Dry warm June. Tight clockwise circuit buried in one of Galway’s west side housing estates. Five right handers, two left handers, 2 speed bumps, one drag up, one drag down. Assorted bales of hay.

All images Donal Kelly 2018. Cameras/film: Hasselblad 501C with 80mm lens, on Rollei Retro 80S and Portra 160. Olympus Mju-II compact (35mm lens) on Ilford XP2 and Rollei Superpan 200.


Distilled summers of wave on wave, collapsing in rushes, scrambling down grassy slopes. The sea so broad and wide below you can’t take it all in. Or in the other direction, up the bogs, soft soft, following rivers, to the Black lake or the Garden lake over Kylemore or Shanabheag in Currywongan where John Joyce has bees. And winter nights sunk in the soft brokenspringed bed with gales whistling eerie tunes on the thick lumpy gable and the ceaseless roar of the ocean behind and below and inside.

And Mweelrae rising behind Letterettrin, looming over Killary harbour. The Atlantic never far away. Sea salt in the veins of air. I watch a tiny distant car trace along the far side of the lake on the potholed road.

Down there Wilde coined a ‘savage beauty’. A literary tourist’s phrase, now a tag painted so often it crumbles under the layers, like any respectable cliche for its marketibility. A pair of rooks, or ravens, circle overhead, black raggedtipped wings against the tumble of clouds.

Out there on the tip of Rosroe Wittgenstein soaked up harassed solitude, grappling with logic and language games. Only hardy sheep and stubborn buckled trees and acid loving mosses and the creases in a grandmother’s hands.

Right below, Lough Fee, and then a river across the hop skip gap to Lough Muck, all part of the Culfin fisheries. Uncle Jackie won his World Masters fly fishing championship down there with a stump of a brownie from one of those banks. Which bank, I wonder?

Following, chasing, alone up here. What am I chasing? I cannot be what I was. I cannot sieve a soul or reburn a boyhood or strip away layers to uncover some mythical burning core. I am the old roar of ocean and a tumble of fresh cloud.

I stop to sit and look south at Inagh. Cumulus humilis and light leaking across the Bens and Maamturks.

A ewe passes with two following lambs. I take another picture.

I can perhaps, chip away on the latest layer, chisel the texture, scrape some grit into the detail, smudge tone in the shadows.

Already I am hungry and clambering back down to the shore of Fee.

Cold. Fresh. Soft. The loft-frozen pellets hop and bounce down the rock face. Pile into little lines and bumps and begin to whiten the ruddy earth. Bounce and hop but then suddenly seem to turn weightless, replaced by scattering petals of snow. Colder still. And then traditional rain joins in, heavy and steady and wet and I crouch deeper under the little flapping shelter.

Fickle winter weather, and a churning mess of cloudmass from the west in slow waves. I came up from the church car park, up the steep pitch of narrow road to the old graveyard. There the exposed hillside tombstones rest on a much older formation, old enough to be the area’s namesake. This is Cashel, from the Gaeilge An Caiseal, a name for a ringfort. These would have been built in the bronze age, which goes back some 3000 years. But this ringfort now sits under the high Cashel graveyard. Clumps of unmarked stumps mingle with rectangular marble and granite slabs and plastic flowers and crosses and bordered beds of gravel.

I notice a tall narrow headstone with a different style

Coleman Nee
Ireland
PVT 103 Infantry
World War I
May 9 1894
January 26 1970

A full run of 20th Century carnage: in a weathered Connemara hillside graveyard built in a weathered 3000 year old fort, lies a Nee who fought in the American army, probably on some blood and mud dug trench in France in the Great war, during which Ireland itself kicked off an uprising against British rule.

3000 years of cloudchurn and yet so quiet and unperturbed. A herd of small sheep with red and blue markings line up behind a gate watching me in hope of feed. An abandoned big house half submerged in a copse of leafless trees. A line of electricity poles lead from its gable back down the hill, the wires long gone: must have been in use after electricity arrived here in the 1950s. Here is a land with abandonment sewn into its definition. More goings than comings. As basic as the acidic soil where the roots of civilising crops are loathe to tunnel. Leave it to the mosses and grasses and layers of sodden peat. Here lies ties to centuries of roaming and fighting and big thick lines being drawn and redrawn on history maps. And yet just a flock of sheep chewing and staring at a gate under Cashel hill.

Higher up, I think about turning back, but the sun pops out again, and I clamber to the summit. It’s not high, just a little over 300m, but is unobscured and panoramic. Straight east huddle the basket of Bens and south of them over the Inagh valley and Recess, the broad Maamturks, and then beyond that Maam, Derroura, Oughterard, and the Corrib. Lakes pocket the bog. Dense conifer plantations in dark green patches. The higher peaks are dusted white, and over them all a canopy of shifting clouds spilling hail, rain, snow. You can make out distant blades of Cloosh wind mills spinning a little more west, and as you spin further that way, the flatter fragmented bogs and scattered houses of gaelic south connemara, from Carna down to Lettermore, Gorumna, and Carraroe and then on towards Galway, hidden now by cloud or slope or both.

Still turning, now facing into the sun as it approaches the Atlantic lid somewhere over the Aran Islands. Just below, the sea negotiates a series of complex bays and inlets. There’s something Escher-like about the one and the other. Perhaps the bog is the bay and the bay the bog? The ocean is boundary, limit, barrier, but yet passage, potential, murky and laden. Further north, the other lonely sisterpeak of Errisbeg over Roundstone, and past that the clouds sitting thicker and opaque. Another band rolling in.

The wind is howling again and flecks of new hail begin to patter, even while light still pours. There’s no scrap of shelter here, so I don’t wait beyond trying to stick something of the place into a digital sensor. Snappity snap. Then I flee back down towards the sheltered slopes and crouch under another rock face when the soup gets thick. The umbrella buckles. A dial cover is missing from the camera. Losses. I track back down by the graveyard and its layers of stones and story and down the hill to the car across from the church. Its wipers have been acting up, but they twitch into life now first time, and I pull out onto the road for home.

Why climb a hill at all? There might be a point. There might not. Is it not all self serving in the end, and the self not a thing at all?

“We’ll climb that hill, no matter how high, when we get up to it.”

I run
For poor shelter under wavebashed rock
Scattering sea birds
Into jolted gale-hung grace
And me, jolted but clumsy,
staring at waves,
Intruding.

Beach and coast at Furbo, January 2018.

After a mild autumn this year, the white stuff was suddenly back on the menu after some thick showers snuck in during a cold snap in early December.

I drove up the Shannapheasteen road until the Astra got stuck, wheels spinning in second gear on a bend. I reversed/slid back down to a junction, and went for a hike.

Turns out hiking in snow is awkward. Especially when the it’s on a bog and the bog has big holes in it and slopes up. My boot slipped and I dipped the camera down. It came up white. Crap. Wipe wipe wipe. Two minutes later I did it again. Learn: use the tripod as a walking stick and put the camera in the bag while going up a slope. I still managed to do a third time.

When I got back to the car, a tractor was helping a couple get up the road where I had parked. I was, er, slightly blocking the road. Sorry.

March 24th, NUI Galway

What is CCAFS? In their own words, “The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) will address the increasing challenge of global warming and declining food security on agricultural practices, policies and measures through a strategic collaboration between CGIAR and Future Earth.” It is a collaborative project that brings together a wide range of research as part of global efforts to understand the effects of climate change on agriculture, and how policy can be changed to imrove and secure the lives of those involved.

All content on this page, Donal Kelly.


Camera used: Canon 70d. Lenses, Sigma 18-35 f1.8, SIgma 35 f1.4, Canon 50mm f1.8, Canon 85mm f1.8, sigma 8-16mm.
All images copyright Donal Kelly.

The proclamations are mostly in the plastic bag, but a few are held up to passers by. Outside the G.P.O., under the narrow pin of the Spire, on the wide, fast food epicentre of O’Connell Street, all manner of 1916 goodies are hawked, for the day that’s in it. 100 years ago today, on the twenty-fourth of April, 1916, a band of rebels ‘stormed’ the G.P.O. and other landmark Dublin City centre buildings in an attempt to kick off a national uprising against the British crown. The Empire was busy with that stark abominable war in Europe. Thousands of Irishmen were fighting there, fighting and dying in places like the Somme, where up to one million men were killed or wounded. Meanwhile in Ireland, in a period of cultural revival and a new sense of nationalism through everything from poetry to Gaelic sports, a physical uprising is plotted in secret.

It means many things to many people. As the joke goes, if you believe everyone who tells you they had a great-grandfather in the G.P.O. with one of them clunky rifles that the ‘gallant’ Germans dropped off in Howth, then about half the country must have been crammed inside. Instead, on the day, a ragtag group showed up, and were jeered by a bemused public and later, they were given the hashtags of heroism though the whole thing is still open to healthy debate.

Flags, flags, get yer Ireland flags!

Just before noon on that Easter Monday, Patrick Pearse read out the proclamation from the front of the G.P.O.

The proclamation was signed by seven men, all of whom would be executed (along with others) in the immediate aftermath for their roles. The executions themselves are commonly regarded as a turning point between a controversial insurrection and a national push towards independence.

• Thomas Joseph Clarke: a 58 year old tobacconist who was jailed for 15 years for trying to blow up London Bridge. He was born in England but grew up in county Tyrone
• Seán Mac Diarmada: a 33 year old Leitrim man with a disability caused by polio, and a close friend of Clarke.
• Thomas MacDonagh: a 38 year old poet, playwright, teacher, and teachers trade union founder from country Tipperary
• Patrick Henry Pearse: 36 year old poet, writer, orator, teacher, barrister, and activist born on the street now named after him in Dublin city
• Éamonn Ceannt: 34 years old, an accountant son of an RIC officer, from county Galway
• James Connolly: 47 years old, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Marxist theorist and socialist leader, esperanto speaker
• Joseph Plunkett: 28 years old, poet, journalist, suffered with TB for much of his life, close friends with MacDonagh

A stage has been set up on the wide central strip where Dublin’s protests tend to start or end, and a speaker is already going #fullgas.

“in exasperation no doubt, once remarked, ‘Dubliners are the best and most unmanageable of revolutionaries’. And he devised that notorious 1937 constitution, which ensured that Irish women would be denied access to much of public life, and who…”

In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.

On the way into the centre, a march, probably unofficial, is starting under the train bridge that cuts across Ballybough Road. A Dublin bus is trying to pull in to pick up and put down its passengers, and a couple of Gardaí on bikes wait along with the compulsory group of bystanders-with-camera phones that have gathered.

We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people.

In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms.

Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades in arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations.

In 1916, O’Connell street shops were looted before being blown to pieces later in the week by field guns or burned in the fires that ensued. Some of the poorest people in Europe went into the luxury shops, taking furs, sweets, shoes…. A toy shop’s contents of fireworks were let loose on the street. Characters walked around decked in trendy furs wielding golf clubs. And both sides shot at them. Towards the end of the week after thousands of British soldiers surrounded the rebels, business owners staying put to protect their livelihoods were randomly executed along with some of their boys. Technically, at the time, they were British citizens, as were the rebels themselves, and Dublin was the empire’s ‘second’ city (#disputed).

In the distance, the bulk of Croke Park stands over the low terraces of the North Inner City. The GAA has organized a big hullaballoo of dance and music called Laochra, to take place after the National football league final between Kerry and Dublin. A couple of hundred metres away, a man was murdered in a recent gangland killing, while in one day’s time, in a few hundred metres in the other direction, another man will be shot dead in a pub.

Just off O’Connell street, there’s no traffic and no Luas running on Abbey Street Middle, but care is still needed to keep the narrow bike wheels out of the Luas track grooves, and dodge the green-clad people heading towards the din. A bigger more official march will take place later on. The Luas drivers may or may not be on strike today, for a pay rise many deem to be verging on greed, or part of some trade union meltdown. Although the economy seems to be on the up, the real wage for most people is not budging, while many are caught in short term contracts, on the wrong side of some two-tier pay system or other, or in a scheme like the infamous JobsBridge, supposedly to get realworld skills but possibly just working for almost nothing. Meanwhile many groups of public workers like the gardaí, nurses, train drivers, and teachers, are looking to recoup losses from recessionary budgets.

The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.

Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of a permanent National Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the Provisional Government, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the people.

Across from the Four Courts, traffic streams up the Quays. In the River Liffey, a couple of boats are going up as well, negotiating under the many bridge arches in the brightening day. A hundred years ago, Ned Daly’s 1st Battalion took over the building; some of the most intense fighting took place in the area. The Four Courts building survived the rising intact hurrah! but was blown to bits in the civil war in 1922 boo! before being rebuilt again hurrah!

Further South and East, another group of officials and photographers is building outside the Dublin Castle complex. A line of Gardaí stands outside in luminous jackets. One of them shouts my surname. He used to live with my brother. We chat for a few minutes about the wreath laying ceremony that will take place at the gates, and the general low-key events taking place (the official celebrations were held over the Easter weekend), and where the president Micky D, might be. An amphibious yellow Viking tourist truck goes past, with the passengers letting out a big choreographed roar that the locals are tuned to ignore. I don’t go into the castle grounds. The rebels didn’t go in either, even though the place was left pretty much unguarded, and it was one of the key buildings and the main admin centre for the British government in Ireland.

We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity, or rapine. In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline, and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.

Down Dame street, a mass of teenagers in black and carefully torn indie anticulture culture mill around the central bank building with skateboards, and College Green is lined with barriers and railings where the new Luas lines are going down. Whatever about the other lines, these curving tracks that will run along by the front of Trinity college will be an interesting obstacle for bikes. That’s the thing about getting stuck in ruts; there’s a good chance you’ll fall trying to get out.

A few streets down from Grafton Street, more Gardaí are outside Leinster House on Kildare Street, where the Government would sit if there was an actual Government. But the parties and TDs are locked in a strategic limbo, with no party having the required majority following a fractious Spring election campaign, and seemingly unable to agree to disagree, unable to step above dead end party lines, caught in “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario, surrounded by so-called emerging ‘populism’ in the traditional ‘best of a bad lot’ politics. Not many commentators hold out much hope for a durable compromise. Flashpoint issues such as the Irish water saga have created huge points of friction. Shut it down, and it’ll cost a load of money. Keep it open, and it’ll cost a load of money. Are those who paid now seeing themselves solidified as ‘winners’ and those who obliged with the extra tax, ‘losers’? Careful now, or another swell of anger from the taxpayers and naysayers will be set in motion.

Outside The Shelbourne Hotel, a bagpiper is playing, and a man in a green military uniform from a bygone era is walking down the steps. More camera phones, and a very tall footman in grey with top hat rounds the taxi rank to greet an arriving BMW 6 series.

Across the road, Edward Delaney’s bronze statue of Theoblad Wolfe Tone marks the North East corner of St Stephen’s Green. Inside the park, tulips are in full bloom and ducks, gulls, swans, and pigeons vie for donated grub while above in the trees that are beginning to leaf, a chorus of blackbirds and robins mark their spots and strut their stuff. Selfie sticks and baby carts wander around in the cool morning. While Stephen’s Green was taken over in the Rising, it was in a vulnerable position, as British soldiers could occupy comfortable high buildings like the Sehelbourne and cover the open area.

Further Southeast again, until the Grand Canal appears, and then down past the bridges and locks until Mount Street Bridge. A jogger is stretching against the lock gates. Faded flowers lie against the monument, tucked away from the pavement and busy commuter road. Office buildings stand in a corporate unison over a tour group. This was the scene of one of the bloodiest Rising battles, where a regiment of British soldiers, the Sherwood Foresters, marching from Dun Laoghaire (then Kingstown) were attacked by volunteers embedded in houses near the bridge. Rather than back up, move one street up, and take another bridge, the troops were ordered again and again into the bullets.

The canal continues down towards the Liffey and the sea. A battered old building stands above the tidy marina at the Grand Canal Docks. Boland’s Mill. Eamonn De Velera was stationed here in 1916 but not a whole lot happened as it was an isolated outpost. .It will soon be knocked, renamed as Boland Quay, and have €150 million of digital-dockland-era money into a brand new trendy living space. #gentrification

Whole Liffey-side sections of the city are changed utterly and still changing: development billboards with utopic designs run down both sides of the river as it edges to the sea. A few remaining old buildings look lonely amid the development. A lone canvas currach is being rowed up under the Samuel Beckett bridge.

Farther north again, the crowds are building for the match. Dublin will steamroll to another league win, and the Laochra show will fill the RTE schedule for a few Sunday afternoon hours. Later on they’ll have to fill out the census forms that have been sent out to every address in the country. Under another train bridge, a huge poster for the latest Game of Thrones TV show series is hung next to a dark poster that seems to have an orange on black likeness of Jesus with the words “EQUALITY FOR IRISH MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN; KEEP REPEAL THE 8TH”

All photos taken on an iPhone 6. I cycled from location to location in a short space of time to try and get a snapshot feel to the areas.

Layers of city,
History piled on history
Hills of rubble assembled into calm parks
Segways converging on an Opera square outside Humbolt
Car park treads over Adolf’s final bunker
Trabants and Mercedes and the odd Porsche
The Soviet ambitions of AlexanderPlatz
And down Under den Linden to the Brandenburg;
Don’t forget to book in advance to go up the Reichstag dome,
Then lose the guidebook and get lost

In all those tangled European threads returning to this knot on the Spree
Bringing the charge of the new
Vietnamese noodles, currywurst, MacDonalds, Starbucks,
Streets rebuilt,
Reinvented for the next phase,
The next age,
Brittle skittles for the roll of a Zeitgeist.
Loud of message and graffiti,
And English speaking barristas serving expensive coffees from South America.

All through this canvas of a city
So many have drawn, painted, built, torn,
And yet it still feels unfinished,
Waiting for the next layer to scrawl.

The rains barely paused for breath, though the good winds provided enough breath for all. Under the twinklings of dangling lights blowing in the breezing rain, ’tis the season’ bells barely tinkled before being bundled back into boxes until the next rendition.

We had the lights barely untangled. Plans to untangle the spent year in my brain and my brain to untangle for the year to come fogged up like a stubborn windscreen. Through that foggy glass things seemed no clearer than before. Clarity maybe comes from commitment to some version of events or other.

2015 might be the year of obsessive notification-checking, or the year of film photography, or a year of solidifying yesterness, or less or more of all these things if considering.

The water levels have broken records, with the shoreline exploring new curves along many a distant acre of field and shrub.

Indoors, in the bubble of days with names, family, television, turkey, and people in every room, time just whips away the last week of the year.

On the only calm clear day I was free, I took a borrowed Kayak to the high waters of the Corrib, with nary another floating human in sight, and rowed two blisters worth from Baurisheen to the head of the Owenriff and up past the boathouse and under the bridge at Eighterard and eventually all the way home in the darkening.

It is a world of
birds disturbed,
hulls upturned,
limbs of leafless tress sketched into the face of the river

To get under the bridge I had to fling myself forward then let my back fall flat onto the kayak hull, and still the bottom of the bridge concrete almost touched my nose. I failed the first time and wondered how safe the idea was with such a rush of water and nobody around and three grand of water-speckled camera gear between my knees, but I tried again.

It is a world of
current and flow,
never the same when you come back,
even if you never go.

In any case, not far after I got tired of battling the strengthening current that tore down in the narrower sections, and I flipped the little plastic boat around. Now it tears back down on the swell.