It was while looking for photography exhibitions in London that I stumbled across Deidre O’Callahan’s Hide the Can series on the V&A website. To be honest, I was looking for new movements in contemporary photography, not a 2003 exhibition, but I was drawn to O’Callahan’s subject matter through my connections to Ireland.

O’Callaghan spent four years getting to know the men of Arlington House and photographing the despair, humor and hope that she found there.  Arlington House is an imposing red brick building located in Camden Town, built over a hundred years ago by Lord Rowton to house impoverished manual laborers. It has over 382 beds, making it the largest male refuge in Europe. Today over 70% of the residents are Irish, few work, and most are alcoholics.

 O’Callaghan was originally invited to the house to document a group trip to Co. Clare made possible by the Aisling Project. For many of the men this was their first trip home in over twenty years. Now in their 50s and 60s, they left Ireland as young men to find work in manual laboring. O’Callaghan states “They emigrated, not through choice, stayed though reluctant, and never returned out of pride”.

I am married to an Irishman who himself left Dublin over twenty years ago to find work. Although they have since returned, his parents left Ireland forty years ago for the same reason. Today, the youth are again leaving Ireland in their droves as employment prospects plummet yet again. On a recent visit, I was speaking to an elderly man who was devastated that his grandchildren had to leave their homeland for any chance of employment. Following the glory years as the “Celtic Tiger” of the European economy, he had thought that those days had finally come to pass. Today, Ireland has the highest suicide rate in young men under 25 as the unemployed  who can are leaving rural Ireland. This is difficult for a country whose citizens have such a strong sense of national identity. As O’Callahan stated, it is not by choice that they are leaving.

When my Grandfather first heard I was dating an Irishman he was surprisingly concerned. He had owned a landscape gardening business whose workforce were the same Irish laborers as the original residents of Arlington House. He would pay them in cash on a Friday and they wouldn’t turn up again until the Tuesday or Wednesday, whenever the beer money ran out. I found myself wondering how many had passed through the doors of Arlington House. 

  

 Hide the Can is a combination of O’Callahan’s images of the residents at odds with the outside world, text from Bono recording the work of the hostel as it tries to integrate the residents within  that world, and interviews with the residents themselves. When published in 2003, Hide the Can won New York’s International Center of Photography  Infinity Award for best publication  and the Rencontres de la Photographie D'Arles award for best book. This critical acclaim is much deserved as O’Callahan’s work show all aspects of the political, humanist and aesthetic forces that drive documentary photography. O’Callaghan has successfully stepped into a community, stepped back, reflected and then produced a body of work that is a testimony to the support these men give each other in a shared situation of mental and physical difficulties. The write up on the V&A website states that “Hide the Can” is a traditional version of humanist documentary photography, one in which O’Callaghan attempts to give a dignity to the men of Arlington House and show her empathy for a forgotten generation of migrant workers.” My greatest fear is that these men do not just represent a period of history past, but a real future possibility with the current economic climate in Ireland.