In Kerry, Thomas Ashe now looks down on the street he inspired
The KerrymanTen years after a friend asked Mikél Mato to paint a pint of Guinness, the Albanian artist has completed his ninth mural in Tralee.
Mato’s vibrant portrait of revolutionary Thomas Ashe now looks down upon the 1833 courthouse on the street named in his honour. The courthouse was once a symbol of imperial power.
Ashe was from Kinard, Lios Póil and a commander in the 1916 Easter Rising and killed at age 32 when he was force fed during a Mountjoy Prison hungry strike on September 25, 1917.
It has been a year since David Slattery commissioned the mural on the second floor wall of Slattery’s Travel. He presented Mato with two black-and-white photographs, a portrait of Ashe with bagpipes tucked under his left arm and an image of the dapper teacher that Mato chose as his template.
For Mato, the painting was an education.
“How you do it?” he says, standing on the courthouse steps at eyelevel across from his painting. “How do you show that sense of danger? He was a soldier, idealist, intellectual, poet, teacher, so how do you bring it all together? It’s not an easy thing. For the first two weeks, I was completely lost.”
For months, Mato balanced on a ladder on the roof of Benny’s Barbers. He began with the blue outline of a head and a trace of a white collar. Then, a yellow cheekbone, a pink brow, a flick of a blue moustache.
“Artists hate a blank canvas,” says Mato. “You try to paint as fast as you can, you know, otherwise it’s intimidating. When you get a few lines out, you get more confident.”
The problem was perspective. The tricolour painting is the breadth of the building and Mato estimates its height is four or five times his own.
Instead, the painter had to go up and down the ladder and then run down Ashe Street or up the 20 polished courthouse steps to view the Gaeilgeoir from a distance.
Mata stretches his arms. “His nose is this big. You have to be up and down the whole time.”
Over winter and spring, people would stop Mato to tell stories about Ashe or dark family memories surrounding independence.
Mato is known in Tralee, a town he has transformed over a decade.
His official job is as a security guard at Penneys. Originally from Albania, he moved to Ireland 26 years ago.
His brush with art began with a hip injury. His brother encouraged him to start sketching, remembering his childhood talent. So Mato sketched at the gym while his friends lifted weights.
His friend Francis Galvin, the owner of Slieve Mish Bar, asked if he could paint a pint of Guinness outside his pub. “I owe it to him,” says Mato.
He was reluctant to paint. But his brother reminded him Vincent van Gogh only began painting seriously at age 27. Mato was 36.
Today, his work appear outside St John’s (Madonna and Child), Sullivan’s Lane (The Good, the Bad and The Guinness, The Creation of Adam and The Mona Lisa, both with a pint), Green Lane (Tom Creane) and Courthouse Lane (Napolean Crossing the Alps, grasping a Guinness) and, of course, there was the Slieve Mish toucan mural that started it all.
Support can still be hard got, says Mato. He insisted on painting a Slattery Travel logo in the corner of the mural, adamant his patron is recognised despite Mr Slattery’s concern of detracting from the art.
Mr Slattery hopes the portrait will rekindle awareness of the revolutionary, who was not a signatory to 1916 Proclamation and less remembered outside home county.
Ashe always remembered home. His sister Nora, recalled in 1952, “He loved Kerry and was never tired describing it to his fellow prisoners in England after the Rising. All of them said they would have to go to Kinnard for a holiday when they were released, so much did he glorify the place to them.”
In the weeks following Ashe’s death, The Gaelic League proposed building a great hall in Dublin named in his honour. Thomas Ashe Memorial Hall on Denny Street, one of the first State buildings in Ireland, was completed in 1928.
The future of the street is uncertain with plans to open a new courthouse complex on the Island of Geese in the 2030s.
Nelson Street, named for the British naval captain who died during the Napoleonic Wars, was renamed Ashe Street after independence.
For nearly two centuries, it was dominated by its imposing neoclassical courthouse. Today, eyes are drawn above to the debonaire revolutionary painted in Irish colours.