Craftsman forged in heart of community

Lifestyle –  Judy Murphy hears how 92-year-old Eamon Madden found his calling in the ancient trade of blacksmithing

They don’t make men like Eamon Madden any more. Athenry-born Eamon, who will celebrate his 92nd birthday on March 17, retired just four years ago, having worked as a blacksmith since the age of 14.  The fifth generation of his family in the business he finally closed the doors of his forge having been advised by his doctor that it wasn’t a good idea to be shoeing horses and bearing their considerable weight at the age of 86.

Blacksmithing was the trade Eamon entered when he was barely out of childhood, and it was one he loved, he says. The Maddens’ forge on the outskirts of Athenry was a community hub, “like a pub, but without the drink”, and for someone as sociable as Eamon, that sociability made work a pleasure.

“It was a career too, and a matter of creating something, something you could hold up,” he says of his work.

He’s a tall, strong man, even as his 92nd birthday approaches, and he’s completely engaged with the world around him. As he sits by the fire in his cosy sitting room on a miserable February evening, there’s a newspaper by his side, and straight away, he starts discussing the issues of the day.

“I love being alive,” he says simply.

Although he was born on the feast of St Patrick in 1924, Eamon wasn’t named after the national saint, as the name Patrick had already been given to an older brother.

That brother died as a young man, the result of an accident while he was working in England. Another brother, Johnny, who lived at home, also died young after a wound became infected. Today, such an infection would be treated with antibiotics, but in the 1930s these weren’t available.

Johnny, who was some 20 years older than Eamon, had run the family blacksmith’s and his death led to Eamon eventually entering the business which their grandfather had established in Athenry.

But his links with this craft goes back much further. “I’m claiming to be the fifth generation of Maddens to be a blacksmith,” says Eamon, explaining that the family had a forge in the townland of Bawnmore for many years. Eamon’s granduncle inherited that premises, while his grandfather moved to Athenry in the mid 1800s, where “he bought a place and built it up”.

Eamon’s father became the farmer of the family, his uncle followed the blacksmithing tradition.

Eamon was born in 1924 into a period of great political change – the Irish Free State had come into being less than two years previously, marking the end of English rule in 26 counties of Ireland. That been followed by a civil war between those who opposed the treaty with England and those who supported it.

But while there were changes in how Ireland was governed, life in rural Galway continued to be dictated by the seasons and by farming.

“Ireland was an agricultural society then,” says Eamon, “it’s an industrial one now.” Farmers needed horses to work the land, and they needed implements. And, so, the blacksmith was central to their lives. When Eamon’s older brother Johnny died, their father tried to continue the business while also working the farm, but it proved too much. Initially, he employed men to do the work, but then he leased the forge to a local blacksmith Pat Brody, who subsequently married Eamon’s sister.

Pat taught Eamon the trade and from his earliest days, this tall, powerful young man was a natural. The forge was a world of intense noise and heat, where skill and concentration were required to forge items made of iron – everything from ‘S hooks’ for cutting briars to horseshoes for the valued farm animals.

Learning to shoe a horse was something Eamon can still remember – the shoe had to be nailed onto the hoof at an angle, making sure that it didn’t hit the animal’s flesh. There was very little to distinguish between the dead hoof and the living flesh, so great care was required.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.