When Will We Be Married

Prompted by a family letter from the Vatican in 1968, condemning my parents’ relationship, I returned to Northern Ireland to photograph a landscape shaped by historic tension and my own uneasy sense of belonging.

“I have thought a good deal, since my return, about Denis and the girl he is going with. I have prayed God to open his eyes to the danger of the situation in which he has placed himself.

 So far as I could learn, he has not asked this girl to become a Catholic, and he is prepared to contract a mixed marriage with her. Against such a marriage we must set our faces. There has not been a mixed marriage among any of our near relations.

 What will be the result if he married her? The children will be brought up as Protestants, probably of the bitter Belfast type…” (extract)

At my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, deep in the English countryside, my father read aloud a letter from his uncle and namesake, Monsignor Denis Mac Daid. Written in 1968 and sent from the Vatican in Rome back home to Derry, the letter was intended as a warning about the Protestant girl my father was going with.

 Like many, I had grown up pondering the story of my parents’ romance: Nana becoming ill through anguish about her daughter’s Catholic boyfriend, my mother seeing him in secret regardless. Hearing the letter read aloud was a profound moment. As the Monsignor’s voice sounded out from history, I fully comprehended for the first time the complex backdrop of my parents’ union and my family home.

 From the outset, their relationship caused tension within both families, and traces of this anxiety are bound into a landscape that, for me, is both familiar and extraordinary. In 1970, my parents left Northern Ireland, married in London, and moved abroad. We lived for many years in the Sultanate of Oman and later in America, with brief interludes at my Nana’s house in Belfast. Although Northern Ireland has always been called home, and much of it feels known to me, I am only ever an observer when I return.

Over the last four years, I have travelled back to explore parks and fields, beaches, suburbs, high streets, towns, and villages, attempting to understand the psychological landscape of home as both a personal and political space. The title of the work, taken from a song, speaks metaphorically to the idea of union: to the history of Ireland, to my parents’ marriage, and to my own liminal position within the narrative.

All photographs were made throughout Ulster which includes the six counties of Northern Ireland: Co. Armagh, Co. Antrim, Co. Down, Co. Fermanagh, Co. Londonderry, and Co. Tyrone, and three counties in the Republic of Ireland: Co. Cavan, Co. Donegal, and Co. Monaghan.