Shooting death of pregnant woman inspires exhibit

When a mother of three received fatal injuries at her home almost a century ago in south Galway, Arthur Griffiths was telegrammed about it and WB Yeats recorded its impact in two of his poems.

Eileen Quinn was 24 years old, seven months pregnant, and waiting for her husband to return from Gort fair when she was shot and bled to death on November 1, 1920.

Now the event has been interpreted in a, exhibition by Ms Quinn’s grand-niece, artist Bernadette Burns, which opened last night in Galway Arts Centre.

Ms Quinn’s sister wrote in her diary that the shots had been fired by the Black and Tans, but the military court of inquiry ruled it as “death by misadventure”.

However, it was reported that the trucks from which the shot was fired were carrying an Auxiliary division of the Royal Irish Constabulary — being former military officers recently returned from the First World War battlefields of Flanders.

“There is a fine line between both, but it is her death and the impact of it on her family that inspired me,” Ms Burns said.

There is no one factual truth or telling of an event or story, there are many strands, versions, and viewpoints of any event that has happened.

It took some time for a doctor and priest to arrive, and she died after 10pm that night.

Ms Burns’s grandmother’s diary is at the centre of the exhibition, and the Galway Observer report of November 6, 1920, formed part of her extensive research.

“It is too awful, too inhuman to contemplate,” local curate Fr Considine told the newspaper.

“I have read of Turkish atrocities; I have read of the death of Joan of Arc; I have read of the sufferings of Nurse Cavell, and as I read those things I often felt my blood boil and I often prayed that the good God might change the minds and hearts of those cruel monsters,” said the priest.Fr Considine

Ms Burns is a painter who works with drawing, photography, sculpture, video, and book making, and was fine art lecturer at the Dublin Institute of Technology for many years. She has exhibited her work in Ireland, Spain, and Greece.

Her exhibition entitled The Uncertainty of History: Remembering Eileen Quinn continues at the Galway Arts Centre until February 21.