Life through a lens: Images of lost Ireland caught on camera

In his poem Dark Ireland, Patrick Kavanagh speaks about the Irish as a “dark people, our eyes ever turned inward”. 

It was those words of the famous Irish poet that inspired photographer Richard Fitzgerald to look not just inward but backward on an Ireland of the recent past, evoking memories of the kind of rural life that has all but vanished.

The images in his book Dark Ireland: Images Of A Lost World, capture the unique landscape of Ireland but they are also intimate portraits of the inhabitants of that landscape as they worked, played and prayed.