In the words of the artist’s wife, Victoria Mary Clarke, “When Shane was sick as a child, his mother would give him potatoes to carve into people, along with accessories like eyes and noses from a ‘potato man’ kit. Shane liked to make the potatoes into IRA men and women, like the men and women who fought in the Irish revolution, some of whom included his mother’s older relatives. The cottage in Tipperary had been a ‘safe house’ for IRA members who were on the run during the civil war and Shane’s imagination was fired by the stories and songs that he heard about the battles with the British ‘Black and Tans’ in the neighbourhood and the daring revolutionaries like Dan Breen and Michael Collins."