e l p o e p s i h d n a n a v a n a C
Art
The pub is crowded. A group of men are at the bar, pints of stout in hand. These men, pictured in one of Bernard Canavan’s paintings, are Murphy’s Men, men in the employ of the construction company named on the jacket of the one whose back is to us. We cannot hear their animated conversation but their accents are surely Irish, rural Irish, full of the strong vowels of the western counties, with one or two men from the other provinces. In the painting’s foreground a woman, not-too-young, not-too-old, sits deep in thought, glass and cigarette in hand, a small island of quiet in the noisy barroom. These are Canavan’s people, the men and women who emigrated to England in the period after the Irish State struggled into existence in the 1920s. The men and women who continued to leave its shores for many years afterwards to find work. Another painting, Holyhead Euston, documents the end of a wearisome boattrain journey undertaken at a time when scheduled air travel was virtually nonexistent or, if available, very expensive. A man has just boarded the crowded train and has found a compartment with just one vacant seat left. Gratefully he pushes his suitcase onto the overhead rack while others look in from the corridor to see if there are any more spaces. Their expressions show their disappointment at the prospect of having to make do with sitting on their suitcases for the journey to Euston. In the compartment everyone looks tired, tired and sunk in their own thoughts. An elderly man, glad to have secured a seat, drowsily looks out at us with the air of someone who has done this journey often and will continue to do it until he can do it no longer. The women have left their suitcases at their feet and keep their handbags close. No one talks.
Eamonn Lynskey considers the paintings of Bernard Canavan
Murphy’s Men
This experience, together with his first-hand knowledge of the tradition of emigration in which he grew up in 1950s Ireland, informs his representation of that era and its hardships. His style is a type of social realism, depicting in close detail the life of the people who had to leave their country to find work elsewhere, particularly in England, after the failure of their new Irish state to break its long history of emigration.
It is often argued that the newlyindependent Irish State, coming into existence as it did during a world-wide depression, could not have been expected to find employment for these men and women. And it is true that its economy and infrastructure were in ruins after a war of independence and a subsequent civil war. The new State had many other problems as well, including its refusal to pay monies to Britain (the ‘annuities’ agreed under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921) for loans received prior to independence. This led to a retaliatory Bernard Canavan was trade war of 1932born in 1944 and grew 1938 between the up in Edgeworthstown, two countries which The Train Co Longford. Illness held caused severe damage to back his school attendance, but he read the Irish Economy. And in contrast with and drew pictures at home. He emigrated the northern part of the island, which to England in 1959 with his father to remained within the United Kingdom, work on construction sites, the only type the new State had a predominantly of employment – along with factory rural economy and virtually no strong work or ‘down the mines’ – open to the industrial base, and therefore was unable unskilled. to provide employment on a mass scale. 16 Senior Times | May - June 2022 | www.seniortimes.ie
Bernard Canavan was born in Edgeworthstown, Co Longford
Things were as they were, and the hope that the lot of the common labourer would improve with the establishment of the new State proved to be a hope misplaced. While there is no doubt that the new Republic faced difficulties, the perception that in the years up to, and after, the1950s it was too poverty-stricken to provide for its less-advantaged citizens is a perception not universally shared. A different view of those years was put forward by Bernard Canavan at a conference held in the Irish Centre in London in 2017: ‘Eight-hundred thousand people sending back £5 a week [from England] is a lot of money and that kept the Irish economy going. It made it possible for Mr de Valera and all of the rest of them to live in a kind of comfort there, talking about how awful England was, and what a terrible place it was, when they were living off the remittances being sent back.’ And a photograph published in April 1954 in The Independent newspaper provides some incidental evidence that things might not have been as bad as is sometimes made
