Tragic family memories explored

HISTORY Black and Tans’ the murder of young pregnant mother inspires work

‘1st of Nov 1920, my sister Eileen Quinn shot by Black + Tans at Corker at 3pm. Died at 10pm.’

The hand written journal entry above was penned by Tessie Burns.

“It was kind of an aide memoir rather than a current diary,” explains Ber Burns, as she turns the petite book over in her hands. Ber is in the Townhall Theatre gallery space where, alongside curator Joe Keenan, she’s hanging her exhibition ‘The Uncertainty of History: traces’.

Tessie was Ber’s grandmother, and the Eileen, the victim of the Black and Tans was her great aunt. While the broad strokes of the tragedy was known to Ber and her siblings in their youth, the 1920s seemed like a different realm, and the killing didn’t fully register.

When Ber was given the diary after Tessie passed away, it was only upon reading the succinct entry that she grasped the full weight of Eileen’s murder.

Eileen was standing outside her house on outskirts of Gort, Co Galway. Heavily pregnant she was holding her baby in her arms and her young children, Alfie and Eva were with her. At 3pm two open top trucks transporting Auxiliaries passed by and one of the soldiers in the first truck shot her and they continued driving.

Carried into her home, she bled to death on her sofa over the course of seven hours. She told the precise details of what happened to a priest who was called to give the last rites.

The military conducted an inquest; a depressingly familiar finding followed.

“The Auxiliaries said well, nobody saw a woman, they were in the habit when driving through a troubled area of firing warning shots.”

Given that it happened mid-afternoon on a wide straight road Ber observes it was “definitely deliberate”.

“Death by misadventure - they didn’t see anybody, it must have been accidental,” she paraphrases the findings.

“It was covered up, as many things were. I think every family has stories like this from that time.”

The nature of the killing of a pregnant mother in front of her children drew media attention, and the sympathy of Lady Gregory who lived not far away.

“She wrote about it, and it’s also mentioned in two poems by Yeats.”

Eileen embarked on researching her great aunt’s killing by speaking to family members.

“I wanted to find out everything about Eileen, what she liked, what she didn’t like, what she wore, and I just found so many conflicting stories about her, because everyone’s memory is different, everybody sees something that happened from a slightly different angle, so there is no definite [truth].”

Ber was also “fascinated” to learn that the sofa on which Eileen died, and which had been stored away in a shed for decades had in recent times been reupholstered and returned to its rightful place in the Gort house, now home to one of her descendants.

“You sit on a sofa to relax, and wind down, or whatever - but this sofa is full of history and inside it I’m sure there’s still blood in the wood of the frame.”

The sofa features prominently in the exhibition, sometimes quite vividly, other times more vague.

“Sometimes your memory is very sharp, you remember things so clearly and then other times it’s clouded and fragmented,” says Ber.

Invariably the sofa is depicted against a cloud filled sky.

“Feelings come into it, and I wanted to depict with clouds and skies the haziness of memory, but also then try to give a feeling of the past and the mystery of the stories - I wanted them to be light breaking through darkness in a lot of the sky.

“It’s about this darkness in our stories, and in our family stories, but we’re always looking for the light and hoping that there will be lightness for people who have come through these traumatic stories.”

Some of the works include writing, an installation piece has Ber’s own diary entries written over again and again until they can no longer be read.

Another key piece is of a boat fashioned from a sheets. That was inspired by Alfie, a man she “knew quite well” as her father’s first cousin, but only realised later that he was Eileen’s three year old boy who had seen his mother shot.

“A boy at that age is totally fascinated by his mother - he’s kind of rejecting his father, but he loves his mother - his mother provides him with everything. So to suddenly have that taken from you... I made a boat and wrote all over it the feelings that a three year old has for his mother, and to suddenly have that taken. Where does that leave you? So I just wanted to create a feeling for this boy,” said Ber.

She notes Alfie grew up to have his own family and grandchildren, but the Celt surmises how that may not have diminished his pain.

“The pain could never be diminished, I think, for something like that. I wanted to put some of that pain and the feeling into the paintings, but then have an overriding thing of hope - that there would be lightness and hope at the end of it.”