As many of you seemed to enjoy the article on Mayo in our last newsletter, I thought I would bring you up to date on what's been happening with this project since then. In October last year, I had only barely begun my project to photograph each of the 32 counties in the island of Ireland. A year has passed and I have taken 12000 photographs, driven 6000 miles and covered 10 counties with a total surface area of 28653 square kilometres.

When I started this project I intended to photograph Irish landscapes. However a landscape, or at least an inhabited landscape, is inseparable from its people, and as the project continued I found myself spending less time in the mountains and more time trying to talk people into being photographed.

It started, unbeknownst to me, when I photographed four Mayo men in a quiet bar on the edge of the world. Technically, it's a pretty bad photo: there was almost no light in the bar and I had no flashes with me, so it ended up under-exposed and partly out of focus. Despite all this, when I showed people the photos from Mayo, this was the one that everyone liked. Before this I had never really photographed people. At least, not people I didn't know. To be honest I find it scary to walk up to a stranger and ask if I can take their picture. However, in this case, it was the subjects themselves that asked for the photo. As I said, I didn't know it at the time, but this was to change the whole project for me.

The next county I visited was Leitrim. Early in the morning of my first day there I pulled off the main road to visit Tarmon Abbey, just below Arigna. I followed a 4x4 down a series of narrow lanes to the churchyard and parked behind it as it pulled up. The driver got out and stood and looked at me. Now Ireland is a pretty relaxed, laid-back place, but the way this guy was waiting for me to get out of my car made me wonder if I strayed onto some private property or crossed some other line.

But no. Sean Flynn, founder of Breffni Plant Hire, only wanted to chat. When I told him what I was up to, he spent twenty minutes telling me all the places I should visit in Leitrim; how he had grown up in this area, before leaving to work in construction and ultimately to build a nationwide plant hire firm. He had come back for the weekend to see friends and visit the graves of his parents, buried in this churchyard. He was a big man, generous with his time and his knowledge, first of many such that I would meet.

In January I was in Limerick, both city and county. Limerick county is surprisingly rich in archaeological sites and I wove my back and forth across it, looking at standing stones, ring forts, and dolmens. The Lios stone circle at Grange is the largest stone circle in Ireland, at 48 metres across. I was prowling around it in the rain, trying to find some way to capture an impression of its size, when a puca-like man magically appeared. Tim Casey owns the farm on which the Lios circle stands. He maintains the grounds of the circle at his own expense, keeping it fenced so that cattle don't destroy its banked rath. He told me that he loved meeting and talking to people from all over the world who came to see the circle, and took me aside into a little shed nearby to show me his childrens' picture in a book of photographs of Ireland.

In February I was in Donegal. I spent a day on the island of Aran Mór, walking its cliffs and stony beaches; some of the most spectacular cliff scenery I have seen in Ireland, especially when you reach the north end of the island. I had to hurry back to catch the returning evening ferry. As I reached the harbour, a schoolkid who looked like he might have been coming back from school on the mainland spotted my camera and tripod and asked me to take his picture. He's the guy in the centre in the blue coat. As soon as his mates saw what was happening they came over and posed too. It was only later that I noticed the kid on the left was standing on top of his football to make himself the same height as the others.

The picture on the right was taken a few months later in Cahir, Co. Tipperary. I was driving through the town and spotted these three kids, clearly not of Irish origin yet carrying a hurley and a fishing rod and looking thoroughly integrated into Irish life. I drove on, parked well ahead of them and then pretended to be photographing a building. Sure enough, when they came up and spotted the camera they insisted on having their picture taken. Xin and Oli from China (left and right), and Rares from Romania (centre).

I spent four days in Donegal in late February, and would have spent forty. A wonderful county for open space, and sky and sea. Killybegs is a major Irish fishing port, and I have a fondness for fishing boats, having grown up in a fishing town. I roamed the docks looking at how much the fishing industry had changed. There were three men mending a net on the dockside and I had to circle a few times before I worked up the courage to ask if I could take their photograph. Left to right, they are Maged Lishmi, Mohamed Arafa, and Brian Mc Gilloway. Brian was from Killybegs, but Mohamed and Maged came from a little further afield: Alexandria.

In some ways the fishing industry has improved. The boats are bigger, safer, better equipped. They are now typically decked in, so that the men can work inside when sorting fish or tailing prawns, instead of being exposed to the freezing waves and biting Atlantic wind. But it's still a tough life. Weeks of hard physical work, alone, at sea, with no guarantee of reward. Fishermen are usually paid in shares, i.e. the value of the catch is divided into a number of shares and the shares alloted by seniority or investment: the owners and skipper getting more, the crew members fewer, depending on experience. So: no fish means no pay, but a bumper catch could make a man rich, for a while at least.

In every county I've been in so far, I've met great people and had interesting conversations. Sometimes I've taken their photograph. When you try to take a good photograph of, say, a mountain or a flower, you have to really see what you are photographing. To look at how the light falls on it, where the shadows are; what is happening in the foreground and background; what composition suits the subject. When you try to take a good photograph, you have to learn to see what is really there.

I started this project, in a way, to learn about the land of Ireland. That was why I decide to visit every county, not just the most scenic ones. But when I began to photograph Ireland's people, as well as its mountains, I began to really learn about Ireland. When you photograph a person, there is a relationship established, even a contract. People make themselves vulnerable when they stand to be photographed, and that's not easy. Photographers make themselves vulnerable when they ask for a photo. In that mutual vulnerability we each begin to see the other as person, and I begin to feel what it is to be Irish.

Ralph Doyle