Artist’s love of Dunlavin’s roots has inspired ancient creations
ARTIST RÓNÁN Ó RAGHALLAIGH HAS BEEN LOOKING INTO DUNLAVIN’S DEEP PAST.
DUNLAVIN is a modern village. The school buildings are up to date. Housing estates full of desirable new residences are springing up on the outskirts. Dunlavin is also laden with souvenirs of a heritage which is centuries old, reminders of the days when the Big House called the local shots. The courthouse, the fair green, the very layout of the place all hark back to a time when the Anglo-centric aristocrats were in charge.
Dunlavin, a pleasant spot, peacefully set back from the main road running between Blessington and Baltinglass, openly proclaims its religious past too, with the Roman Catholic church at one end of the village, while the Church of Ireland is at the other. Both are named after Saint Nicholas, just to underline how both Christian traditions – for so long markers of social division – have a great deal in common.
New Millennium Dunlavin. Twentieth century Dunlavin. Georgian/Victorian Dunlavin. Christian Dunlavin. They are all clearly on show in the year 2024, immediately accessible to everyone. But artist Rónán Ó Raghallaigh is keen to delve even further back, to explore a time when there was neither Catholic or Protestant, landlord or peasant. Christened Ronan O’Reilly, with no sign of a fada, he is aware that this is a place which has roots that go far deeper.
Like most roots, however, they tend to remain hidden, unless someone goes digging. He fully realises that adopting the Irish form of his name is a gesture. The Ireland he seeks to explore largely predates the Irish language as it is currently spoken and understood.
His field of interest goes back before the saints and scholars to an island of myth and legend. And he has discovered that the truly ancient Dunlavin he wishes to commune with is actually not so very deeply concealed at all. The holy well at Tornant, just a short walk across the fields from modern Dunlavin, serves as his window into Neolithic times. It is here that he has placed a modest stone sculpture in tribute to those who inhabited County Wicklow countless generations ago.
Ronan/Rónán has the best of Dunlavin connections, though brought up a few kilometres across the Kildare border in Naas. The 31-year-old is son of Aidan O’Reilly and Sheila Higgins. Aidan is from Dunlavin and as a boy the future artist was often brought to visit grandparents there. When a teenager, Rónán earned pocket money working for the construction firm Aidan ran with his brother. Projects undertaken included an extension to the primary school in Dunlavin as well as contracts for the Defence Forces up in the Glen of Imaal.
After leaving the CBS in Naas, Rónán did not seek to enhance his building skills. Instead, he opted for the fine arts course at the Dublin Institute of Technology, since rebranded Technological University Dublin. The college’s art department when he enrolled was located at Amiens Street but later moved to the grand new campus bedside the Liffey at Grangegorman.
Pondering on his time there, he recalls how he went close to choosing a different, more utilitarian path: “I was accepted for architecture at DIT but changed my mind.” Art and architecture, they both appealed to someone who instinctively put energy into making picture.
“I was always drawing as a child and I went to art classes in drawing and in painting.” In the end he turned down the architecture: “It seemed too restricted by client briefs and by practicalities.
“I didn’t want to design apartment blocks and I think it was a good decision for me.”
That said, his preferred course proved to be no easy option. The emphasis on ‘concepts’ rather than technique, which pervaded the fine arts department at the time, he found challenging. His desire to blend art with folklore and mythology did not strike his mentors as in any way relevant. Yet Rónán persevered.
He traces his fascination with the Stone Age back to a visit paid with his father to the stone circle at Castleruddery, on their way home from a day’s work in the Glen of Imaal: “It was my first real experience of pre-Christian Ireland and I thought it was very impressive, a natural amphitheatre. That sparked my interest – I was hooked.”
His obsession has since been reflected in his output, often semi-abstract, as a painter.
Freshly graduated, he was taken under the wing of Noelle Campbell-Sharpe who encouraged her protégé to exhibit in Kerry and in Dublin. Rónán took time out to spend a year in Canada, teaching English in Toronto, but the call of palette and easel persisted. He returned home to take a master’s degree at the National College of Art and Design.
Pursuit of the MA was fraught by the onset of Covid with all the uncertainties of the pandemic. Learning by Zoom was not to his taste, though he persisted and devoted himself to reeling back in time to the Ireland of the ancients.
It was during the pandemic that O’Reilly became Ó Raghallaigh, his parents and four siblings collaborating in a joyful ceremony of re-baptism with water imported from Glendalough.
“I’m always visiting these holy wells and megalithic sites and I want to make art out of these places,” he reveals as he considers how he came to create the Dunlavin project. He points out that the ‘holy’ in the title need not be taken in any modern church-going sense.
“Holy wells were very important in pre-Christian Ireland. Water was very important to the druids in their religion.”
All that water springing clean and pure from the earth has long attracted humankind seeking sustenance and prayer.
He has become especially familiar with the Mass Path walk which leads from the village of Dunlavin, across the stubble of last year’s maize, through a swing gate to a corner of a grassy field in the townland of Tornant where a simple spring weeps into a stream leading ultimately to the Slaney river. This holy well is not an elaborate deep well with a bucket on a rope. It is a peaceful place, shaded by trees and surrounded by pasture.
The artist is not the only one who comes here to deposit objects. Rosary beads and ribbons and little statues of Christ or his mother are scattered around, indications of a form of Christian faith which does not rely exclusively on priests and buildings.
Rónán is convinced that this place of simple pilgrimage must have attracted the interest of local residents long before Christianity. And he has devoted creative energy to highlighting the connection with the ancients, working with video maker and friend George Hooker.
Though he is not a sculptor, he persuaded George to record him making a stone piece from a lump of granite rock found up in the mountains beside Saint Kevin’s Way, which runs from Hollywood to Glendalough. The video, produced for the Dunlavin Arts Festival, shows Rónán using an improvised stone chisel to cut a design copied from the spiral pattern etched on to the hefty 20-tonne Neolithic original which is held in the National Museum of Ireland.
The video is not without humour. The scenes showing the artist hauling the granite across the countryside is good for a laugh. This is one artist who is never pompous, though he seriously hopes that more people will follow in his footsteps along the Mass Path and take the time to visit Dunlavin’s holy well. Maybe they will detect echoes of the long gone past there along with his stone.
I’M ALWAYS VISITING THESE HOLY WELLS AND MEGALITHIC SITES, AND I WANT TO MAKE ART OUT OF THESE PLACES