Sweet treat: Three generations bag first prize in photography competition
Eileen Maloney in her shop in Athlone with her great granddaughter Ryleigh Maloney Hughes. This picture by Eileen's daughter Helen took first place in the all-island ‘How We Age’ photographic competition run by The Institute of Public Health. A ‘How We Age’ gallery of selected images will be launched in October to mark International Day of Older Persons
An image capturing the close bond between different generations of one family went down a treat with judges at the Institute of Public Health’s How We Age photography competition.
The all-island competition invited photographers to submit images capturing older people in their everyday lives with the theme Staying Active, Staying Social, Staying Connected.
The setting for the winning entry is Murphy’s shop on the old Ballinasloe road in Athlone, County Westmeath. The adorable image features three-year-old Ryleigh Maloney Hughes selecting sweets from her 80-year-old great-grandmother and shopkeeper, Eileen Whelan.
Behind the lens is Eileen’s daughter and Ryleigh’s grandmother, Helen Maloney, who is thrilled to see her special snap picked for the first prize in the competition.
“That’s my mother, she’s 80 and she is in that shop all her life and that’s my granddaughter, she’s three. She’s always in wanting sweets anyway so we saw the competition and thought that would be a great idea,” explains Helen.
“She [my mother] was all for it and of course, the granddaughter, she loved the sweets so that suited her.”
Helen, who has been involved in the Athlone Camera Club for the past six years, says her mother has worked in the shop for her entire life. Even now, at 80 years of age, Eileen works seven days a week — not even closing for Christmas Day.
“She’s in the shop all her life. She’s 80 and she opens seven days a week. It has to be open. She gets worried about the neighbours,” she says.
“Christmas — she’ll open for a half day. Lots of people come in for cigarettes and batteries. Every Christmas it’s the same. So, she will close at about 1pm.”
When she first found out about the photography competition, Helen knew that she wanted to make her mother the focus of her entry: “I’m always trying to get her [in a picture] anyway and she doesn’t mind it a bit, my mother. She likes the photos and she’s like, ‘when is the next competition?'."
The three generations all live within a couple of miles of one another and as evident in the winning entry, Ryleigh has a close relationship with her great-grandmother and has no problem telling her which sweets she would like.
“All the other kids come in after school and she sees them there, so she wanted to copy them. You have to have the bag out. And ‘I have to have one of them, one of them and one of them’. It’s like .”
The only issue, however, is that Ryleigh now expects a bag of sweets each time she visits her great-grandmother.
“She expects them now the whole time. Every time she goes in, she thinks she can have another bag of sweets,” says Helen.
Coming in second place at the Institute of Public Health’s How We Age photography competition is Gerry Scully from Dublin, who captured his parents-in-law, Aidan and Mary Ellison, on a family holiday in France.
Third place went to Mark Davison, from Lisburn, who captured a poignant Covid-19 snapshot.
The entries will be complied to create a gallery of stock images for use in the Institute of Public Health’s (IPH) ongoing work to promote healthy ageing and broader public health themes.
IPH Director of Ageing Development and Research, Roger O’Sullivan, said they were highly impressed by the entries: “Many entries featured parents, grandparents, neighbours, friends or community or group activities and the breadth of images really captured the ordinary and extraordinary moments in the everyday lives of older people.”
