Letter: Time to commemorate Ernie O'Malley in his native Mayo place

Sir,

I want to start by saying that I’m very grateful that my letter ’Romantic Castlebar is dead and gone, it’s with Davitt in the grave’ was published in The Connaught Telegraph, and it was well received by the people of Castlebar.

I’ve been stopped on the street on numerous occasions and I believe that what I wrote has struck a chord with many people and has started a healthy debate as to what should happen to the Imperial Hotel going forward.

I will at the end of this letter try and clarify some misconceptions that people may have as regards funding and so forth.

After the previous letter I wrote was published I had a conversation with Mayo County Councillor Gerry Murray who represents the Claremorris Swinford Municipal District and is the sole representative for Sinn Fein in the council chamber.

He told me that the late Ernie O’Malley’s wife - Helen Hooker O’Malley - had wished to bequeath her Irish and international art collection to the people of Mayo in the 1980s, but it never came to pass.

Obviously, I had known that Ernie O’Malley was a major player in the fight for independence, but I had never heard this before.

After the conversation concluded with Councillor Murray, I immediately contacted a friend of my father, namely Peter Mullowney, veterinary surgeon, who is an expert on local and national history.

I asked him did he know anything about Ernie O’Malley and an art collection bequeathed to the people of Mayo.

He told me to come over to Newport as Cormac O’Malley, Ernie O’Malley’s youngest son, was staying with him for a few days, and he would tell me all I wanted to know.

I was intrigued by the whole story and did as much research as I could in the library in Castlebar before I met Cormac O’Malley.

Helen Hooker, in fact, donated her art collection (roughly 600 items) to the Irish American Cultural Institute of Minnesota. They own the art.

The art collection was then to be donated to a museum to be built in Mayo, but that museum dream never came to fruition due to a change in government at the time.

Subsequently, part of the collection was sold by the institute to cover storage costs and the remainder was ultimately placed on permanent loan in 2004 to the University of Limerick, where part of the collection has been loaned to Mayo cultural institutions on a regular basis.

One of the purposes behind her gifting her art collection was that she felt that artists and people shouldn’t have to travel abroad from the west of Ireland to see such art. They should be able to see it in Mayo.

Helen Hooker O’Malley was herself an artist, photographer, and sculptor of some renown herself, and her own works have been exhibited in Mayo over the years in Castlebar, Clare Island, Enniscoe, The Country Museum, and Westport.

It’s important to note that Ernie O’Malley was a contemporary of Jack B. Yeats and Louis le Brocquy and other artists, some of whom stayed with him in Burrishoole Lodge, Newport, and painted while being inspired by the surroundings.

Incidentally, it’s possible to view some of the art collections online. If one types the following into the GOOGLE search engine www.ul.ie and then ‘IACI O’Malley Art Collection”, one will see paintings by J.B Yeats, Paul Henry, Mainie Jellett, Gerard Dillion, Evie Hone, and others.

The birthright of the people of Castlebar and Mayo are hanging on a wall at the University of Limerick.

I visited Newport and met Cormac in the Grainne Uaile Pub. We spent two hours plus talking.

He’s a son of Mayo, a Harvard graduate, who attended Columbia Law School, yet he wears it all very lightly. He just shrugged his shoulders when I brought it up.

I won’t document all of what we discussed, but the fact that there is no plaque on the wall of Ernie O’Malley’s homeplace on Ellison Street, Castlebar, is disgraceful.

The fact that there’s not a street, a bridge, a train station, or a roundabout named after one of our most famous sons is disgraceful.

Heuston Station, Ceannt Station, Connolly Station. Pearse Station. Enough said.

Now, I want to address some issues with respect to the debate about the future of the Imperial Hotel.

The first point. The debate isn’t about whether the building should be a museum or a boutique hotel.

The debate is about whether the building should remain in public hands or private hands.

If the building remains in public hands, it’s a building ’for all’. If it enters private hands, it becomes a building ’for some’.

So really the kernel of what the debate is about is equality. Do we, the people of Castlebar, want a building in the center of the town and the heart of the county that can be accessed by everyone and is open to everyone from all social classes and ethnic groups?

Remember, this decision is just not for the here and now. We are making a decision for the generations to come.

Talking with Cormac O’Malley, he felt that the Imperial should remain in the hands of the public and that it should become a ’Cultural and Social Institute’.

People like Davitt and O’Malley can be honoured and respected, but there could be an art gallery with rotating exhibits.

The art that was bequeathed to the people of Mayo could finally hang on the walls of Castlebar (if even on a short-term basis).

The building could become a community hub at the heart of the town. There could be a lecture theatre for academic symposiums, be it history, politics, mathematics, etc.

The second point pertains to the funding itself.

The money that was allocated towards the town of Castlebar comes from the Urban Regeneration Development Fund (URDF). It comes to a total of €11.5 million for a total of five projects.

A total of €5.25 million which is allocated towards the Imperial Hotel and renovating the building into an ’innovation hub’.

I was curious myself as to how the funding actually worked, so I rang the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage a week or so ago.

I was wondering what would happen to the allocated funding if the Imperial was sold to a private investor. Would the €5.25 million be returned to the exchequer?

No. The €5.25 million would remain in the town and be used on other projects. I was told that ’it is not the department’s intention that the approved funding for such projects would be lost to that particular local authority area and that ’where a local authority confirms therefore that a proposal or subproject is not proceeding or is unlikely to be delivered within the timeframe of the URDF programme, the department will consider making the approved funding available for an increased scope of work or cost increases on other approved projects or in some exceptional cases an alternative project.

Where such instances arise, the department will discuss the options directly with the relevant local authority, i.e. Mayo County Council.

I think we would all agree that it’s vital to ensure that a sum of €11.5 million allocated to the town of Castlebar must be kept in the town of Castlebar.

The other questions I had were as follows:

Does the €5.25 million have to be spent specifically on building an ’innovation hub’? No.

Or can the monies be repurposed for another project in the building?

Yes. If the local authority feels that €5.25 million would be better served in developing a ’cultural and social institute’ then yes the money can be spent to do that instead of an ’innovation hub’.

Also, if the local authority feels that the Imperial needs more than €5.25 million to renovate the building they can draw down from the remainder of the €11.5 million as needs be.

Obviously, there’s a balancing act with other projects, but yes it can be done.

In closing, we should remember very carefully what our founding fathers told us all those years ago on the steps of the GPO in 1916 - ’The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights, and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally’.

If we read the above very carefully then we know deep down what has to be done.

The building must remain in the hands of the people. The Republic as they envisioned it was about equality. This debate is about equality. Equality must prevail.

Yours,

Dr. Richard Martin,

Castlebar.