Editor's note: During the spring 2026 semester, Rare Books & Special Collections (RBSC) will highlight examples of survival, contemplation, competition, protest and learning in their exhibition, “Cultivating Community: Stories from Special Collections.” 

Curated by six faculty members from the Hesburgh Libraries and featuring pieces housed in six of RBSC’s distinct collections, “Cultivating Community: Stories from Special Collections” showcases the universality of constructing community and cultivating hope across time and place.

Throughout the semester, the Hesburgh Libraries website will feature news articles about each of the six faculty curators, providing insight into the stories behind their individual exhibits. Previously, we featured  stories about the exhibits “A Community of Learners in Colonial America and the Early Republic” and “The Gay Olympic Games: Community Through Sport.”

_______

Some would call it ideal. Others would call it romanticized. But for the people depicted in the six black-and-white images on display in Rare Books & Special Collections (RBSC), it was just life. 

Caught between past and present, the photographs are part of “Ireland’s Idealized Community,” an exhibit curated by Matthew Knight, Irish studies librarian. The images give insight into the realities of living in a rosy vision of rural Ireland.

“These photos were taken between 1963 and 1965,” Knight said. “Less than 200 miles away, Beatlemania is raging in Dublin. People are going crazy in the dance halls. And there is rural Connemara, with no electricity or running water. This was a traditional community that thrived and survived, but never kept pace with the rest of Europe or with the more developed cities in Ireland. It's just a really interesting dichotomy between how these people were living and how everybody else was.”

One image on display in the exhibit depicts men in a boat transporting sheep off High Island before lambing season. With no place to moor a larger vessel, farmers packed several loads of sheep into a currach, a traditional Irish boat, to take them to a larger boat anchored offshore. The process of removing 41 sheep from the island would typically have taken five men three hours.

“The same type of images you would probably see in 1812 are happening in the 1960s,” Knight said. 

An ideal imagined

The exhibit, one of six that comprise “Cultivating Community: Stories from Special Collections,” gives a glimpse into the kind of community that former Irish President Éamon de Valera idealized in a 1943 speech. 

“At the time of his speech, Ireland was a new country, and his ideal was being the most Catholic, the most pure and the most anti-materialistic in order to live the life God wanted people to live,” Knight said.

In a national radio broadcast, de Valera spoke of a community, “who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living…satisfied with frugal comfort.” Theirs is “a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children…and the laughter of happy maidens.”  

An ideal lived

But ideal visions painted in speeches often fail to account for everyday realities. Only 20 years after his speech, the places that reflected what de Valera would consider “ideal” stood as outliers in modern society.

“What I find fascinating is that, looking at the photos, you can see the difficulty in the work, but they are embracing the lifestyle,” Knight said. “It's a hard life. But you don't get the sense that there's a bitterness about it.”

The photographs, part of RBSC’s newly acquired “John Reader Connemara Collection,” were taken near the beginning of Reader’s decades-long photojournalism and writing career. The collection includes more than 3,600 negatives captured over a year and a half, accompanied by passages from the photographer's journal providing insight into how much work it actually took to live the “ideal” life. And, while the community wasn’t modeled after de Valera’s speech, it nonetheless embodied his vision. 

“I guess you leave it up to the viewer to decide if it is ideal,” Knight said. “Does it look in any way like they're yearning for something different, or are they content?”

An ideal lost but preserved

Inevitably, time caught up with rural Connemara.

“This is that last bastion of that ‘idealized’ life because, by the early 70s, it is pretty much gone,” Knight said. “But a lot of these communities didn't fade because they modernized; they often disappeared because people left for better lives, usually in North America.”

While many of these areas now have electricity and plumbing, the region still holds onto traditions such as its Irish language, cherished by locals. It also continues to inspire poets, writers and artists—including Reader, who, in the early 2000s, returned to the spot where his career started. He still found plenty of sheep, but didn’t take a single image of sheep shearing. 

“Back in the day, a pound of wool would be enough for a pint of Guinness, but in the early 2000s, 25 pounds wouldn’t come close to getting a pint because you can’t make money from it anymore,” Knight said. 

So why are there so many sheep if they aren’t profitable?

As Reader noted after a visit in the early 2000s, “some will tell you that Connemara sheep are little more than lawnmowers, paid for by the EU, that keep the scenery looking good for tourists.”

“There’s still this idea of an idealized, romantic peasant community for tourists and visitors who want to see sheep in the countryside,” Knight said.

“Cultivating Community: Stories from Special Collections” is generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment. The exhibition is open to the public and will remain on display in 102 Hesburgh Library, Rare Books & Special Collections, through June 15.