We are scheduled to catch the 9.26am train from Venenzia S Lucia to Roma Termini, with an arrival time of 13.25pm in Rome. While every night on the trip I was careful to get to bed relatively early, on our last night in Venice we all stayed up in the hotel outdoor lounge area chatting about the day. I am usually a poor sleeper and awake early so I do not bother setting an alarm. You can imagine my horror when I awake Sunday morning and on checking my phone realise that it is 8.05am and our departure time from the hotel is set for 8am.!  To say I flung my clothes into the suitcase is probably an understatement! I arrive downstairs by about 8.12 , happy to realise I was not the only one late but looking decidedly worse from wear.

On the Vaporetto my mind starts to relax as I soak up the beauty of the canal for one last time before we depart. We get our seats on the train without difficulty and head south. The journey is interesting as cloudy skies in Northern Italy start to give way to blue ones and sunshine towards the South.  One of my colleagues who knows Italy well advises me not to take the coffee from the trolley but to go down to the cafeteria on the train instead. How right she was. Styled like a café bar, you can stand at the counter and enjoy a freshly brewed expresso and watch the fields go by. We arrive on time in Rome and after a quick trip to our hotel to deposit bags, our third day begins.

People were surprised when I said I had never been to Rome before. I had visited Italy , but for some reason I just had not made it to Rome. So this was going to be a real treat. Our first site visit is Forum Romano . The Forum’s beginnings are connected with the alliance between Romulus  the first king of Rome (which then consisted only of the Palatine Hill) and his rival, Titus Tatius , who occupied the Capitoline Hill around 750 BC. According to tradition the pair formed an alliance after combat had been halted by the prayers and cries of Sabine women.

                                     

For centuries the Forum was the centre of day-to-day life in Rome: the site of elections and triumphal processions, public speeches, gladiatorial matches, and criminal trials. In fact, the day after we arrive in Rome there are some re-enactments of the gladiator matches happening in public spaces, which were interesting to observe. So this rectangular area, the Roman Forum, originally marsh land, gradually became the nucleus of commercial affairs in ancient Rome.

There are so many important monuments and statues in this historic space it is hard to select one – but for me the memory I will always have of standing there, for the first time, was seeing the Temple of Antonius and Faustina, pictured at the opening. We stop just under this monument, and I stare at it , transfixed by the sheer enormity of the columns. I have a similar experience, the following day, when we reach the Pantheon and again at Hadrian’s Villa. Georgina Masson describes the Temple in her wonderful book The Companion Guide to Rome (1965)  and she is worth quoting. She writes that ‘passing in front of the altar and temple of Caesar, we turn right and are immediately confronted with the great podium crowned with ten monolithic columns in cipollino marble of one of the forum’s most prominent and best-preserved monuments , the temple of Antonius, Hadrian’s adopted son and successor and Faustina, his beloved wife. On her death in AD 141 she was deified, and the temple was built and dedicated to her and on her husband’s death twenty years later the dedication was changed to the pair of them’’. (pp, 56) My image I hope captures the enduring grandeur and majesty of this  building.

We explore the Forum and gradually move toward the Capitoline Hill to visit the Capitoline Museum.  We climb the steps that lead us to the ‘Campidoglio’ and there we are greeted with the statue of a mounted rider right in the centre of the piazza: Emperor Marcus Aurelius , who , for those of you who are interested in this city’s complex history, married the daughter of Faustina whom I spoke about earlier. Confusingly, Faustina’s daughter was her Mother’s namesake. Linkages and connections are forming for me as I piece together so many stories from this ancient city.  

The statue of Marcus Aurelius in the square is a copy of the original which is safely exhibited in the museum to protect it from the elements (above). The history of the museum dates back to 1471 when Pope Sixtus IV donated a collection of important ancient bronzes to the people of Rome and located them on the Capitoline Hill. Since then, the museum’s collection has grown to include many ancient Roman statues, inscriptions, and other artifacts, a collection of medieval and Renaissance art and collections of coins and jewels.

     The Capitoline Wolf. Image: Denise Meagher

I stop to study and take a quick photograph of the bronze sculpture of the Capitoline Wolf. A symbol of Rome since ancient times that we will all be familiar with , the she-wolf (pictured above) is suckling the mythical twin founders of Rome – Romulus and Remus (before the alliance with Titus Tatius of the Sabines was formed ,as discussed above ) and is a symbol of Rome since ancient times. The sculpture has been housed at the museum since 1471.  It is believed the work is Etruscan in origin dating back to the 5^th century BC though this is controversial. According to legend the twins were cast into the Tiber river by Amulius when he overthrew his brother King Numitor, grandfather to the twins. The misfortunate pair were rescued by the she-wolf who cared for them until a herdsman found them.

The evening has descended and once again we retire as a group to one of the many wonderful Italian restaurants before returning to our beds after another busy day.  Tomorrow we plan several site visits before we go to the Embassy of Ireland to conclude the evening.

Monday morning we start our day at The Villa Farnese ,  a Renaissance suburban villa in the district of Trastevere, built between 1506 and 1510 . The villa was built for Agostino Chigi, a rich  Sienese (Tuscany)  banker who was also the treasurer of Pope Julius II . We will meet Pope Julius II again in this blog series and his importance cannot be overemphasised.

        

The novelty of this suburban villa design is primarily because of it’s differences from that of a ‘typical’ urban palazzo (palace). Renaissance palaces usually faced onto a street and were decorated versions of defensive castles: rectangular blocks with rusticated ground floors and enclosing a courtyard. This villa, however, was intended to be an airy summer pavilion, and presented a side towards the street.

                   

Chigi also commissioned the fresco decoration of the villa by artists such as Raphael (1483-1520). Best known are Raphael’s frescoes on the ground floor depicting the classical and secular myths of Cupid and Psyche and the Triumph of Galatea.  . The latter, one of his few purely secular paintings, shows the near-naked nymph on a shell-shaped chariot amid ‘frolicking attendants’, and is reminiscent of the famous work by Botticelli –  The Birth of Venus. The themes were inspired by key members Lorenzo de Medici’s circle, including the work of the poet Angelo Poliziano. Interestingly Raphael did not paint any of the main events of the story as depicted by the poet. Instead, he chose the scene of the nymph’s apotheosis (glorification/ascent into heaven) where Galatea appears surrounded by other sea creatures. The bright colours and decoration, it is argued, are inspired by ancient Roman painting. At the left we see a Triton (partly man, partly fish) abducting a sea nymph; behind them another Triton uses a shell as a trumpet. Galatea rides a shell-chariot drawn by two dolphins. While some have seen in the model for Galatea the face of Chigi’s lover, the art historian and Raphael’s near-contemporary, Giorgio Vasari ( acknowledged as one of the first great art-historians from this period), disagreed. He argued that Raphael did not mean for Galatea to resemble any one human person, but to represent ‘ideal’ beauty. When asked where he had found a model of such beauty, Raphael reportedly said that he had used “a certain idea” he had formed in his mind . I thought to myself the ‘idea’ most likely was the woman he loved rather than the one Chigi did , especially when you think about his portrait La Fornarina at the Palace Barberini (which I will discuss in blog 4) . The villa became the property of the Farnese family in 1577.  

I was particularly struck by some of the ceiling frescoes which reminded me of the designs we saw in the main room at Castletown House in Celbridge on an earlier field trip.

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Wall Fresco , Castletown (left) Ceiling Fresco, Villa Farnese (right)

Both Images: Denise Meagher

Next stop is the Basilica of Santa Maria , also in Trastevere, one of the oldest Churches in Rome. The basic floor plan and wall structure of the church dates back to the 340s but the first sanctuary was built in 221 – 227 by Pope Callixtus I. The church has large areas of important mosaics  from the 12^th and late 13th century by the late Medieval artist, Pietro Cavallini (1259- 1330)

Santa Maria in Trastevere, interior. Image: Wikimedia Commons

These are reminiscent of the mosaics we saw in Venice on the outside of the St. Mark’s Basilica but again time did not allow us to study them in great detail though one of the people in our group is writing a Ph.D. thesis in this area so it was interesting to hear her talk about the importance of some of these beautiful mosaics during the trip.

Moving on we reach the church of Saint Agnes in Piazza Navona next, a 17th-century Baroque church. Piazza Navona is one of the main urban spaces in the historic centre of the city and the site where the Saint Agnese , the early Christian saint,  was martyred. Construction of the Church began in 1652. I am struck by the altar piece: The Two Holy Families  (1676) by Domenico Guidi .

                   Domenico Guidi, The Two Holy Families (detail), (1676). Image: Denise Meagher

Outside the Church I stand in front of the first sculpture of one of the artists we studied on the trip that made a lasting impression : Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) whom I will discuss again in a later blog. This work, his Fountain of the Four Rivers is situated in the Piazza Navona.

   Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Fountain of the Four Rivers (detail) Both Images: Denise Meagher

It was designed in 1651 for Pope Innocent X , whose family palace faced onto the piazza, as did the church of Saint Agnes mentioned above. The base of the fountain is a basin style, from the centre of which beautiful limestone rocks rise to support four river gods and above them, a copy of an obelisk of Egyptian origin surmounted with the Pamphili family emblem of a dove with an olive twig. Collectively the gods represent four major rivers  of the Nile (Africa), the Danube (Europe) ,  the Ganges (Asia) and Rio de la Plata (South America).

And still we move on.

Before I discuss the Pantheon, our next stop,  I must introduce another very important character from the first century AD – Hadrian (76–138), mentioned earlier. He was a Roman Emperor from 117 to 138. He was also a seriously bright man,  gifted in many areas, a person I would have loved to meet! His father was of senatorial rank and was a first cousin of Emperor Trajan . Hadrian married Trajan’s grand-niece Sabina  early in his career, before Trajan became Emperor and possibly at the behest of Trajan’s wife, Plotina, who was well disposed towards Hadrian. When Trajan died, his widow claimed that he had nominated Hadrian as Emperor immediately before his death. Some Senators opposed his nomination and he had them put to death when he came to power, something the Senate did not forget easily.

Very much ‘ his own man’  he often had clashes with the Roman elite , especially because of his policies. He built walls to protect the then Empire and despite opposition he pursued his own Imperial ideals and visited almost every province of the Empire, accompanied by his Imperial ‘team’. In Rome he is remembered for rebuilding the Pantheon  and constructing the vast Temple of Venus and Roma  . He was deeply inspired by ancient Greece and even thought to make Athens the cultural capital of the Empire at one point.  His intense relationship with a Greek youth called Antinous is also well documented, and I will return to that later when I discuss his Villa in the Roman suburbs. Antinous’s tragic death by drowning  led Hadrian to establish a widespread cult in his lover’s honour later in his reign.  

My first encounter with Hadrian then is when I see the building he was involved in rebuilding and this is, of course, The Pantheon.

                                              

And it left me breathless. Originally built by Marcus Agrippa in 27-25 BC it was destroyed by fire in AD 80. Replaced by Domitian it was then struck by lightning in AD 110. Plans for rebuilding were probably put in place by the Emperor Trajan but he died before they were finished, so it was Hadrian who then took charge. ‘Hadrian ..did not dedicate the new Pantheon in his own name but in that of the original dedicant : thus the bold on the front : M. Agrippa L.F. COS TERTIUM FECIT (Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, trice consul, made this)’. Amanda Claridge continues in her book Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide ‘The city of Rome (unlike the Empire at large) never took kindly to the idea of worshipping emperors as gods during their lifetime but it is possible that the Pantheon provided a setting – not a temple in the conventional sense – in which the living emperor would appear in company with the gods (including his own deified predecessors) ‘. (pp, 231)

This awe inspiring structure, famous for its Corinthian columns which I discussed in my earlier blog, (eight in the first rank and two groups of four behind) , situates the design in the Classical tradition. The famous Rotunda (pictured below) is linked by a  rectangular vestibule to the porch.

The rotunda  is under a   large coffered Dome i.e – it is decorated with recessed ceiling panels . This device had been used  to bring an added dimension to the ceilings of large rooms since Etruscan times. The Dome is made even more impressive by the central opening called the ‘oculus’ through which one can see the sky. Almost two thousand years after it was built, (think about that for a minute!)  the Pantheon’s dome is still the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. A painter and architect who worked in Rome and is primarily known as one of the vedutisti (“view painters”) from the city – Giovanni Paolo Panini or Pannini (1691-1765) exquisitely captures views of the Pantheon, including the one pictured above. His name and that of Piranesi (1720 – 1778) feature throughout this blog series.

We visited numerous churches on our trip, not all of which I will cover nor in the order in which we visited them, but San Luigi dei Francesci is a Roman Catholic Church not far from Piazza Navona and is important to mention. It has three masterpieces by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) .   The Calling of St Matthew (1599-1600), The Inspiration of Saint Matthew (1602) and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (1599-1600). This was , apparently, not an easy commission for Caravaggio, and it is believed that at least two of the three paintings had to be repainted to satisfy his patron, the Cardinal Francesco Del Monte. If you did not have a patron in these times, you could not fund or progress your work.

But let us turn the clock back a decade earlier when Cardinal Matthieu Cointerel left funds in his will for the decoration of this church on themes connected to his namesake – Saint Matthew. Caravaggio was fortunate to get this commission as the dome of the chapel had been decorated in frescoes, in a Mannerist style by the famous artist and contemporary of his , Giuseppe Cesari, who was also Caravaggio’s former employer. Mannerist was a sixteenth century style of art and design characterized by artificiality, elegance and sensuousness in portraying the human figure and is the name given to the style followers of Raphael and Michelangelo adopted from around 1520–1600.

Cesari, however,  was busy with other important royal and papal commissions so  Caravaggio got this job thanks to his patron’s intervention. I wished I had more time to study these works but it was hard to, given that the Church was very busy and a little noisy with many people also trying to look at them. Caravaggio was a most interesting character and in his short and tumultuous life he achieved so much –  it was an honor to see the works even briefly.   Below is one example from the three, the one I liked best.

And still more amazing experiences were packed into this day. Our group – MA students from the Department of Art History and Social Policy in UCD , have been invited to the Irish Embassy, situated in the Villa Spada. On route we call at the Galleria Spada, a museum  located in the Piazza Capo di Ferro, famous for its façade and for the forced perspective gallery by Francesco Borromini that is in the building. There are also some wonderful pieces of art.  The Villa Spada however dominates my memory, pictured below.

It dates from 1639 and was originally constructed as a summer home for the Nobili family who produced several noted churchmen including Roberto Nobili, who was made a Cardinal at the age of 12 by his grand-uncle Julius III in 1553. Their own web site gives the background to the building: ‘The Nobili Family owned the property for about a hundred years and then another Italian family, the Spada Family, owned it for a further 200 years of its history.  ….It was sold several times over the subsequent years and leased to the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, whose founder died in the Villa in 1894. The Irish state purchased Villa Spada from its then owner Dr. Alberto Uzielli of Florence, in 1946. For 65 years it housed the Irish Embassy to the Holy See before its change to house the Irish Embassy to Italy in 2012.’

                       

We  were welcomed by the Ambassador to Rome, Patricia O Brien  who was exceptionally warm to us all and then given a tour of the building by one of her assistants. I was struck not just by the beautiful views from the villa but by the frescoed doors that feature in some of the rooms, which, I was told, came from Venice.  

                                

We were treated to some tea and biscuits as we took in the view, one of the many incredible memories I have of my eight-day field trip of Venice and Rome.  It was time to retire for some food and refreshments but more to follow…….

My late dear Mother often said to me that the 22^nd was a date that featured regularly in our family’s long history. Some of us were born on the day, others died, weddings were celebrated, and coincidental things happened that somehow had the magic number 22 attached. No surprises then that the departure date for ‘my’ grand tour, was April 22^nd 2022. I left Killough shortly after 1.30am for the airport, anxious to be leaving my three sons for eight full days.

What was a Grand Tour? In the 18^th century it was a cultural tour of Europe usually undertaken by men, very occasionally by women, of the upper classes, to complete their education by introducing them to classical antiquity. Italy was central to the tour and our first destination in Italy is Venice, a place I had been to before, but my focus then was on modern art at the Biennale in 2015. This time my attention would be on things of a more classical art historical nature. I was going to visit churches designed by the great Palladio, see ceilings painted by Tiepolo, among others, and look at works of art by some of the greatest old masters of all time: Tintoretto, Bassano, Veronese to name a few.

I managed to sleep for an hour on the plane, so I arrive somewhat refreshed. As we await our bus into Venice, where we will get the ‘vaporetto’ (a boat bus) down the Grand canal to our hotel, myself and some of the other participants on the trip buy our first Italian expresso.  We had landed.  

We reach the city by early afternoon where we all purchase a three-day pass for the Vaporetto which will bring us to various stops in the city. The day is overcast and colder than one might expect for late April, but the views of the buildings are still mesmerizing as they stand majestically overlooking the canal. The duller light of our first day changed some of the visuals of a building’s exterior, so on my return home I had to be careful to identify my phone images correctly, as I had become used to looking at images of some of these places, pictured only against dazzling blue skies.

I get my first glimpse of the 18^th century museum Ca’ Rezzonico while on the boat, where I will present my paper the following day. In my mind’s eye I begin to imagine the spectacular site this Palazzo must have been in the 18^th century, when lit up with lamps and torches for one of the many parties that were held when the building was owned by the Rezzonico family. More on this later.   

Our first site visit of the day is the church known as il Redentore.

                                                      

Designed by Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), who I discuss in more detail below, it is believed Palladio was inspired in his design of the façade for this building  by the Pantheon in Rome. This makes me stop and think about what we will soon see when we reach that ancient city further South in Italy. The building also features fifteen steps leading up to the entrance, significant because of the connection to the Temple of Jerusalem.   As a pilgrimage church, the building was expected to have a long nave, which was something of a challenge for Palladio, given his interest and dedication to classical architecture. The nave is the body of the church between the door and the sanctuary, which gave processions more impact on the spectators. His interpretation is a typical Venetian approach, on a classical model .

The Bolognese architect Sebastiano Serlio in Book 1V of his Regole generali d’architettura , which was published in Venice in 1537, wrote that ‘ It occurred to the ancient Romans to mix the rustic order not only with the Doric order, but also with the Ionic and Corinthian. The mixture in my opinion is very attractive to look at and represents great strength’. At Il Redentore however an uninterrupted ‘Corinthian order’ makes its way around the entire interior.  These orders were, of course, originally a feature in Greek architecture and were popularised by Roman Vitruvius (80–70 BC – 15 BC) who wrote a treatise, The Ten Books of Architecture which had huge influence. According to Vitruvius, architecture is an imitation of nature. To roughly paraphrase him: ‘Just as birds and bees built their nests, so humans construct houses from natural materials that gave them shelter against the elements’. When perfecting this art of building, the Greeks, as mentioned above , had invented the architectural orders: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian . It gave them a sense of proportion and Vitruvius drew from this in his designs, as did Palladio and others who came after him. John Summerson , whose book The Classical Language of Architecture (Thames and Hudson , 1963)  I am reading at the moment , sums this up well: ‘A vast amount of pretentious nonsense has been written  about proportion and I have no intention in getting involved in it. The Renaissance  concept of proportion is fairly simple. The purpose of proportion is to establish harmony throughout a structure  – a harmony which is made comprehensible either by the conspicuous use of one or more of the orders as dominant components or else simply by the use of dimensions involving the repetition of simple ratios ….The orders  provided a sort of gamut of architectural character all the way from the rough and tough to the slim and fine’. (pp 8 & 15) . I think that is a very good summation.

The Church is also famous because every year, the then Doge (the chief magistrate or leader of the Venetian Republic when it existed)   and senators , walked across a specially constructed bridge from the Zattere to Giudecca where the church is situated, to attend mass. Still today this ‘Festa del Redentore’ remains an important festival in the city celebrated the third Sunday in July . In Ireland it is called a Pattern Day – a type of celebration of a local saint. This church also has some wonderful art works, my favourite perhaps being The Baptism of Christ by the Venetian Paolo Veronese (1528 – 1588). His works usually are enormous canvases, featuring many people and have allegorical, biblical, and historical themes. But he was also a good observer of the world around him. Aileen Ribeiro in her book Clothing Art : The Visual Culture of Fashion , 1600-1914 comments that ‘Veronese’s freedom in the depiction of costume .. irritated the defenders of the academic hierarchy in art’ .( pp 216) This is a theme I revisit briefly in the concluding post in this series when discussing William Hogarth’s writings from the 18th.

Our next church is San Giorgio Maggiore, a 16th-century Benedictine church on an island of the same name.  Also designed by Andrea Palladio, the building shows again the architect’s cleverness in adapting a classical temple façade, to a form acceptable as a Christian Church.

As mentioned , Palladio was inspired by classical Roman architecture, but he did not imitate it completely. He chose elements and assembled them in innovative ways appropriate to the site and function of the building. This type of innovation is something, over the course of my first year studying art history, at UCD , I learnt the Venetians were good at. Palladio’s buildings were often placed on foundations raised up to make them more visible and provide a better view. His influence in architecture is well documented, not just because of his buildings,  but also because he too wrote a  treatise, The Four Books of Architecture, which influenced many architects  who came after him, just as Vitruvius’s work had done.

We  can see examples of his style of design in houses like Castletown House  (above) in Celbridge here in Ireland, for example.

Back in Venice, on entering the church one is immediately struck by the spaciousness of the design and the brightness of the interior. Massive columns and a long basilica nave unfold before the eye. The basilica follows a cruciform plan.

                                 

Where better to meet one of the great master ‘s work – Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto (1518-1594) . The Church has two of his pieces : The Last Supper and The Jews in the desert . The latter shows the Jews collecting and eating the manna (a type of bread) in the desert, a gift of God to the Israelites,  after they escaped Egypt, and it foreshadows the concept of the Eucharist.  His works are considered Mannerist in style characterised by dramatic brushwork and his use of perspective.

       

We also get the opportunity to take a lift up the campanile  , an Italian bell tower where some great views of the city can be seen.  I am particularly struck by the view opposite us where we can see St. Mark’s Square where we will soon walk to.

By now it is approaching 6pm and most of us had little or no sleep the previous night, so we decide to head towards St. Mark’s Square to soak the atmosphere only this space can provide before finding a nice restaurant to eat.

As we enter the square the mosaics on the Basilica di San Marco glitter as the sun starts to emerge from behind the clouds. I buy myself a hat in case we get more rain or too much sun. Étienne , my youngest son, fell in love with it on my return, even wearing it to bed on one occasion, so it is now officially his!

Procuratie Nuove occupies the right side of the Piazza, designed by the architect Scamozzi (1552-1616), a student of Palladio , and was later finished by Scamozzi’s student, Longhena (1598-1682). More about Longhena later.  In class this year it was explained to us that it was the architect Jacopo d’Antonio Sansovino (1486-1570) who laid the foundations to rebuild a range of buildings as the Procuratie Nuove. These were ‘ a new set of administrative apartments (not completed until the 1580s under the supervision of Vincezo Scamozzi. The Piazza was widened , and the new range was set further back in the Campanile. The piazza acquired 20m in width and the Campanile became free standing. The Doge’s Palace now becomes far more visible as one enters the square. Sansovino also succeeded in clearing the square of many of its ramshackle huts and stalls’ . (Lecture notes)

Between 1805 and 1814, Napoleon, who had proclaimed himself King of Italy, lived in the Procuratie Nuove whenever he visited Venice. It was he who, it is alleged , called the square ‘the drawing room of Europe’ given that it was visited by so many young men on their Grand Tours, the trip embarked upon, as I mentioned earlier, usually by aristocrats, to finish off their education, by giving them some experience in classical culture and architecture. Some also argue it was an excuse to party!.

    

Procuratie Nuove. Image: Denise Meagher

On my last visit to Venice in 2015, we sat in the famous Florian café for refreshments on our first night in the city. I will never forget the orchestra playing and the lights of the square flickering around us . It is a memory I hold vividly to this day. Café Florian dates back to 1720 and was frequented by famous people like Lord Byron, Marcel Proust, Simone de Beauvoir  and many others. 

This evening however we all desire some pasta and an early night’s sleep. Day one of my Grand tour is over and I already know it will be a trip of a lifetime.

We arise early on Saturday morning and return to St. Mark’s Square where we intend to visit the Doge’s Palace , then the Museo Correr.  The Doge’s Palace is a building that one might overlook visiting on a trip to Venice. This was the residence of various Doges over the centuries. It would be a shame not to visit the interior because it is truly a mesmerising experience to walk through – a building that is literally wall to ceiling covered in art. We probably all know the exterior of the building from vedute (city views) by Venetian artists from the 18^th century like Canaletto (1697–1768).  His works were popular with the grand tourists to bring home after their tour.

In the painting above we can see the Doge’s palace exterior . The building we see today is the result of several phases of modification and rebuilding from about 1200s to the last Doge’s residency in 1797 . The façade is in Venetian Gothic style, which is really beautiful.

                                                 

Several fires have ravished the building over the years, so there are only few traces remaining of the original palace but some Byzantine – Venetian architecture features can still be seen at the ground floor. One of our colleagues on the trip who is researching mosaics for her PhD talked to us about this aspect of the building.

Andrea Palladio had made a proposal to refurbish the building in a more Classical style but it was decided to respect the original Gothic design.  They were correct. It became a museum in 1923 and is one of the 11 museums of importance in the city. It has great works by Titian (1488/90-1576 ) , Tintoretto  (1518-1594) and Tiepolo (1696-1770) , among others  .

Moving from here to the Museo Correr, another stunning building to visit, particularly the rooms that have a particular 18^th Century atmosphere. This Museum boasts wonderful works of art , including some by Antonio Canova (1757–1822) the Venetian Neoclassical sculptor, famous for his marble sculptures. His work was inspired by the  Baroque and the classical revival and has been characterised as having avoided the ‘melodramatics of the former, and the cold artificiality of the latter’. When in Rome Canova spent time studying and sketching the works of Michelangelo. We will meet Michelangelo through his masterpieces later.

My favourite of Canova’s pieces is The Three Graces depicting the mythological three Charities, daughters of Zeus   – identified on some engravings of the statue as  Euphrosyne, Aglaea and Thalia  and  who were said to represent, mirth (Euphrosyne), elegance (Aglaea) and youth/beauty (Thalia). I will discuss this piece again in Part 5 of this blog series.   We see below another example of his work from the museum.

My own presentation was scheduled at our next museum stop – the 18^th  Century museum Ca’ Rezzonico.  This building stands on the right bank of the Grand Canal. The site was originally occupied by two houses which belonged to the Bon family, one of Venice’s patrician  clans. In 1649 the head of the family, Filippo Bon, a Procurator of the city and patron of the arts, decided to transform the two houses into a single large palazzo. He employed Baldassarre Longhena (1597-1682), the greatest proponent of Venetian Baroque, a style slowly replacing the Renaissance and Palladian architectural style. Longhena was the designer of the famous dome of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, a Venice baroque landmark at the entrance to the Grand Canal. He was also a student of Scamozzi and Scamozzi’s own master was Andrea Palladio as mentioned earlier – so we can see how all these brilliant architects influenced each other. Sadly, the architect died before the building was finished and the owner ran out of money.

In 1750 the Bons offered the unfinished palazzo to Giambattista Rezzonico, a banker and fabric merchant from Lombardy, whose family had bought a title of Venetian nobility in 1648, following the war with Turkey , when the Venetian state funds were depleted. Rezzonico hired the most prestigious Venetian late Baroque architect Giorgio Massari (1687-1766), who designed several important buildings. At Ca’Rezzonico he finished the works Longhena had implemented with modifications to suit his later Baroque, or ‘lighter rococo’tastes. He replaced  some double columns on the facade with slender pillars and eliminated a heavy plinth of columns, giving a more graceful appearance. He installed a row of small oval windows above the larger windows on the second floor, adding a rococo touch. The facade was finished between 1750 and 1752.

                                              

The Rezzonico family wielded huge power, not only in Venice, but also in Rome. There were frequent banquets at the building in this time and as I walked up the staircase to the grand ball room I imagined myself in masque and gown having arrived from a gondola and ascending the stairs, listening to the chatter and music from above.

Carlo, the younger brother of the house’s owner Giambattista , was elected Pope Clement X111 in 1758. In 1759 Aurelio Rezzonico was elected  a Procurator of San Marco, and in 1762, another family member, Ludovico Rezzonico, would be elected to the same position. This gives some sense of the power the family wielded.

After the Rezzonico family’s fortune and power came to an end and the building was no longer theirs, various people rented or owned the property.  The City Council purchased the building in the 1930s to showcase the large and important collection of 18^th Century artwork the city had to boast. The then Supervisor of Fine Art and the Director of Museums were key players in establishing the museum in its current format.  They gave the museum a particular character, as if the works were not being shown in an exhibition  space but simply placed where they naturally belonged in the home of an 18^th Century wealthy Venetian family.

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo 1727-1804 Il Mondo Novo (1791) Ca’ Rezzonico

My presentation deals with the history of the building but also discusses some of the major artists at the museum which allow us to compare different trends in the Venetian painting school of the Eighteenth century. For example, the vivid, sensual, splendour of the rococo, visible in the allegorical and mythological works of Giambattista Tiepolo. But also the everyday spirit of the Venetian 18^th Century society , with all its class vagaries and sensitivities is captured in the paintings of  Pietro Longhi (1702-1785). The flamboyance and profligacy of city life can be seen in Longhi too and in the works by Francesco Guardi (1712-1793) at the museum. Guardi and Canaletto’s (1697-1768) veduta of Venice are somehow always in the background of our minds, as mentioned earlier , when we think about Venice, partly because the Grand tourists bought them and popularised them in Europe.  Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757) one of the most famous female portrait artists from this time also features at the museum and captures in her portraiture some of the period’s wonderful personalities . Giandomenico  Tiepolo (1727-1804), eldest son of Gaimbattista Tiepolo  directs us off the 18^th Century stage with his marvellous work, including ‘Mondo Nuovo’  (1791) (above) and others , that hang in the museum.

It would be remiss of me not to mention, however, a work of art that really struck me. Lorenzo Baldissera Tiepolo’s portrait of his Mother Cecilia Guardi Tiepolo is a masterpiece. The youngest of the family he sadly died too young to progress his obvious talent for Portraiture.

My presentation over we have a final stop, a relatively unknown gem in Venice  – San Pantalon with a most magnificent ceiling by Giovanni Antonio Fumiani (1645–1710),  an Italian painter of the Baroque period.

 

Between 1684 and 1704, Fumiani decorated the ceiling of  this church with what has been claimed to be the largest painting on canvas in the world. The painting depicts ‘The Martyrdom and Apotheosis of San Pantalon ‘ , an early martyr, across forty-four canvases that cover the large ceiling.  My photograph above does no justice to this magnificent ceiling. Some believe Fumiani died from a fall from a San Pantalon ceiling scaffold, although other sources date his death to six years after he stopped work in the building. In any event it is a joy to see, so one to look out for if you travel to Venice.

We retire after another wonderful day for some pasta before returning to our hotel to share some wine on our last night in the wonderful city of Venice. I look forward to returning in the not-too-distant future.   

‘’..you must be allowed to fail, as well as to succeed, in every area of the Arts. ‘Fail better’, as Beckett would say”.

Deirdre McQuillan

I remember the buzz of excitement in the foyer, at a fashion show in Limerick, sometime around 2005. Deirdre McQuillan, Fashion Editor for The Irish Times was attending and we spoke briefly. I recall her telling me about her connections to Tipperary and I always wanted to follow up with her about that.

We spoke again in 2009 when she wrote about me in her column ‘My Style’ in The Irish Times.  

Several years later we are sitting together in Il Café Di Napoli, a wonderful Italian cafe in Dublin, a place I have frequented every week, for the past two months. I love the ambiance there. Don, Joss and I are doing a wonderful drawing course at The Drawing School on Merrion Square, and we pop into the café after class each week. Hence I suggested to Deirdre to meet there.

Inevitably before we delve into the story of Deirdre’s fascinating career, as an editor, activist, fashion journalist, author, food writer, PRO for the Abbey Theatre, – we go back to Tipperary, and to the time she spent there as a child, visiting with her great Aunts.

Borrisokane  

I have brought along her lovely book The Irish Country House Table to the interview for her to sign and I quote here a section from the introduction. : ‘My earliest memories of good food come from the country. As a child, I was sent to stay with my grand- aunts in Tipperary during the summer holidays and I vividly remember that my shy, gentle aunt, a brilliant cook, was never more at ease than when she was bustling around the kitchen preparing good things to eat’.  Irish Country House Table (Gill & Macmillan 1994)

I tell Deirdre I am loving the recipes in this book, and so the conversation starts here.

Denise: So tell me about your memories of spending time in Borrisokane as a child.

Deirdre: My two great aunts Madge and Kit, sisters of my grandmother Mary owned The Central Hotel, shop and pub in the middle of Borrisokane. Aunty Kit did all the buying and handled the financial affairs while Auntie Madge’s fiefdom was the kitchen. And it was a huge kitchen, as I remember as a child. She taught me how to bake and was never happier than when she was in there fussing around the place. The book is dedicated to her. I would have been sent for a couple of weeks every summer to visit. So, I spent a lot of time there. One of the things I had to do when I arrived in Borrisokane was to go and visit all the other local shopkeepers in the town for a chat. Gather the eggs from the yard.

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Denise : And it’s a beautiful town, with some lovely buildings.

Deirdre: The Central Hotel was a fine three storey building and I remember it very well, every little detail. One of my memories was of the market day when all the animals would be penned up along the footpaths of the street and you’d go to the window downstairs and see sheep looking in at you! A lot of money changed hands on those days and I used to pull pints in the pub and take the takings of that day to the bank the following morning. What else do I remember about those summers? I learnt how to cycle at  a lovely house with a long avenue just outside the town called Killavalla owned by the Corcoran family. I remember seeing butter being churned there for the first time.

(2)

Denise: A complete contrast to city life. So you got your culinary education in Tipperary.

Deirdre: Well certainly in baking yes. Auntie Madge made patty cakes, sponge cakes and bread and when my parents came down to collect me, we would have the most wonderful meals in the dining room but have to sit on these awful horse hair seated chairs! She was shy and modest, but the food she served was incredible.

When Kit died and the place was sold, I am told that Madge got into that car and never looked back at the place in which she had been born and lived all her life. She spent the last years of her life with another sister, Eileen Slater. Eileen was great fun, had married an Englishman called Slater and after he died lived in a lovely apartment in Northumberland Road in Dublin and that’s where Madge spent her last days. I was reminded of her when I first saw ‘Dancing at Lughnasa’ by Brian Friel at the Abbey.

Travel Journalism

Denise: So tell me about how you got involved in journalism.

Deirdre: I got involved in journalism because I always wanted to write. I kept a diary when I was a teenager and always kept notes when I went to some new place. (In fact I have also had a career as a travel journalist and have traveled widely in Asia, South America and Africa and of course various parts of Europe. I’ve always been curious and love learning about other places!) My first trip was in 1970 when I spent a month in Morocco and kept a daily diary. I can still tell what I did every day there in the month of March.

Denise: Morocco is beautiful. I have been there. We have friends in Casablanca. I also associate the country with all the famous artists who spent time there, like Sir John Lavery.

. (3)

Deirdre: Four of us, friends from London spent a whole month travelling there right down to the south to Goulimine and back up through the Atlas mountains, camping. It was like another world to me. In TCD I spent a year studying Arabic in the School of Divinity because I had ambitions to be a foreign correspondent given that it was the most widely spoken language in the world. I am left handed so it was beautiful to learn because of its calligraphy and because you write from right to left. I could only do a year because Professor Weingreen was a Hebraist and couldn’t take us any further. Besides, it was starting to take up so much time that I had to concentrate on General Studies in which I eventually graduated in 1968. When I went to Morocco in 1970 I could floor people with the little bit of Arabic I had at the time. But there are so many dialects and what I was studying was classical Arabic. So it didn’t develop in the way it should have….it would have been a very different career.

Denise: Fascinating – so how did things unfold from there?

Editing ‘Women’s Choice’

Deirdre: After graduation, I got a job working in London for Penguin Books. Brendan Kennelly had been my tutor in Trinity and they were working on his Penguin Book of Irish Verse.  My job was to clear the permissions for all the poetry, and I spent a year there doing that and working as a secretary for two brilliant editors, Robert Hutchinson and later Neil Middleton. The thing about Penguin was you couldn’t go any further there, there were no prospects – you couldn’t hope to become  a commissioning editor. So I came back to work on a magazine called ‘Woman’s Choice’, in Dublin and ended up editing that magazine.

Denise: And what stand’s out in your mind from your time as editor of ‘Women’s Choice’.

Deirdre:  I was editor of the magazine for several years. I have given you a picture of one issue, because it was incredibly important, containing a guide to contraception (image below) . At the time it was against the law to publish any information about what was termed family planning – that issue sold out and there were many requests for more as well as vociferous criticism from right wing Catholics in the media for publishing it.

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Denise: It had a huge circulation?

Deirdre:  Yes it had a circulation of about 55,000 a week. So it was not inconsiderable.  It was a very exciting time in the early 70s.  We had done a survey beforehand asking readers for their views on contraception and got a huge response.  I remember the sheer desperation of women at the time, most of whom were married with several children and struggling to cope. We had a column called ‘Talk it Over’, an agony aunt, who established connections with a whole underground network of sympathetic doctors and who could help a woman in need of contraception along with pharmacists who would honour the prescriptions.  So the work that we were doing that year was incredibly important and valuable. And it’s kind of forgotten a bit… the contraceptive train and burning bras and all that is remembered but really what we were doing was vital – providing women with the information they needed. And you had to be very careful obviously.  The book that really influenced me at the time was ‘The Female Eunuch’ by Germaine Greer. I remember closing that book and thinking: ‘everything is going to change now’ .

Denise: We tend to forget just how difficult it all was.

Deirdre: Well you had all these right wing commentators in the media, the Catholic church’s power was enormous. So what we provided was the only information that was available to women at the time.

Denise: I remember in the ‘70s my mother bought ‘Woman’s Way’ magazine every week.  I used to cut the front pictures out of the magazine and keep them. I had hundreds of them because the front pages had these glamorous women wearing wonderful clothes. I am very regretful that I didn’t manage to retain those, as I generally keep everything.

Deirdre: Well I kept all the ‘Women’s Choice’ ones, actually –  I have a file of them. As editor, I would have written a leader every week. It was a time when a lot of women’s organisations began and we wrote about issues like domestic violence, equal pay, the status of women etc. My deputy was a woman called Darina McCluskey whose family were doctors and  started the Civil Rights movement in the north. So there was all that as well going on.

The Abbey Years

Denise: It was a time of great change and think of all the writers that were influenced by the events of that time – the emerging Northern Irish crisis, that phase of the Irish feminist movement etc. I am thinking of the late Seamus Deane who we only lost recently, Friel, Heaney, Nuala O Faolain, well there were so many…

Deirdre:  Well I would have known many of them when I went to the Abbey, because that was the next phase of my life: the Abbey Theatre. I was ten years in the Abbey as its PRO. I left ‘Women’s Choice’, because they wanted to launch the magazine in the UK reusing features from Australian magazines leaving only the letters page as local interest. I could not stand over that and see everything that meant anything to me destroyed. I had serialised ‘The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne’ and other important Irish novels, I had commissioned people like Mary Maher of The Irish Times to write a column on motherhood, Dr. Moira Woods on medical matters (she went on to establish the Sexual Assault Unit in the Rotunda).  I had published many interesting writers and to stand over something like this – I just couldn’t. So when the job in the Abbey came up, Gemma Hussey was on its Board and would have known of my work and campaigning and her influence obviously helped me secure that job.

(4)

Denise: Some wonderful plays produced in that period.

Deirdre:  Yes because the policy of Joe Dowling, as Artistic Director was to nourish and promote Irish writers.  Touring was a highlight: I particularly remember ‘Faith Healer’ and Donal McCann’s brilliant performance in that Friel play and the many plays of Tom Murphy, who became a good friend. And of course the first US tour since the 1930s, to New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington was thrilling. I worked at the theatre from 1972 to 1982 when I was headhunted by Vincent Browne who was re-establishing The Sunday Tribune. May 1983 was a month I will not forget;  I got married, changed jobs, became pregnant and joined the Sunday Tribune. It was a big decision, but ten years at the Abbey was ten years. So I decided to make the leap and go to the Tribune

. (5)

The Sunday Tribune

Denise:  A decade can change a lot – I always think decades mark periods of huge change, not just historically but personally in one’s own life.

Deirdre: Yes everyone changes and I totally believe that in life you make choices at critical times and from that point of view I’m an existentialist and believe that you are a result of the choices that you make. So yes, it was a big step in March 1983. I joined others in the venture, many of whom came from or went on to very successful careers – Emily O’Reilly, Maggie O Kane, Deirdre Purcell, Fintan O’Toole, Michael Dwyer, Lynn Geldof, Eamonn Dunphy, David Walsh, Paul Tansey, Brian Trench.  Coming from the theatre Browne suggested I cover that area, but I preferred to write about other things. So I started writing features, like one on sex education in schools and another on domestic violence and incest, a topic not much written about then along with interviews with interesting people and other stuff.

Denise: What a wonderfully talented group of people. And of course you were again trying to get information out to the public that was otherwise being swept under the carpet.

Deirdre: Yes exactly – I mean there was no sex education in the schools at the time and a very forceful right wing movement against it. There was an American priest called Fr. Paul Marx, a leader of the pro life movement who came to Ireland at the time with a 14 week old foetus in a bottle and went around the schools with this foetus to show teenagers as an introduction to sex education. Shocking.

Putting Fashion of the Irish Map

Denise: And when did you start writing about fashion?

Deirdre: Well Vincent (Browne) couldn’t bear the idea of fashion and kept calling it ‘clothes’! We tried to get various people to do it. But having worked on ‘Women’s Choice’ and published fashion features – I suppose you could have called me a stylist at the time – I knew how it worked and was interested in a general way in fashion though I had never nourished any ambitions to be a fashion journalist. And I thought, well, if I have to do it, I’m going to do it properly. So I read every single thing, everything I could read on the subject. And I realised it was more than just about the clothes. It was about textiles, it was about design, about aesthetics, about social history. So it opened a whole new world to me. And then when my second son was born I went freelance, but with a contract to do fashion features for the Tribune. And I continued to do that for quite some years.

Denise: That was pretty groundbreaking.

Deirdre: It was ground breaking at the time, because there was a gifted production manager at the paper called Andy Barclay (who only died recently) and he loved fashion and style and would give my features huge spreads. So as Kavanagh says, : ‘Gods make their own importance’, and the Tribune made fashion important.  I was the first Irish journalist to cover the British Designer Show, for instance, which eventually became London Fashion Week.

Another first was photographing the ancient gold lunulas and torcs from the National Museum on a live model – I doubt if this will ever be allowed again! During this time I also started doing features for Town & Country, Elle, the Washington Times and The Financial Times and wrote various books as well. It was also the start of another career as a travel writer.

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Denise: Your first book was the ‘The Aran Sweater,’ I think?.  Then ‘A Style Guide to Dublin’ which you worked on with Seamus Heaney’s wife Marie Heaney I think?. And there was the one on Fish….

Deirdre: Yes: ‘Perfectly Simple Fish’. There was the book about Mary Robinson. And then the book on Roly’s Bistro. I spent weeks doing that as we had every single recipe tested in a domestic kitchen. It sold 20,000 copies. The Aran Sweater book took nearly a year’s research but it was so rewarding to do.

. (7)

Denise: So you were freelancing when you were offered a position with The Irish Times?

Deirdre: Geraldine Kennedy had been appointed editor of The Irish Times.

Denise: Another Tipperary woman whom I interviewed some years ago.

Deirdre:  Another great Tipperary woman indeed. I was approached by her to become Fashion Editor of The Irish Times. And it was wonderful because suddenly there were resources I had never had previously, I had support and enthusiasm and was made to feel so welcome. That was in 2003 and I had to jump straight into it.

Denise: Fashion has changed a great deal in those eighteen years.

Deirdre:  It certainly has in many ways.

Denise: And the politics surrounding it have changed quite dramatically too. Who would have been at the pinnacle of their careers then when you started at The Irish Times:  John Rocha, Louise Kennedy, Quin and Donnelly.

Deirdre: Indeed and others like Mariad Whisker, Michael Mortell and Lainey Keogh were also beginning their successful careers and there was still Sybil Connolly, the most successful Irish designer internationally and one of the first Irish female entrepreneurs. I did the last interview with Sybil before she died.

. (8)

Denise: And over those eighteen years reporting on fashion Deirdre – are there key moments that stand out to you in that period?

Deirdre:  Andy Barclay’s insistence on my going to London to the British Designer Show was the kind of encouragement I needed and that really changed everything for me. I remember seeing  John Galliano, Jasper Conran, Vivienne Westwood and other emerging British designers on the London catwalk in Olympia where the event was then held. I can still remember Galliano’s first show, the colours, the silhouettes, the sheer energy. I followed his career right to the day he was dropped from Dior and his last show in Paris.

(9)

Other unforgettable collections were those of McQueen in London and Paris.

Denise: ..McQueen was so gifted and unbelievably talented. So tragic.

Deirdre: Yes, he was a trained Savile Row tailor but knew how to break the rules and push boundaries and was so ahead of everyone else in every way particularly in experimenting with new technology. The one collection I’ll never forget was in the sports stadium at Bercy in Paris where he regularly used to stage his shows.  It was called The Widows of Culloden for autumn/winter 2006 when he returned to his Scottish roots and the Highland Rape collection of 1995 which made his name. At the end of the show, a hologram of Kate Moss appeared like a genie in a bottle, an otherworldly apparition arising from a glass pyramid in the middle of the stage – and then disappeared.  I’ll never forget it.

( 10)

Denise: That show was unforgettable – and then to have a good seat as a fashion journalist! You were so fortunate.

Deirdre: Yes. But the big change now of course is that these kind of elaborate live shows are probably not going to happen anymore except occasionally by big international brands who can afford to do them…everything changed with Covid.  And it needed to change.

Denise: In what respect?

Deirdre: In that we are consuming too much, too much is happening and fashion had become a treadmill that no one seemed to be able to get off or stop with pre collections, cruise collections, whatever.  I mean John Galliano was having to do thirty three collections a year. How does your creativity let alone your sanity manage that?

Denise : Design was bought by the corporate sector.

Deirdre: Yes. When the corporate sector moved into fashion, designers surrendered their independence and became pawns in big business. Big business changed fashion – particularly when Bernard Arnault bought Dior, then Louis Vuitton and Moet Hennessy and started to dominate the world of luxury. That changed everything globally.

Denise: In the sense that standards dropped?

Deirdre: No, it wasn’t that standards dropped, it’s just that design was bought by the corporate sector. And so as a designer you had to deliver, to sell. So  creatively you were not allowed to fail and you must be allowed to fail, as well as succeed, in every area of the arts. “Fail Better” as Beckett would say.

Denise: Yes. Well it was pressure that was a big factor in Alexander McQueen’s demise….he was overworked.

Deirdre: Yes and the same with Galliano. There’s a lot that’s wrong with the industry. That is being revealed in a whole new genre of books on the subject, the most recent one called ‘Unraveled’ by Maxine Bedat, about the life and death of a garment – the scale of production and consumption and how so much clothing ends up in landfill in Africa. I recently did a feature on summer fashion reading in The Irish Times Saturday magazine selecting six fashion books and ‘Unraveled’ was top of the list that included ‘What Artists Wear’ by Charlie Porter, ‘Patch Work’ by Claire Wilcox and ‘Dandy Style’ by Shaun Cole and Miles Lambert.

Denise: I will look some of those books up. The landfill situation is serious.

Deirdre: Yes, I saw the scale of the situation in one of the biggest slums in Africa, Kibera in Nairobi a few years ago – mountains of clothing as far as the eye could see and so shocking. Yet people have made fortunes from fashion. Arnault is the richest man in France, Amancio Ortega, now in his 80s owns Zara and is the richest man in Spain. The richest man in Japan is Tadashi Yanai owner of Uniqlo. The owner of H&M, the biggest global fashion company in the world is Steffan Persson who bought an entire village in Hampshire, England. You have fashion tycoon Michael Lewis head of a clothing empire that includes 3000 stores and brands like Phase Eight and Whistles who recently married Lady Kitty Spencer. Her ring was estimated at €300,000!

Denise:  There is so much wastage and so many people working behind the scenes in underpaid jobs.

Deirdre: Yes, I mean Boohoo have a lot to answer for in terms of labour abuse and scandalous disregard for workers’ rights. So there’s a lot that is wrong: we are consuming far too much. Influencers are persuading us to buy more and more so these days I think it’s important when considering a purchase to ask am I going to wear this more than thirty times? And if not, don’t buy.

Sustainable Fashion

Denise: I read your recent article in The Irish Times on Sustainable Fashion and you are raising very important points there about the industry and about greenwashing (11). 

Deirdre: Sustainability is one of the biggest issues in the fashion industry, but unlike food labels such as ‘free range’ or ‘organic’, sustainability in clothing is not regulated, consequently, yes, there is a lot of greenwashing. It is estimated that 40% of environmental claims could be misleading customers. The industry churns 80 billion garments out annually. Zara for instance produced more than 450 million items in 2018! We throw away 1.2 billion tons of clothing to land fill….I mean that can’t continue.

Denise: Yes – it is a really critical situation, like Climate Change. It is one that needs to be taken more seriously by us all.

Deirdre: Carrie Symonds rented her wedding dress for £45 and drew attention to My Wardrobe HQ . That set an example to others.

Collins Barracks

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Denise: Deirdre I could chat for hours but it does strike me you are a type of institution in Ireland, given all the years of fashion commentary and analysis you have provided. You must have an amazing collection of books, magazines and key beautiful pieces?

Deirdre: Oh, yes lots and lots of books! And I have a few pieces that I treasure, not necessarily expensive designer items.

Denise: And would you ever think of doing an exhibition of these pieces and the books and articles you have archived?

(12)

Deirdre: Well I mean the thing is I have an extensive fashion library which I would ideally like to sell not being in a position to donate. And I have a whole box of invitations from years of attending shows in London and Paris, some of which are very elaborate, innovative and interesting in their own right.

(13)

Denise: But shouldn’t they be looked at maybe by the National Museum of Ireland? Think about what the V&A have done for fashion history?.

Deirdre: Oriole Cullen, who is Irish, and a senior curator at the V & A was behind the big recent Dior exhibition in London.  She would be an interesting person for you to talk to and has had wide experience and knowledge of fashion.

Denise: But you should think about that Deirdre. Collins Barracks (pictured above) would surely be interested in the amazing collection you have – documenting several critical decades in Irish life.

Deirdre: I would love to see Collins Barracks put on more Irish fashion exhibitions as there is certainly great interest out there – when they put on When Philip met Isabella – with Philip Treacy’s hats in the Riding School, it attracted a record attendance. But that was years ago.

(14)

Maybe there are plans in progress? One of the aspects of being a fashion journalist that I have really enjoyed in my career is witnessing and reporting on the scale of Irish creativity in the industry both at home and abroad. I have been covering the graduation shows in Dublin and Limerick and seeing the development and growth of so many talented designers and following their progression – like Simone Rocha, for example. So there are rich resources out there from which to draw…

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Image References:

(1): Left: Deirdre’s Grandmother Mary Cleary from Borrisokane with her husband Stephen Murtagh. Right: Deirdre’s Mother Joan McQuillan nee Murtagh.

(2) A photograph of the Central Hotel, Borrisokane, from the 1970s, after Deirdre’s relatives had sold the building. Image: Sincere thanks to Eamon Slevin for sourcing this image.

(3): ‘My Studio Door, Tangier’ by Sir John Lavery RHA Image: The Belfast Telegraph

(4): ‘The Abbey Theater Dublin : A Commemorative Record 1966-1976’ by Deirdre McQuillan

(5): Image: Donal McCann in ‘Faith Healer’ by Brian Friel . Image: The Irish Times

(6): Torc : National Museum of Ireland. Image: Archeology.ie

(7): ‘The Irish Sweater’, Deirdre McQuillan (Appletree 1993) ; Mary Robinson: A President in Progress, Deirdre McQuillan (Gill & Macmillan 1994)

(8): Sybil Connolly . Image:Limerick.ie/Hunt Museum

(9): John Galliano while at Dior – the image gives some sense of his theatrical and vibrant designs. Image: WWD

(10): Alexander McQueen and Kate Moss. Image: Mail: On Line

(11): ‘Sustainable Fashion: 10 Irish Brands for The Mindful Shopper’, The Irish Times , Sat, July 24th 2021

(12): Part of Deirdre’s extensive library.

(13) : Louis Vuitton Invitation.

( 14) : Isabella Blow. Image: ‘Philip Treacy: When Philip Met Isabella’, by Philip Treacy, Isabella Blow and Hamish Bowles. Assouline, 2003.

In an article entitled ‘Tipperary Stars Line Out for a Celebration of their Homeland’ , published on Tuesday August 15^th 2000, in the Irish Examiner , Anne Marie O’Brien writes ‘Natives of the Premier County are to the fore in business, sporting, academic and cultural life at home and abroad – and a major conference next month will bring some of these important figures together for the first time.  Organised and hosted by the newly-opened Tipperary Rural and Business Development Institute (TRBDI) Ceiliúradh Thiobraíd Árainn, A Celebration of Tipperary, from August 31^st to September 3^rd marks the start of the millennium and Tipperary’s extended Diaspora. People with Tipperary roots such as Niall O’Dowd, who had a significant role in the Northern Irish peace process and is publisher of the Irish Voice Newspaper in the US; Dr. Conor Cruise O’Brien ; TJ Maher; and John Lonergan will share stories from  their youth and their careers in a festival centered at TRBDI in Thurles’.

In another article, on Aug 29th (she wrote several about the event, including the one copied below – ‘An Irish Voice of Our Country’s Diaspora is Keynote Speaker’ ) she goes on to mention all those participating in the event but rather than list everyone, I include below the conference programme, which gives some idea of the magnitude and importance of the event. Several key participants are sadly no longer with us, but it remains a great achievement that so many high profile and influential Tipperary people gathered together in Thurles in 2000.

Ceiliúradh Thiobraíd Árann Conference Programme.

I was one of the main organizers and I remember vividly the buzz of excitement on Friday evening September 1^st, waiting for Niall O’Dowd to give his key note address:  ‘The Role of the Diaspora in the Peace Process’. The Tipperary Star also did extensive coverage of the event, the snap below from Saturday September 9th (apologies as my files with paper clippings are twenty years old and I had to take them out of scrap books to scan them causing some damage).

Zoom Forward Twenty One Years

Push the clock forward twenty one years, and I am sitting in my dining room, on a cold February evening in 2021, in Covid Lockdown,  waiting to talk on zoom to Niall in New York.  Is 6pm Irish time, 1 pm NY time. But once the meeting begins, it is like sitting down at the table together, in Killough, for a chat.

I tell Niall I had a difficult time trying to decide the focus of our conversation – Niall has had such an amazing career,  some of which we discuss in the interview below. Apart from his many business achievements, his role in the Northern Irish Peace process, his journalistic and academic writing career, and the many prestigious acknowledgements he has received, such as being awarded in 2004 by UCD ,his  Alma Mater, an Honorary Doctorate and in  2014 The Government of Ireland ‘President’s Distinguished Services Award’, Niall remains a very humble and humane person, and deeply knowledgeable about Irish American relations.

Thurles Years

Denise: There are so many things I could ask you about, I had a hard time narrowing things down. But I think I have hit on a couple of key questions that will interest people who read my blog. It is a visual, cultural and a biographical blog Niall, as I was explaining to you. So, when you are ready, we can launch in.

Niall: I’m all set, go right ahead.

Denise : So obviously I want to ask you about your early years, you grew up in Tipperary, indeed my brother-in-law Michael Quinn remembers your dad quite vividly, Donal, and often mentions him when your name comes up. So, what are your first memories that come back to you about those formative years, but also what Tipperary means to you as an Irish-American. Is it something that you think about in terms of your identity now that you have lived away for so long?. I’m interested in regionality and things like that. So, I thought I’d begin with that.

Niall: Sure, I’ll tell you where it is most important to me – is the Tipp hurling team. I was brought up in Thurles, as you know, and hurling was in my blood from a very early age. I know I left Thurles when I was 10, but I was deeply indoctrinated at that point into the great Tipperary teams of the early 1960s and Jimmy Doyle and John Doyle, Tony Wall and all those, Liam Devaney, I think I could probably name the team. And something that really kind of grabbed me at the time, like a young kid, fixates on a particular sport. So, what Tipperary means to me? I get as excited about Tipperary playing in a hurling All Ireland as I would about any team playing anywhere. So, that’s one memory and one sort of connection that I have kept all my life.

Denise : Well that’s a very strong memory  and one that a lot of people from Tipperary would identify with. So, you moved then with your family when you were about 10, I think to Drogheda and you completed your primary and secondary education there before moving on to UCD. So I’ll go to UCD. It was English and History you chose as your subjects, am I right in that?

Career Decisions

Niall: Actually, English and Irish.

Denise: English and Irish ok. With a view perhaps to becoming a teacher?

Niall: Yes, you know it was a time you are talking about the seventies, where you didn’t have any great ambition other than a certain level – what did your Father do? My Father was a teacher all his life. So, I basically wanted to become a teacher. You didn’t think back then of any great sort of career changing moves, but you tended to go along with the flow, which was teacher’s sons tended to become teachers. The legal world was I suppose controlled by certain families, the medical business was controlled by certain doctors. I think to some extent it’s still the same. But you didn’t have any greater horizon other than what your Father had done and what your family history was.

Irish Community in America

Denise: Yes, I can fully understand that. But during that time you did go on a trip to America, which was probably something a lot of students may not have had the opportunity to do at that stage in the 70s. So that was formative for you to go on a working visa when you were in college?

Niall: Yes, I was always fascinated by America, my Father loved Cowboy and Indian movies and the old movies. And I remember going to see John Wayne and all that stuff and just growing up with the kind of mythology of America. And then I remember very specifically John F. Kennedy coming to Ireland and what an inspirational figure, it seemed that overnight the country went from black and white to colour. Because you had this spectacular young president who a very backward country, like Ireland was at the time, could lay claim to and it was something very trilling. So, America was in my imagination. I often think about that these days of what the kids today think when they see Trump, as against what we saw, which was a great American president called John F. Kennedy.  So, I went to America in 1976 for the first time, I was in college in UCD and I went to Chicago for the summer to play football, Gaelic football. I was a reasonably good footballer and hurler I must say. But mainly played football with the Connemara Gaels and hurling with the Limerick hurling team. So that was a great way to go because I had no relatives in America as such. And it was a great way to get started. I think one thing about the GAA that people forget is just how much socialisation and good will there is when you arrive into a new town and you don’t know anyone, you can go to the GAA club, you can get to know people. In my case they got me a job, they got me a place to live, and I made an immediate group of friends. And I just found America everything I was looking for as a young man.

Denise : And of course you had a strong sense immediately there then of community and an Irish American community, even at that stage. It seems to have been something that really nurtured you on your first trip there?

Niall: ‘Nurtured’ is a good word, because I can’t imagine what I would have done if I didn’t have the GAA, if I didn’t have that immediate connection with people to give me a job and get me started. Because it’s a pretty intimidating country otherwise. And I found it very helpful to be able to hang out with a group of people right from the beginning. And it was just a great experience, because my mind was expanding at that point, to what was I going to do after college and all that. I remember thinking this is a magnificent country, I’m really enjoying myself here, I love the climate, although I wasn’t crazy about the heat at the height of summer. But I love the people, I love the whole sense of adventure basically…like so many Irish before me.

Californian Years

Denise : Yes indeed, it’s such an incredible history and incredible bond. So you came back home to Ireland and taught for a while. You moved to California then a couple of years later. Had you a vision Niall as to what you were going to do then? Was the world of journalism beckoning to you or was that something that came about when you got to California. Can you tell me a little bit about that please?

Niall: Well it’s interesting, I often talk to young journalism students and people like that, and I always say ‘don’t plan your life because it won’t work out as you expect anyway’. And I never sort of said in my head, well I’m leaving Ireland and I’m never coming back. I just went to America in 1978, I went to California which was a fabulous experience for a young Irish man at the time. Again, using the Gaelic football and hurling connection I played out there with teams and got in with a crowd of lads. And I remember at the end of the summer thinking, you know I’m not really that interested in school teaching and I’d like to really see if I could do something out here…not making a complete decision, but just saying I’m going to stay, I’m going to stay for a year, I’m going to stay for two years and suddenly it’s 40 years! and you look around and think: ‘how did that happen’.

Denise: I know, but you launched the first successful newspaper in 50 years when you had settled a little bit in California, the Irishman newspaper. So you were beginning to see a need to reach out to the Irish-Americans Niall I think?

Niall: Yes it was just at the time, it was right at the time that emigration was becoming an issue from Ireland again. And the early eighties saw a flood of young Irish come into California, New York, Boston, Chicago. And what I remember noticing (because I was working in construction myself and a friend from Connemara and I started a small construction business) but just how little knowledge people had about Ireland and the New Ireland and what was happening. Because there was no internet obviously, there was very little media that you could get from Ireland. Occasionally there would be an Irish radio show on the radio, but that was about it. So, I thought, you know, because there was so many young Irish coming in, that this was an opportunity for me to start a newspaper because I was always very interested in writing and I had written for a local paper in Drogheda for a couple of years. So, I thought to myself – I’m going to give this a shot. And with the sheer madness of youth and the sheer irresponsibility, just starting a newspaper with $1,200 dollars when I think of it now and making it work, was just a great growing experience and something that told me a lot about myself and also a lot about America. The main thing about America I noticed was the good will that people had towards you, if you were Irish – it  was phenomenal. And when we started the newspaper the amount of support we got from very good people. I remember after a week we went broke and I had to go and ask this guy for a loan, and not only did he give me a loan, but he got five other people to help!. And it was that kind of initial stage where you were all in it together, you were an emigrant community, you helped people and it was all informal. But I look back on it with great pride and great sense of achievement that you know, 95% of new publications never get off the ground – but we did.

East Coast

Denise: Yes – fantastic. And in deciding the move to the East Coast, you had obviously at this stage found your vocation, found a passion in translating, as such, what was happening back in Ireland, to the community in the States. That would have appeared, from what you just said, as one of your objectives and that’s what you wanted to do.  Or was it more to liase and bring together the Irish community in America? Probably a bit of both?

Niall: Well, there were two levels to it, one was that the Irish-American history, not just the Irish form, but the Irish American history was so incredibly fascinating. In a place like San Francisco, where the Irish had come in their droves for the Gold Rush in the 1840s and they had put together much of the downtown infrastructure – you went downtown and the streets were called after Irish people. And there was this whole history, extraordinary history of the Irish in California. And I became very very interested in, and that was one part of it. 

And the other part of it was the young Irish coming in who didn’t have any access to information other than through my paper. But I realised what I wanted to do was start a magazine. I had been to New York a couple of times and just in terms of the numbers of young Irish, there were far more in New York. Also I remember  going by a newsstand one day and picking up an Italian-American magazine called the ‘Attensioni‘ and thinking you know, something like this could work for the Irish and that was the determination for the Irish-American magazine. And another Tipperary person, Patricia Harty was working on that as well. So, we decided that New York and Irish-American magazine was really going to be the future.

Denise: The rest is history.

Niall: Rest is history , good or bad! But I mean when I came to New York again it was like starting all over. And somebody said to me instead of going west young man, I went east. But again, a great welcome, a great sense of involvement by the community and what people understanding and being proud of what I was trying to do, which was create a whole new Irish sensibility out of the fact that so many new young Irish were coming in, and they were changing the whole situation there. So Irish America was mainly aimed at the Irish-Americans, the history, the heritage. And like John F. Kennedy was obviously Irish-American, but there was so many other great figures in American history who were Irish-American. And writing a magazine for them, the 40 million people of Irish extraction was great task. And then in 1987, that was in 1985, in 1987 starting the Irish Voice, because there was a massive influx of young Irish into New York at the time.

Democrats and Republicans

Denise: Yes, and indeed the Irish Voice was the first successful newspaper since 1928 I think and had a huge circulation – so I mean, what a fantastic achievement. But what I was thinking about, I’m jumping ahead a little but something that struck me when I was thinking about that and I suppose this is inevitable after Trump’s time in office as well..but when I look at social media in Ireland and when I think about politics in the States, I see this incredibly polarised society. I see the Democrats on one side, the Republicans on the other and the Democrats are progressive economically, pro-immigration, pro-choice, pro-same sex marriage. And one could say almost directly the opposite then: Republicans are conservative, anti immigration, anti choice, anti same sex marriage. I mean is it as bad as that there Niall? I think the election really brought that home to me. I used to have to close social media some days, because I would see these pejorative terms being thrown by Republicans at Democrats calling them ‘communists’ and ‘socialist’. I wonder did you find a problem in reaching out to the Irish American community, in bridging that divide, or is it that pronounced among the Irish American community?

Niall: Well, the Irish American community reflects America at large. I mean think of it this way, if you look at the Irish American political history, we had the great liberal Kennedy family, the great liberal icons of the 20^th Century.  You had the on the other side Joe McCarthy who was also Irish American, who was a rabidly anti-communist, rabidly right wing. So, you had this differentiation. Then you had Eugene McCarthy who was a very liberal American senator who played a huge role in forcing President Johnson out of office. So, you had this divide right through which reflected to some extent the greater American culture. But also the level of peoples experience. I mean in terms of the liberal Irish, they made huge contributions to the United States. I mean I think John F. Kennedy was probably the key figure in terms of the Irish Americans. But there were thousands of other politicians across the country who created the democratic party really. The Democratic party arose out of Tammany Hall fundamentally and the rules and regulations of Tammany Hall about how to get elected in local politics and how to take care of the local individual, how to go, block by block, and that was all from Irish American political experience. And you look at how Roosevelt handled the depression. A tremendous amount of the donations and charitable and then the kind of work programmes and all that that was done were based on Irish models. So, I think from that point of view there was a very identifiable Irish strain in American politics. And then on the other side you had Ronald Reagan and people like that of Irish American heritage, who thought very differently. And in fairness it didn’t look that bad during the Reagan era really when you think back on it now. But with Trump it has just become completely and disastrously divided, to the point where there is a story today in the New York Times, that 71% of Republicans don’t look on Democrats as their opponents, they look on them as their enemies and that’s a sad day for politics. And it’s totally created by the Trump era.

Denise: Yes absolutely very sad to see things having, I suppose, ‘regressed’ so far – that’s probably the best word to use in that context. But anyway, we have good days ahead – we have a different Administration.

Niall: And I want to put that in context, I was on 125^th Street in Harlem in 2008 when Barack Obama, a black man was elected president, I never thought I’d see that in America or anywhere actually. And then if you look at the result from the senate race, two Senate races in Georgia, you had a Jewish and a black guy elected in the deep south. I mean there is a lot of tremendous amount of change going on in American politics and it’s not all about Trump. It’s about states like Arizona, states like Georgia understanding suddenly that the Republicans are going completely off the wall and there are more and more people like in Colorado which used to be a red state, now it’s a blue state. So, I think there is an underground political movement of a shift to the left, which is probably disguised at the moment because everyone is talking about Trump. But long term I think that is happening…I mean if you look at the last elections, since 1998, I think, the Republicans have only won the popular vote one time. So, they are not necessarily as popular, or as dominant, as people might think.

Denise: Yes and again it’s what we are being fed and how the media can present these things: it can become skewed when you are not on the ground in a certain place, however vast the American society is.

Patten Report

Denise: So, I’ll bring you back a little bit and I’ll come back to Biden in a few minutes but obviously you played such a pivotal role in the progress that was made between the American administration and relations with Northern Ireland in the lead up to the Good Friday Agreement. Now that was largely through your friendship and your collaborations with Bill Clinton and his time in office, when you acted as a key negotiator there.

So, the questions that came to my mind about that and it is bringing you back a couple of years now to ask you this – but when you were over in Tipperary in 2000 at Tipperary Institute, we had seen the establishment of the Good Friday Agreement. And you were concerned at that stage about the Patten Report, because that was clearly still a worry at the time as to whether the British administration were taking the policing side of things seriously enough in Northern Ireland. Now happily that all seems to have panned out ok with the establishment of the Northern Irish Policing Board. 

So I wondered and I’m jumping over time spaces here, but in light of what happened on 25^th May 2020 with George Floyd’s tragic death, I wonder have you ever thought about something like that working in the States? Because you are so knowledgeable about that particular process in the Northern Irish context do you think a reform of policing might happen under this new administration, in light of the upset that man’s death created?

Niall: You know I wish I could say yes. But I actually think what I have become acutely aware of, something I should have known for a long time, but I never really thought enough about it ..but the depth of racism in American is unbelievable and that’s the very sad part of it and that’s what’s blocking a lot of progress, in an awful lot of places. Because it’s almost so prevalent that you don’t notice it, I know that sounds strange. But the entire society is set up in such a way because of slavery that black Americans are second class:  in terms of the number of people dying from Covid; in terms of general health issues; in terms of employment; in terms of all these factors. And there is a very good question to be asked, why is that the case? And I think a tremendous amount of it is, I’m not even sure people mean to be racist, but it’s like they inherited this society where blacks were thought of a second class and third class people. And that flows over into policing. I mean the secret to policing, as everyone knows, is that the police man at the top of the road in the Ardoyne Road should be a Catholic police man, because he understands the community and he’s from them and he’s understood by them and he’s accepted. Now in American unfortunately the chances are in most of these black neighborhoods, that the policeman is a white guy. And like what happened with George Floyd where you had this tug as a policeman who put his weight on his neck for nine minutes…and for the life of me, to this day, I cannot understand why he did that for any reason. I mean it made absolutely no sense, other than to torture the poor man who was obviously not well to begin with.

Denise: Well to assert his authority of course and his power in the dynamic.

Niall: Yes …but to spend nine minutes killing somebody.

Denise: It was horrific, I couldn’t watch it to be honest, I found it too distressing.

Niall: It really made me think an awful lot. And I think that’s where Black Lives Matter came in very prominently. And you know what I’m delighted about, more than anything, you know people attack the young generation that they are into their computers and they are into Facebook and all that. But they came out on the streets in huge numbers, massive numbers when that happened. And that is something very pertinent in a democracy – that people can protest peacefully and make the point over and over: this is not good enough. And I was very proud of the fact that so many young people did that, because they really had quite a bad reputation as a generation that wouldn’t go outside the door other than to socialise or exchange texts or whatever. So, I think from that point of view there is a lot of good things happening, at a younger level.

But if you ask what’s really going on in America: unfortunately, I think racism is so deeply engrained and it’s very hard to deal with it.

Denise: Yes and even after Obama’s Presidency – it is hard to believe that these things could be happening, to the extent that they are. But from what you are saying it is deeply ingrained and it’s not going to resolve easily: it would take really a complete reenvisaging.

Niall: I mean you look at the faces of the mob that stormed Capitol Hill, just look at the hate, look at the horrible things they did. They gouged out a guy’s eye; they killed somebody; they threw a fire extinguisher at someone else; they attacked somebody with an American flag. I mean these are bad people. And what Trump did, quite deliberately, is to wake up that slumbering giant of racism and promote it and push it for his own reasons to ensure his re-election. And it was a dreadful political thing to do and it was a dreadful outcome that happened. But I think people now see that that’s what Trump was doing. And I do believe that what has happened to the Republican party is very tragic, because they are a party that apparently does not believe in democracy and you can’t survive as a party like that, because they are not accepting the results of the election. They tried to overturn it. To this day there are forty four Senators who don’t want Trump to face trial on the issue of creating an insurrection which was no doubt what he did. So they are in a very bad way in my opinion.

But it is also an incredibly fascinating time, because America is going through incredible transformations. When I say Trump’s time in office was bad – but then I’m really saying also that electing a black man in Georgia, electing a Jewish guy in Georgia, that’s huge. People would never have thought of it fifteen years ago, in the heart of the south, that a black guy and Jewish guy would get elected to the Senate. 

Denise: Yes well that’s very positive and I’m delighted to hear you say that. I guess we don’t hear enough of that filtering through. …we are hearing more of the negative side than some of that progress you are speaking about.

Niall: Well we can talk about riots and all that, but even the election of Obama, I know it’s two steps forward and three steps back, but it was an incredible thing to do. And unfortunately, Hillary missed out very narrowly that would have been…

Denise: Yes. Very unfortunate….

Niall: Yes…but so I think the country in many ways is innovative, creative, finding new ways, finding new people. But unfortunately, the last four years, frankly I’m serious about this Denise, a lot of people I know and myself included, seriously wondered if we could live through another four years of Trump.

Denise: I can understand that totally.

Niall: Because it would effectively have become a Dictatorship.

From Kennedy to Biden

Denise: Very very scary. And in light of all that you have achieved (and I know we can’t go into this in too much detail, because it’s too vast a topic) but in everything that you did and worked for, in the context of Northern Ireland, Brexit was also a big blow in that respect. And it did appear like it was a dark place the world for a few years and then Covid on top of it. I mean all I can say is at least Biden made it in.

And I loved your piece in the Irish Times recently where you talked about Robert Frost’s advice to John F. Kennedy, about how to direct his presidency: ‘Be more Irish than Harvard’, and I thought that was brilliant advice.  You made the point that Biden is in some respects, more Irish than John F. Kennedy . (1) see ref. below

(2) see ref. below

Do you see him having a hugely positive role for Irish Americans and for Ireland?. I mean he clearly is a person who has selected for his Administration, people across ethnic grounds, across gender grounds. I was delighted to see, obviously, the Vice President Kamala Harris – she is wonderful. And his Interior Secretary is a Native American Indian Deb Haaland (now that probably hasn’t been confirmed yet). And of course we have Samantha Power, an Irish lady,  my own age , who will be heading up USAAid. So I mean these are great things to see happening. Do you see him as being very important for the Irish now Niall?

Niall: I see him as being very important for the world and also the Irish. I think it’s very interesting when you get inside the American mindset. They go and they pick an African American President. And then they go and pick this crazy lunatic television reality star. But then they go as far away from him as they can and they pick this calm, very together, very easy going on the surface conciliatory figure which is what he is. You watch what Joe Biden is doing, he hasn’t said a single thing against Republicans in any kind of inflammatory way. He said,’ I’m trying to deal with them’. But he’s just taken down the whole tone, he’s letting all this sort of stuff go over his head, he’s getting the Covid package together, he’s getting the economic package together. He’s doing exactly what Joe Biden does, he’s a legislator, he’s a guy and this is what people don’t understand, to move the leavers of power within the US government, you have to have such an intimate knowledge which is exactly why he picked people who had been in the cabinets before. Because Trump hadn’t a clue how to use the levers of power, even in terms of the delivery of the vaccine. He just said leave it to the States, which was insane thing to say. And tens of thousands of people died as a result.

But I think Biden knows, it’s like a guy who has been a cop for 50 years, and suddenly he becomes the captain. He knows what he’s doing. And this guy knows exactly what he’s doing and I’m very proud of him. Because I mean if you look at a guy who came from nothing, I mean his Great Great Grandfather left on an emigrant famine ship from Cooley Co. Louth and the other one from Mayo. And three generations later there he is, in the White House. And I think he’s very very aware of his heritage and I think already, in terms of Brexit, where he stepped in and said: ‘now you are not going to mess around with the Irish on this one, we want the position that’s in the Good Friday Agreement’. So, I think, from that point of view, he’s very very keen. I mean I know the guy reasonably well. I first interviewed him in 1987 and the reason I had interviewed him was he had written an article about Wolfe Tone, his political hero.

Denise: And you subsequently wrote about Wolfe Tone then?

Niall: Yes. But I mean he’s exactly what you need in terms of calming down the country which is what the country desperately needs. So, I think from that point of view he’s going to be very successful.

Denise: Yes, I hope so and I agree with you fully on that. My last question would relate again to, I think you have kind of answered it, have you any thoughts of returning home, you still have family here. I know you probably would be on the plane already, if Trump was back in office! But you may be reconsidering that?

Niall: Well, I went home for the Kennedy School September twelve months ago and I haven’t been…I just haven’t been home since. I mean it’s been an extraordinary year without being home. And it’s really upsetting actually because you miss so much with your family. But also, there is a hunger within you just to see Ireland. I know the exile situation is really one that emotionally, every so often, I need to go back and connect with Ireland and I need to talk to people, I need to find out what’s happening, I need to hear it firsthand, I need to look at the country and see where it’s at. But I also just love to be there and to meet my friends and all that. And of course, that’s all been cut off, not just for me but for everyone. So, it will be a great day for me when Covid is finally vanquished and I’m able to get on EI105 and land into Dublin Airport. Because in so many ways it’s still home, my family is there. And it’s something that I miss desperately. I mean even the hurling and the football and all that, the atmosphere around those months are so exciting. And it was all very different last year. It worked out in the end, but you missed the games in the summer which were great.

Denise: Even I did and I’m probably the least knowledgeable person about anything in that arena, as one could imagine!. But I fully understand what you are saying.

Remembering Mutual Friends, My Trip to New York in 2001 and The Power of Education

The formal part of the interview over, we chat for a further few minutes about my trip to New York for the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in 2001 where I met some wonderful people including Bill and Hilary Clinton, the late Frank McCourt, among others. I mention Theresa Crowe, also from Thurles, and her kindness to me on that trip in 2001. The picture below of Theresa was taken at the New York Plaza Hotel on March 15th, when she and I met Hilary Clinton.

We recall the day I called to chat with Niall at his New York office before returning home to Ireland.  Incredible to think, all these years later, we chat again, using a medium we all now consider part of our day to day life: zoom.

Thurles, formative years

Niall’s final reflections bring him back to Thurles where he spent those early formative years: ‘Well you know I lived in Castle Avenue in Thurles and somebody one day recited to me where all the people that we grew up with, there was some amazing success stories, like there was a guy called Jimmy Fitzgerald who became a huge horse trainer; there was another guy who became a brain surgeon. I mean just this ordinary little street in Thurles and so many people… like my brother (Fergus) became a TD and a Minister. I mean it’s incredible to think. And you know it speaks to what was very important for people back then and my parents embodied it, which was education and everybody in the house ( they had seven kids), obviously they weren’t rich, but they insisted on the best education for everyone. And you can never forget that when it comes to Ireland, that that is what made Ireland what it is today’.

Niall O’Dowd is certainly an Irish Voice that has made a huge contribution in the States and in relations between Ireland and America over the last forty years. I am proud to say he comes from Tipperary.

And we have another Irish voice, once again, back in the White House. His name is President Joe Biden.

(3) see ref. below

References

(1): ‘Niall O Dowd: Joe Biden’s Debt to the Kennedy’s’ : The Irish Times, Thur Feb 4th 2021

(2): I found this paper cutting in an old album, belonging to my late Mother. She frequently took paper cuttings and put them into albums or her favorite scrapbook. This was obviously from a paper published around the time John F Kennedy’ was inaugurated or from his visit to Ireland . It is nearly 60 years old. Jacqueline Bouvier looks radiant in the picture. She made her own contribution to the western world, in terms of her incredible taste and sense of style and aesthetics.

(3): Photo Credit: Niall O’Dowd inducting then Vice President Joe Biden into the Irish America Hall of Fame. Photo Courtesy: Waterford Crystal / Niall O’Dowd.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines curation as : ‘The action or process of selecting, organizing, and looking after the items in a collection or exhibition’.

Of course the word can be broadened to include the work of, perhaps, curating the content for a conference or music event, or to curate something for an on-line creative presentation. But generally, when we think of the word ‘curation’, we think about going to an exhibition of art and noting who the curator is or going to a museum in some of our international cities and reading who the curators are, working there. Apparently, the etymology is ultimately from the Latin: cūrātor (“one who has care of a thing, a manager, guardian, trustee”), from cūrāre (“to take care of”), from cūra (“care, heed, attention, anxiety, grief”) .

Curators play a really central role in ‘selecting’ what we see in these museums – they have become guardians almost, of our heritage (in their collaboration with Museum Directors and other influential bodies involved in the Arts world).

In fact since the beginnings of modernity, and in particularly in the last two hundred years, much of what we see presented in national museums have been chosen or displayed for political reasons. These institutions were and are part of the process of nation-state building. Selecting and editing what is important (or not) to exhibit is then, when you think about it, a very powerful role to have. And yet so often the Arts and Heritage are neglected in public discussions.

Maybe stop for a moment and think about all the wonderful pieces of work that were never selected and consequently were never displayed in our national museums. Might the ‘un-selected’ pieces not also have been items deeply reflective of our different cultural and local heritage(s)?. An alternative way of seeing our culture?

Erik Schilp

I want to write about a different way of thinking about curation and I want to thank Erik Schilp, based in the Netherlands, for his inspirational lecture from 2015 where he asks for a type of revolution in how we understand the word curation. He tells us we are all curators – or could be.

‘Most of our art and heritage in museums never gets noticed by most of the people’ , he argues. Isn’t that such a sad thing to contemplate? But what does this actually mean? It means that many people just do not visit museums. They may not see their relevance to ‘real’ life; or they may object to having to pay a fee at a desk to go into a building and ‘view’ what they are being told is our united ‘heritage’. Some people may feel no connection to it. Or they may have led careers in the sciences and not have had the chance to explore the world of Arts ,to the same extent as their ‘scientific’ education.

A wonderful gentleman often came to visit us here in Killough in the latter years of his life – Dr. Niall Maher from Cobh. Niall had spent a large chunk of his childhood at Suirside House in Killough. He was a relative of ours. Niall once arrived in the yard at Greenville, a few years before he died, with some old iron pots, which were connected to here, he said, though I am not sure of the context, but he wanted me to have them.

He always told me he regretted he had not been able to explore the creative side of his mind because his career as a GP was so demanding and all consuming. I always remember him telling me that. Because really the two ‘worlds’ , the scientific and the creative, are intrinsic to everything we understand as our culture and heritage.

Niall Maher and his Sister, Avine visiting us in 2007

So what if we think about heritage differently , as being more than just what we see in museums. We all have a collective responsibility to take care of our heritage. It is what happens around us every day: the ‘way’ we work; the way we might lay our tables for dinner or for a ‘special’ occasion; the way we engage in community activities; the way we dress; the way we decorate our homes – these are all mini curatorial acts , and are important in terms of everyday lived heritage.

The Eclipse Gallery

This movement away from Curating with a capital ‘C’ toward what I might call a more democratic understanding of curating, with a small ‘c’, has its origins in the 60s and 70s, and is documented in many places including the ‘The Eclipse Gallery’ forum. They discuss the concept of ‘ alternative spaces’ where our culture, arts and heritage are collected, presented and possibly displayed. On their home page they argue that:

‘The role of the contemporary curator in alternative spaces is highly creative—some would even say the curator’s exhibition becomes artwork itself. Curators are producing exhibitions that explore contemporary issues on social, political, and cultural levels, considering and encouraging audience participation, and challenging viewers to re-think their definitions of exhibitions, curators, artists, and artwork. Contemporary curators are also expanding the horizons of the art world by working in (places) that have little in terms of contemporary art. Here, they can have a bigger impact than over-saturated cities such as New York’.

(https://theeclipsegallery.wordpress.com/about/writing/curating-alternative-spaces/)

This echoes what Eric Schilp talks about in his lecture and I want to bring some of these ideas home now, to Greenville, in a short blog and video installation about some of the humble presses we have here.

Here in Ireland we tend to use the Hiberno – English expression ‘Press’ where the English use the word ‘Cupboard’- thus for example an English “Airing Cupboard” is in Ireland a “Hot Press”. The origin is an Irish word ‘Prios‘ meaning a press, cupboard or shelf as is ‘Prios labhar‘ a bookcase ( see below).

Nana Breen’s Buttons

I am going to begin with a picture of one of my Nana Breen’s buttons as this will put my blog in context .

Many years ago when I was a teenager Mother gave me a coat that belonged to her Mother, my Nana Breen (who died a few months before I was born). I loved the coat but I particularly loved the brass buttons on it.

Nana Breen’s Brass Button takes center stage

So when the coat became too tattered to wear, I took the two remaining buttons off and made them into a set of earrings myself. I had these earrings and wore them, on and off, for almost 35 years.

Only last January I was rushing out one afternoon to take the boys to their guitar class in Carlow, running a little late and it was very windy. One of the button earrings blew off my ear. I only realized when I was en route in the car that one of them was gone. You have no idea how upset I was. I literally cried. We searched everywhere on our return and for several days afterwards, but to no avail. One of the earrings was gone. I now just have the one photographed above.

But all is not lost. The one I still have has pride of place in my jewellery press which I discuss in more detail below and I am going to get this one made into a ring. This is an example of what I mean about curating our heritage – differently – minding or saving something from our personal past, re displaying it, in a unique way. This too is a form of curation.

Thinking Visually

In actual fact I have been doing this type of thing my whole life. I have always had enormous respect for items from the past connected to my family heritage and I keep them and preserve them and try to breathe new life into them. They are not valuable items like a Jack B Yeats painting, to give an example of something we might see if we went to visit our National Gallery, but to me – they are precious, some priceless.

My Kitchen Press

The opening image and the one below is of the press in our kitchen. The press was not originally from here but I saw it in a salvage shop years ago in Limerick and we bought it. I never imagined I would use it in my kitchen, nor that it would one day be filled with jars full of flour and sugar – my baking essentials.

I had a difficult time finding the right size glass jars to put in it but these are by the Danish designer Ib Laursen whom I came across in Copenhagen when at my niece Tara’s wedding last October. The Danish are wonderful designers.

On the top I have some vintage cups and jugs. The coffee set (top left corner) was a gift from Clare and Lilly of Tipperary Mountain Trekking Centre who spent Christmas with us here at Greenville some years ago. The silver Art Deco jug is from my dear friends Liz and Eoin O’Donnell. Liz never visits me without bringing somethings she has in storage, which she no longer uses, and many are pieces from her childhood home, which she knows I adore. The large coffee cups with paintings of African animals were a gift from Seosamh many years back which he got me on a buying trip for my shop in London. I also have some old style milk bottles on the second shelf to the left.

My flour and sugar jars are functional objects, used every day – but this in no way takes from the way I see this press – to me, it is a work of art.

The Wardrobe

My clothes wardrobe is also a very unconventional ‘press’ – and definitely where I do most of my curation!. The entire landing of our home is effectively a wardrobe – I use a rail to hang clothes I might be thinking of putting together in a new way, or putting away in storage for a while as a garment may have lost its appeal.

The Wardrobe

When I lived in Meadow Brook Court in Maynooth I rented a house from the same landlord for over six years. The house could take four tenants and people came and went depending on how long their courses at the University would be.

As I was the longest staying tenant there the landlord gave me a type of caretaker role. I used my bedroom as my study space and because I spent most days there working on my doctorate (and the room was relatively small) I asked my co-tenants if I could leave my clothes rail outside the door of my room on the landing and no one ever objected. In fact it was a constant source of conversation and I often let girls who were renting other rooms borrow items from it – once they returned them in proper order. The guys loved the rail too – they thought it was ..intriguing!!

So the tradition has continued and thirty years later I still use a landing as my wardrobe. I love to spend a Saturday or Sunday morning , when the house is quiet, with a coffee just going through things and looking at how I can put items together in different ways. I will always come up with new ideas.

I use cardboard boxes as ‘drawers’ because if I used clear ones my clothes would get damaged by light. And I like the boxes. They are simple and remind me of the way items were stored in generations gone by – in boxes, with moth balls and sheets of brown paper to protect the items.

Boxes in the Wardrobe

I still have many things belonging to my Mother including some of her scarves. I never wash them because I can smell her unique scent when I wear or hold them. It can make me very emotional and lonely for her, but it still comforts me so much.

All our hats, ‘good’ coats and Seosamh’s suits and ties are stored downstairs but my bags and shoes are in various places in the wardrobe landing . I mind everything so when I wear a pair of shoes I will wash the soles and heels and dry them and polish them before putting them back in their box. Some might consider that madness but I have never claimed to be very sane!

Jewellery Press

The jewelry press, mentioned earlier, was bought for my shop nearly twenty years ago. I have many happy memories of fashion shows and events in ‘The Business’ with this press in the background.

The picture below is of the lovely Aoife Flaherty (Nesbitt) at one of those events, where I invited people to dress up and we picked the best dressed. Aoife won that night. You can see the jewellery press just behind her on the right.

It now showcases my own costume jewellery here at home.

I organise things according to colour mostly. I have several high street inexpensive pieces that are dramatic and different to wear. I never liked gold – I find it lifeless and you needs lots of it to ‘make a statement’ and then it can be over done and look really tacky.

The image below shows a box with purple jewellery in the press – the claw with the purple stone was Mother’s. She loved the color purple. So did my late Aunt Masie. The brooch was hers and given to me by my Godmother Fiona after Aunt Masie died. She visited us here at Greenville, once a month, on a Sunday for lunch, for many years and we loved her visits. She was great fun.

Aunt Maise’s Purple Brooch and Mother’s Claw Brooch

She wore that brooch to Mother’s 90th Birthday party which was held in Tim and Tina’s home in Killough. Precious memories….I have to hold back the tears thinking of it. It was only a few years ago ..and yet we have lost so many dearly loved people who were there, since then.

Aunt Masie and Mother

Natalie Diner

When I was in my late teens I worked as an au pair in Paris for several months minding a little boy called Alexandre. His Mother Natalie Diner worked for Ralph Lauren and she was very kind to me and so beautiful looking.

Natalie Diner

She gave me stunning clothes and costume jewellery she no longer cared for – these earrings were from her.

Natalie’s Earrings

I still cherish them. They look a little like eagles with a blue dangling stone. She was one of a few big influences on me in terms of how I dress and my sense of style.

The Press of Dolls

I have a press in the Guestroom that has a selection of dolls from all over the world. I started to collect these dolls in the 90’s – they were called ‘Dolls of the World’ and each month you could buy a magazine with a porcelain doll and read about the costumes of the country featured but for some reason the newsagents who were getting it in for me were finding it hard to source them. So I managed to collect around 50 and have recently started to pick up, via eBay, the ones I did not get back then.

The Dolls’ Press in the Guest Room

I just love the Japanese doll.

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The Irish doll is also very special. Naturally she has red hair and is wearing…a green dress.

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The Boy’s Room

My three boys have picked this ‘curation’ skill up from me it seems. They are Lego fanatics and they display the items they make in their room. One press that came from my Grandparents home in Shanakill has all their minifigures which they arrange on a stand they also made themselves with Lego.

They also have a press shelf in another part of the room dedicated to Harry Potter Lego and another with Star Wars and Super Hero sets.

The Lego Press in the Boys’ Room

The Anthropologist as Curator

Since I was a student of English and Anthropology in the 80s and 90s, so many things have changed within my discipline. I had no idea until very recently for example that there are now Professorships in ‘Aesthetic Anthropology’ . This is truly fascinating to me as the subject of aesthetics is at the root of so many academic discussions about art, design and curation and has been an interest of mine for years.

Anthropologists are getting more involved in the debate now. The focus on aesthetics has expanded and become more rooted in culture with a small ‘c’ rather than the big C ‘Culture’, reflecting what I mention at the start about democratizing the discussion almost – moving away from a sense of culture as something for the elite or the leisured rather than what we make and create and do each day in our lived lives.

I am grateful to Roger Sansi for the inspirational introduction to the publication he recently edited ‘The Anthropologist as Curator’ (Sansi 2019). He writes:

‘The object of study of anthropology is no longer a given singular community, located in a singular space for a particular time, but an assemblage of different parts, people, places, objects, concepts and agencies of different sorts , that constitute contemporary assemblages’. (pp 5.)

So I suppose you could call me ‘an assemblage’ type of girl with a fascination for objects and the meanings and importance we give to them. I seem to spend a large part of my life doing just that – assembling and curating things around me.

I am informed his book will be under our Christmas tree this year so it will therefore soon grace our book shelf – yet another press we all love in our home, a gift to Seosamh from his late Father, James Devine.

“An Prios Leabhar” (AKA the Book Press or Bookcase, in the Dining room)

Many humble ‘things’ are owned by ordinary people who may have great respect for their importance and integrity.

They constitute an important part of our local, national and potentially even global heritage in a world made so small and accessible by social media and the internet.

You can choose to curate them.