WHYTE'S in association with CHRISTIE'S - The Ernie O'Malley Collection MONDAY 25 November 2019

20 In Mayo, Ernie and Helen found Burrishoole Lodge, near Newport, which became their home for many years. Initially, they were active in photographing rural Ireland, but with the start of the SecondWorldWar, they decided to establish a self- sufficient farm, and poured their combined energies and resources into this effort. Helen expanded the farm buildings and Ernie managed the farm. Many of their Dublin and international artistic and literary friends visited Burrishoole. In 1942, having felt the isolation of the West, Helen leased a small studio in Dublin to continue her sculpting. In 1944 after the birth of Etain and Cormac they returned to Dublin for their children’s schooling as well as their social contacts. In Dublin Ernie became involved in artistic and literary activities by helping organise exhibits, like the 1945 Jack B. Yeats National Loan Exhibition as well as taking on a role in The Bell, where he expanded the book reviews section. In 1945 he began interviewing contemporary Irish artists, from whom he and Helen bought art for their new home in Clonskeagh. Ernie also started writing articles on art for English and Irish magazines, covering diverse topics such as Mexican, Irish and English art, book reviews, the Irish countryside, and music. He lectured on the BBC and Radio Éireann, and he prepared a compendium of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In 1948 he commenced interviewing more than 450 survivors of the War of Independence and the Civil War to record the details of their individual struggles, all in an effort to build history from the bottom up. He used some of his collected history in lectures on Radio Éireann and in a series of articles in The Sunday Press in 1955-56. By 1948 Helen and Ernie’s marriage was fraying and when Cathal and Cormac contracted tuberculosis in June, the children were taken out of school and attended to at home. By late summer they were taken to Burrishoole to rest with a nurse under Ernie’s supervision and stayed there for a full year. Helen, who was spending much of her time in London on theatre business, closed the Dublin house and went home to stay with her family in America. She only returned briefly in 1950 to take Cathal and Etain from their boarding school, where the two had been sent by Ernie to learn Irish. The 1950s were most difficult years for Ernie but had some highlights, such as assisting John Ford in June 1951, consulting for The Quiet Man and in 1956 for The Rising of The Moon. He continued his interviews and writing but was struck with bad health including a massive heart attack in 1953 which required him to rest; this lead him to winter with friends in Cambridge for the next four years. He continued with lectures and publications but due to financial difficulties, he had to sell his library, and then his lands at Burrishoole. His initial educational plan was to send his boys to Benedictine schools in Ireland, then Ring College to learn Irish and thereafter - as an admirer of the English boarding school system - to Ampleforth College in York. In the end only Cormac attended Ampleforth. During school holidays Ernie managed, despite poor health, to bring Cormac to Paris to learn French and to the Aran Islands to learn Irish. In the final year of his life Ernie O’Malley could no longer continue the strenuous intellectual writing he had hoped to accomplish. He returned to hospital in Ireland in early 1957 and died on March 25 in his sister’s home in Howth. Ernie’s state funeral - only the eighth in the history of independent Ireland - was attended by former comrades-in-arms, including President Seán T O’Kelly, Taoiseach Éamon de Valera, and the entire cabinet. In his oration, Seán Moylan, TD, talked of Ernie as carrying ‘the gospel of national freedom into every corner of the country inspiring men by his example, steeling their courage by his contempt of danger, and training men…’ Ernie O'Malley by Seán O'Sullivan, 1941. Collection of National Portrait Gallery. Right: Ernie O’Malley, photograph by Helen Hooker, 1934; image courtesy of The Gallery of Photography Ireland.