Drawing on art to explore tragic family legacy

Lifestyle – When British Auxiliary forces murdered young mother, Eileen Quinn, on November 1920 in South Galway, it caused outrage here and in England. The impact of Eileen’s murder on her family left a imprint that spanned generations. Her grandniece, artist Bernadette Burns, explores Eileen’s death and the fragility of human memory in a new exhibition at Galway Arts Centre. JUDY MURPHY hears about it. 

The chaise longue in the Quinn family house in Kiltartan, just outside Gort, is an heirloom, one that has been lovingly restored and reupholstered by the current generation of the family.

It’s a beautiful piece of furniture, but this chaise longue has much more than aesthetic significance for the family of Eileen Quinn. Eileen was an innocent young woman and mother of three, who was murdered 100 years ago this year by forces of the British Crown in Ireland at the height of Ireland’s War of Independence.

Images of chaise longue where Eileen died are central to an exhibition, The Uncertainty of History, which opens at Galway Arts Centre in the City this Friday evening, January 10, and will run until February 22.

The Uncertainty of History is the work of Galway-born artist Bernadette Burns, who now lives on Sherkin Island off the south-west Cork coast and it’s an exploration of family history and the fragility of memory.

Bernadette grew up hearing the story of her grandaunt, Eileen, her grandmother, Tessie’s younger sister and knew that Eileen had been a victim of the guerrilla war that raged across Ireland in 1920.

“It was known in the family but not talked about a lot,” Bernadette recalls of Eileen’s murder by the infamous D Company of the Auxiliaries, a group of ex-British Army officers who been recruited by the British Government in 1920 to quell the Irish war of independence. The Auxiliaries were noted for drinking, ill-discipline and violence.

After Tessie died in 1991 and Bernadette found her diaries, the young woman wished she’d learned more from her grandmother about that troubled time and her grandaunt’s death.

Bernadette was reared in Newcastle in Galway City, one of a family of five and studied art at the then RTC and the National college of Art and Design in Dublin.

Her late father, Kieran, who was Professor of Physiology at the then UCG, was Eileen’s nephew and had grown up in Kiltartan.

His parents taught in the two-teacher school close to the house outside which his aunt had been shot by an unidentified member of the Auxiliaries on November 1, 1920, as the British para-military police were returning from Gort to Galway in military lorries.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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