Hammering out a living — a blacksmith's tale from Blessington to Ballyglunin

By TONY GALVIN The call of home brought him and Isabelle back to Galway and they settled in Ballyglunin in the pleasant new home they share with their two-year-old son Cian. He then spent a year commuting to Inverin in Connemara where he worked for blacksmith Peter Folan. After looking at his tools in storage for two years he decided it was time to go out on his own. He built a forge behind his house, put an ad in the Golden Pages and got hammering. Unfortunately, the timing was not the best as the market for what are essentially luxury items in many cases, was drying up. As in any business, trade or art, getting noticed is the key to getting commissions and finding buyers. To this end Garret placed his work in a number of galleries around the country. He has also had success at the RDS National Crafts competition and the Boyle Arts Festival. There is no typical blacksmith's day, he explains. If he has a commission or someone wants a gate made then that, as paying work, takes preference. If the day is free he may do some work on spec in the hope it will find a buyer in one of the galleries and, with luck, attract a few more orders. Each Sunday he heads down to Ballyvaughan in Clare to a craft market which he says can be good. On the morning of my visit he was finishing off a fire set for a customer he met there. As with many labour-intensive crafts in a prefabricated age, it is difficult to get it across to potential buyers how many hours of intensive labour go into each individual item. Take his tree sculpture, pictured here. This takes him three days to make and he has to charge €470 to get €150 for a full day's work. Out of this comes the cost of the forge, the material and all the other sundry expenses that build up. The same applies to making gates. Garret says it could take him a week or two to produce a set of gates whereas a fabricator, someone who buys in ready-made kits and simply welds the end product together, can knock one up in a day. Getting customers to appreciate the uniqueness of a hand-made product is one of the great challenges when trying to make a living as a modern blacksmith. This is why Garret is anxious to establish himself on the art market. Those viewing his work in a gallery generally appreciate the level of artistic and trade skills that go into one of his works. 'It's a living but things have certainly slowed down. I'll just keep going and hope things will improve,' he concluded. Garret can be contacted at creaforge.com[/private]