Eyrecourt artist David Rooney first began creating illustrations of the Great Famine for the BBC series 2011’s The Story of Ireland. Working on them was an emotional experience and the famine continues to haunt him. The result is a magnificent new book in which he offers a unique perspective on this seismic time. He tells JUDY MURPHY how it came about.

David Rooney’s eyes light up as he recalls playing in Tuam’s old graveyard as a child, on visits to his maternal grandparents.

Doreen Monaghan’s family ran a sweet shop and café in Tuam and, at the time, this graveyard was inaccessible except from their house. Its headstones and graves fuelled the imagination of this solitary child.

Even then, artist and musician David was intrigued by the world around him in a way most children aren’t. Birdwatching was an early obsession, followed by military modelling.

“I had the obsessive gene every artist needs and I struggled with a lot of things in school,” he says of his early education in the various boys’ schools in the towns around Ireland, where his father’s Garda job took the family.

David’s dad Joesph (Joe) was born in Fermanagh and met Doreen while stationed in Tuam. Joe’s final posting was in Eyrecourt, when David was 13. That’s where Joe still lives, having retired there as a sergeant. Doreen died in 2020, in the early days of Covid.

On a trip to Galway to visit Joe, David who lives in Wicklow, takes time out to chat to the Tribune about his new book, The Story of the Great Irish Famine.

“The four-year-old who didn’t want to go to school is now the person who draws these pictures,” he says about the book and its dark, vivid images. This largescale, slim volume is backboned by his extraordinary, haunting illustrations portraying aspects of the famine, with text that was chosen to accompany them.

As a child, David’s parents encouraged his creative passions, but school was another story. There, his obsessive nature and tendency to ask questions got him into trouble.

“I got bored. It’s not that I was that smart but I was doing the things that interested me more, like birdwatching and military modelling.”

Being curious didn’t help either.

“I had a ‘why’ written on my forehead and it made me a target”.

Everything changed when the family settled in Eyrecourt, and 13-year-old David and a few other ‘misfit’ boys were taken on as day pupils at the convent in nearby Banagher.

The school, run by the La Sainte Union nuns, had previously been an all-girl boarding facility, catering for daughters of the well-off.

Here, David and the other artistic boys were allowed to explore their creativity in ways they hadn’t been previously.

He recalls the principal, Sr Angela, and says “we were like an experiment to her”, while he was inspired by his recently qualified art teacher, Sheila Haugh, who saw and encouraged his potential. That had never happened before.

“It was then I knew I would go to art college,” he says, quoting his late mother, who used to say, ‘the path was laid out’.

David graduated from the National College of Art and Design aged 21.

“I left as a complete mixed bag and didn’t know what to do,” he says. “I was a good painter but it took me forever.

“I had been good at linocut printing and a former student friend was doing something like it, called scraper board.”

With this technique, which involves using a scalpel to scrape a layer of black ink from a chalk-coated board to carve out images, David had found his medium.

Soon after, sheer perseverance got the 24-year-old a job as an illustrator at the music and politics magazine HotPress. There, this “angry young-man” offered his unique, caustic perspective on the Catholic Church and State. Also international affairs, as his illustrations accompanied Michael D Higgins’ HotPress column.

Pictured: David Rooney: ‘has the obsessive gene every artist needs.’’ PHOTO: PATRICK GLENNON.