Sad to hear of the death of the wonderful Irish poet Eavan Boland who passed away yesterday.
I spoke to her in 2018 as I was making work in Ireland in the early stages of an ongoing project: 'The Landscape of Ideology’.
She kindly gave me permission to use her poem ‘The Famine Road’, as an accompaniment to my picture made at Killary Harbour, Co. Connemara.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt such an eerie sense of disquiet as I walked out alone on a cold November dawn along a path of broken rock laid out in the mid 1800s by impoverished men and women during the Great Famine. I still feel it now as I remember that day trudging in the wild beauty of the Fjord with a backpack, tripod, my old Deardorff camera and a few darkslides of film - all alone yet strangely not alone.
The ‘road' was built ‘from nowhere going nowhere of course’, as part of a slavish insistence on the prevailing ideological belief in ‘laissez-faire’ economics: a conviction that any kind of benevolent state welfare would create a lazy dependency among the poor and that the answer lay not in government assistance for those in need, but in a requirement for them to undertake hard labour on what were essentially futile projects in exchange for meagre rations. Hundreds of thousands died of exhaustion and starvation in the service of early free-market ideology, all whilst food was still being exported for profit in vast quantities from the east coast ports.
Eavan Boland's anger and compassion resonate fiercely in her verse......
