Louis le Brocquy's Speech at Launch of TFW
In August 1945 I had been cycling around the County Offaly, on the lookout for interesting landscape, when I came across an encampment of the Travelling people or ‘Tinkers’, as they were then known, mending peoples’ pots and pans by the wayside.
I approached them rather shyly, telling them I was an artist and asking if I could make sketches. Their curiosity enabled me to approach them sympathetically. Nobody had asked them such a thing before and, although some remained reserved and suspicious, I managed to come back to them a number of times.
I still remember sketching as casually as I could for my painting Tinker Woman with Newspaper, portraying the matriarch of a clan defiantly clutching the crumpled sheets of an alien world in newsprint - remote and uncompromising as she was, within the depths of her nature.
Minister for Health and Children Mary Harney T.D, Louis le Brocquy and Winnie Kerrigan Culture & Heritage Programme Pavee Point
The vitality, mystery, and wildness of these travelling people was what I greatly admired in them. But most of all I was impressed by their insistence on freedom - freedom from every external regulation - observing only their own tradition, their own tribal rules. Not perhaps altogether unlike the independence of the artist within society. They became a symbol of the individual as opposed to organised, settled society.
As my old friend, Ernie O’Malley remarked, they could represent the artist who deals with the unexpected and the unrecognised and who suffuses with meaning familiar things.
Anne Madden, Louis le Brocquy and James Collins
I had in mind John Millington Synge's notion of the spiritual bond between the traveller and artist, as Picasso had done beforehand with Baudelaire’s similar view. The elegant melancholy, however, of Picasso's Saltimbanques, who have much in common with the travelling communities, is substituted in my paintings with a sense of harsh endurance.
For me the Travelling People represented, dramatically perhaps, the human condition.
I got on reasonably well with them because I was different from them and did not attempt to identify with them, because they were in fact extremely jealous of their own identity.
And this, I believe, is what we -all of us - would do well to remember: The Travelling people have their own traditions, their own pride, their own ways, their own strict morality.
Mary Harney T.D Minister for Health and Children, Louis le Brocquy and Winnie Kerrigan
They have been prejudicially excluded by our settled society. Yet they belong to us, variant within us. Faced with Cromwell's choice to Hell or Connaught, the forebears of the Travelling people are said to have chosen a third way. They took to the road. In time they became the road - that which lies outside the security of settled society.
While right-minded people plead with us not to discriminate against our influx of immigrant peoples, remembering our own emigration, let us, in turn, remember our own Travelling people with understanding, with tolerance and, above all, with the recognition which is their human right.