo, close to Achill Island, and commentators have noted that J.M. Synge chose to set the play - with its derorgatory depiction of rural life - away from his beloved Aran Islands. As well as the proximity of the setting - in the play Synge refers to 'the heaths of Keel' and to escaping on the Achill boat, as well as a curious reference to 'the madmen of Keel, eating muck and green weeds, on the faces of the cliffs' - there is a stronger Achill connection to this play. The story of The Playboy of the Western World is partly based on the story of an Achill man, James Lynchehaun.



James Lynchehaun was born at Achill Sound in about 1860 and was educated at the monestary at Bunacurry, Achill Island. A known trickster and ladies man, he was sacked as a school teacher for falsifying the roll in order to gain more pay. He later worked as an agent for a formidable but eccentric English landlady, Agnes MacDonnell, on her estate in The Valley, Achill Island. Lynchehaun was sacked by MacDonnell and a bitter dispute ensued over his estate cottage. During the dispute, in 1894, MacDonnell's residence The Valley House was set on fire and she was savagely attacked and left for dead as she fled the fire.



Agnes MacDonnell survived the vicious attack although she suffered severe facial disfigurement, and Lynchehaun was arrested and charged. He escaped from custody and, after returning to Achill on a boat, was hidden on the island by friends. Though he was later betrayed (for a reward of £300) and spent seven years in jail, he escaped again and fled to the U.S., where, following his arrest 82 days later, his case set a precedent in U.S. extradition law when the courts refused the British government's extradition claims. Lynchehaun is reputed to have returned to Achill, disguised as an American tourist, in 1907 and to have settled finally in Scotland where he died in 1937. (The full story of Agnes MacDonnell and James Lynchehaun is available in the History section of the website of Achill hostel The Valley House.)



J.M. Synge is said to have based the character of Christy Mahon, the 'playboy' of the play's title, on James Lynchehaun. In the play Christy, thinking he has killed his father in a fight, escapes to a remote part of north Mayo where the local publican, Micheal James, allows him to remain as a pot boy to safeguard his daughter, Pegeen Mike, while he attends a wake (the notorious drunken wake which Synge based on the story heard on Aran). Pegeen Mike falls in love with Christy, much to the indignation of her would-be suitor Shawn Keogh. Keogh's character, weak, cowardly and in thrall to the Catholic church in the form of the local priest, is Synge's embodiment of the 'rampant, double-chinned vulgarity' that he observed on his travels in the west of Ireland.



The Playboy of the Western World was premiered at the Irish National Theatre in January 1907. The theatre, which had already seen riots from a nationalistic audience at the performance of Yeats' The Countess Cathleen, was to witness disturbances at Synge's play that have become legendary. From the vulgarity of the characters' language to the depiction of Shawn Keogh's cringing servitude to the local priest, and from the bloody violence of the 'murder' to the hero-worshipping by the villagers of a shameless 'killer', the audience took immediate exception to this representation of rural Irish life. In the folklore of the 'Playboy Riots', the final straw for the audience was the reference by Christy Mahon to a drift of females standing in their shifts (night-dresses). The audience rioted at this point, and subsequent performances were drowned out by a booing audience that had been whipped up by critics with nationalist sympathies.



J.M. Synge himself remained unrepentant about the reception given to his story of life in the west of Ireland. In a letter to his friend Stephen McKenna following the Playboy Riots, he attacked his attackers: "... the scurrility and ignorance and treachery of some of the attacks upon me have rather disgusted me with the middle-class Irish Catholic. As you know I have the wildest admiration for the Irish Peasants, and for Irish men of known or unknown genius ... but between the two there's an ungodly ruck of fat-faced, sweaty-headed swine." (published in Collected Works, Vol. 2, p283)



It is worth noting that some accounts say the play was received well when it was later staged in the west of Ireland, suggesting that the offence taken at its Dublin premiere was less of an instinctive and classless reflex and more a politically mediated objection from a group of urban-based nationalists. J.M. Synge was to die just two years after the Playboy Riots, in 1909, leaving behind the unfinished play 'Deirdre of the Sorrows'. Another of his plays, 'The Tinker's Wedding', was thought too antagonistic to nationalist sentiment to be staged in Ireland in the wake of the Playboy Riots, and was not shown in Dublin until 1971. Despite the controversy caused by The Playboy, J.M. Synge had a huge impact on the Irish literary and cultural scene, providing an inspiration for the Achill-based painter Paul Henry and being read by other writers with Achill links, including Ernie O'Malley and Graham Greene.

German novelist Heinrich Böll (1917-1985), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, visited Achill regularly during the 1950s and 60s. His travelogue, 'Irish Journal', describes in loving detail his journey to Achill and his observations on island life.



Born into a liberal Catholic and pacifist family in Cologne in 1917, Heinrich Böll was drafted into the German army and fought on the Russian and French fronts during World War II. He was wounded four times before being captured and held in a U.S. prisoner-of-war camp.



Following the war he turned to writing, basing his work on his experiences as a soldier. His first novel was published in 1949 and Heinrich Böll went on to have over 20 books of his work published. Böll also translated the works of other authors into German, including Irish writers G.B. Shaw and J.M. Synge. It is possible that like Paul Henry and Graham Greene before him, Böll read Synge before travelling to Achill Island. Böll's work has in fact been compared to that of Graham Greene, both of whom are said to have combined an unorthodox Catholic belief with a sense of the absurd in human actions. In 1972 Heinrich Böll was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his humanist literature. An active supporter of writers in repressive regimes (Böll was the first to host author Alexander Solzhenitsyn after he was exiled from Russia in 1974), Heinrich Böll has been described as a literary spokesman for the disadvantaged.



Heinrich Böll first travelled to Achill Island in the early 1950s, crossing the country by train from Dublin to Westport with his family. The details of this visit, along with Heinrich Böll's acute observations of Irish ways and customs - from tea drinking to priests wearing safety pins to the popularity of ice cream - are recorded in the humorous, moving and wonderfully readable book 'Irish Journal'.



Life on Achill and in Ireland generally in the 1950s provided Heinrich Böll with plenty of material with which to indulge his penchant for the absurd and the incongruous, not least the casual relationship with time. The German writer, whose first book was titled 'The Train Was On Time', began his experience of the west of Ireland agreeably enough, observing that his train arrived in Westport right on schedule. From there on in, however, Böll was quickly introduced to the Irish saying: 'when God made time he made plenty of it'. Recounting the time he went to the movies in Keel, this phrase obviously struck a chord with Böll as he observed that regardless of the advertised start time the movie could only begin when all the priests - "the local ones as well as the ones on vacation" - are assembled in full strength. Böll's account of and meditation on the passage of time at the village hall in Keel between the advertised start time of the movie ('a snare and a delusion') and the arrival of the priests following their post-supper conversation is worth recounting in full:



..."The rosy glow from the shells on the walls gives out a feeble light, and in the semidarkness the atmosphere is as lively as at a fair. Conversations are carried on across four rows of seats, jokes are shouted over eight; up front in the cheap seats the children are making the kind of cheerful racket heard otherwise only in school breaks; chocolates are proffered, cigarette brands exchanged, somewhere out of the dark comes the promising squeak of a cork being pulled out of a whiskey bottle; make-up is renewed, perfume sprayed; somebody starts singing, and for those who do not allow that all these human sounds, movements, and activities are worth the trouble of occupying the passing time, there remains time for meditation; when God made time, He made plenty of it. [...] meditation comes surprisingly easily and is pleasant enough in this fairground of lighthearted gaiety, where bog farmers, peat cutters, and fishermen offer cigarettes to and accept chocolates from seductively smiling ladies who drive around during the day in great cars, where the retired colonel chats with the postman about the merits and demerits of East Indians. Here classless society has become a reality." (Irish Journal, pp54-55)

It is interesting to speculate whether one of the 'seductively smiling ladies who drive around during the day in great cars' could have been Catherine Walston, who certainly drove Ernie O'Malley's old Ford around Achill in the late 1940s with Graham Greene. The theme of time, and the abundance of it on Achill, was one that Heinrich Böll returned to many times in the book Irish Journal. Referring to the island's position at the extreme western edge of Europe he observed: "... Sitting here by the fire it is possible to play truant from Europe, while Moscow has lain in darkness for the past four hours, Berlin for two, even Dublin for half an hour: there is still a clear light over the sea, and the Atlantic persistently carries away piece by piece the Western bastion of Europe; rocks fall into the sea, soundlessly the bog streams carry the dark European soil out into the Atlantic; over the years, gently plashing, they smuggle whole fields out into the open sea, crumb by crumb." (Irish Journal, p83)



Achill Island, with its 'classless society' and its casual attitude to time, appealed immensely to Heinrich Böll. He was also attracted to the poetry and humour of the Irish, which he contrasted with the stern and foreboding outlook in his native Germany. Böll wrote: "When something happens to you in Germany, when you miss a train, break a leg, go bankrupt, we say: It couldn't have been any worse; whatever happens is always the worst. With the Irish it is almost the opposite: if you break a leg, miss a train, go bankrupt, they say: It could be worse; instead of a leg you could have broken your neck, instead of a train you could have missed Heaven ..." (Irish Journal, p109). To Böll this attitude requires poetic talent and creativity - plus a certain sadistic touch - to imagine a worse situation against which the present troubles seem tame. Coupled with the common Irish phrase 'I shouldn't worry', Böll contrasts this easy-going outlook with the grim reality of Irish history, famine and emigration. Time and again he refers movingly to the displacement of Achill sons and daughters to England, Australia and the U.S., and his account of the deserted village at Slievemore carries a haunting pathos. Click here for a gallery of pictures of the deserted village at Slievemore.



Referring to the family of the Dugort postmistress, 'Mrs. D.', Böll wrote:



"... One thing is certain, and that is that of Mrs. D.'s nine children five or six will have to emigrate. Will little Pedar [...] in fourteen years, in 1970, on October 1 or April 1, will this little Pedar, aged fourteen, carrying his cardboard suitcase, hung about with medallions, supplied with a package of extra-thick sandwiches, embraced by his sobbing mother, stand at the bus stop to begin the great journey to Cleveland, Ohio, to Manchester, Liverpool, London, or Sydney, to some uncle, a cousin, a brother perhaps, who has promised to look after him and do something for him?" (Irish Journal, p94)

In a passage that could just as easily refer to 1980, 1990 or 2000 were it not for the closure of many rural railway stations, Heinrich Böll continues:



"... These farewells at Irish railway stations, at bus stops in the middle of the bog, when tears blend with raindrops and the Atlantic wind is blowing; Grandfather stands there too, he knows the canyons of Manhattan, he knows the New York waterfront, for thirty years he has been through the mill, and he quickly stuffs another pound note into the boy's pocket, the boy with the cropped hair, the runny nose, the boy who is being wept over as Jacob wept over Joseph; the bus driver cautiously sounds his horn, very cautiously - he has driven hundreds, perhaps thousands, of boys whom he has seen grow up to the station, and he knows the train does not wait and that a farewell that is over and done with is easier to bear than one which is still to come. He waves, the journey into the lonely countryside begins, the little white house in the bog, tears mixed with mucus, past the store, past the pub where Father used to drink his pint of an evening; past the school, the church, a sign of the cross, the bus driver makes one too - the bus stops; more tears, more farewells ..." (Irish Journal, p95)

There is one aspect of Heinrich Böll's heart-rending account of emigration that he got wrong; and his error belies a perhaps even greater disaster for Achill, for Mayo, and for the rural Ireland that sent so many sons and daughters overseas. Böll wrote in the mid-1950s: "Of the eighty children at Mass on Sundays, only forty-five will still be living here in forty years; but these forty-five will have so many children that eighty children will again be kneeling in church." (Irish Journal, p95) Forty years later the forty-five adults that Böll expected to remain at home was more likely to be twenty-five or thirty, and the eighty children he hoped would be kneeling in church was likely to be less than half that number. This tragedy is something that Böll himself acknowledged in the 1967 postscript to 'Irish Journal' in which he - still a Catholic despite his unorthodoxy - lamented the arrival of the contraceptive Pill:



"... a certain something has now made its way to Ireland, that ominous something known as The Pill - and this something absolutely paralyzes me: the prospect that fewer children might be born in Ireland fills me with dismay." (Irish Journal, p109)

Heinrich Böll and his family continued to travel to Achill during the 1950s and 1960s, residing in a cottage at Dugort. In the 1967 postscript to Irish Journal, Böll lamented the other changes that had taken place in Ireland since the early fifties (apart from the arrival of the pill). It had, he said, 'caught up with two centuries and leaped over another five' and the years of 1954 and 1955, when Irish Journal was written, was the historic moment at which the leap was beginning.



Heinrich Böll's legacy to Achill Island is evident most prominently in two places: his cottage in Dugort which, thanks to his family, the Böll Stiftung in Cologne, and Mayo County Council, is now an artists residence providing a short-term retreat for writers, poets and artists from Ireland, Germany and around the world. And Heinrich Böll's son, Rene, an artist, works and exhibits regularly on Achill Island. A selection of work by Rene Boell is available online at the web site of Keel-based Western Art Gallery. To visit the site click here.