Co. Roscommon: A three hundred strong father and son labor force was employed in the north Roscommon coalfields of Arigna. A generation mostly gone, joined again to the mineral heart of the valley. Men with the white eyeballs and the black faces of cotton plantation slaves. A coal lorry was used to carry the pitmen to and from work. There was talk that Arigna coal was too heavily subsidized. The local power-station was being taken off the grid. At a packed meeting in a smoke-filled hall the matter of the miners' redundancy payments was finally settled. The mines closed. Memories of the native industry with its factory buildings, old mills, and mineshafts have joined the ranks of Newgrange, and The Ceide Fields in Ireland's legacy of ancient wonders and attractions. On a Bank holiday weekend circa 1996 a poster with a pitman at the coalface says, "Arigna Mining Display, a three-day exhibition of coal mining artefacts, photographs and videos." The old hall has had a face-lift, and there are snapshots donated by the community of pitmen and their trade, family and school photographs: heartbreaking reminders of how it was, and all who have passed away. Those who arrived to look at the artefacts on display were lulled into a chapel hush. The pick-axes, the carbide lamps and short-handled shovels, the implements of manual labour and bits of coal-cutting machines seemed consecrated with a special power, a power close to holy relics. The torn caps and pit helmets were laid out like vestments, with old account books and colliery receipts for sacred manuscripts. And the black and white photos of the pitmen at their work had a sanctified presence. Images that froze and distanced their subjects from their own lives Icons. And a litany of names -- Cullen, Daly, Lavin, McManus, Early, McDermott, McLouglin, Lynch, Conway, Gilrane, McPartland, Dooley, Rynn, Gaffney...generation upon generation. -- Excerpt, "The Leitrim Guardian"