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Perched above the picturesque village of Kinsale in West Cork, Wild Goose Studio is one of the most famous craft workshops in Ireland. Famed for its meticulous attention to detail, the studio began in 1970, when Kathleen Smyth, who passed away last year, would sit at her kitchen table carving little pieces of art, killing time while on call for her job as an X-ray technician at the hospital in nearby Bantry.
She and Wild Goose co-founder Brian Scott McCarthy began selling their creations, transformed from clay and other materials into bronze or iron, through Ireland’s emerging network of design and craft stores, and the workshop quickly took off. Wild Goose has quietly exported its art around the world ever since.
The United States has always been a vital market for Wild Goose Studio’s output. Its current managing director, Jamie McCarthy-Fisher, estimates that a third of the workshop’s total business comes from U.S. customers—many of them Irish-Americans seeking some spiritual link to ancestral roots or customers drawn to the contemplative beauty of the studio’s bronze and iron designs.
Each piece that crosses the Atlantic is more than a small work of art and beauty. It is an evocation of memory, an expression of devotion and of the distinctively Catholic conviction that beauty should be durable, elemental and infused with meaning.
This month this gentle trade has unexpectedly found itself in stormy waters. Tariff policy, the domain of stodgy economists and i-dotting bureaucrats, may have seemed an arcane concern to these artisans in Kinsale, but since April 2 it has become much more than an abstract threat. While high-profile battles rage around steel production and semiconductors, small-scale exporters like Wild Goose find themselves casualties in the macroeconomic realignment being attempted by President Donald Trump.
Mr. McCarthy-Fisher describes the current moment as one marked by “a lot of confusion and doubt and uncertainty.” Not only are the costs of exporting rising—and the costs of “actually getting something made of bronze across the Atlantic is already expensive”—but managing shipping logistics has become more precarious and stressful: increased paperwork, unpredictable delays and the ever-present question of whether American customers will remain willing to pay more for the same sacred object.
“Our hope would be that because Wild Goose’s offering is unique and there is no equivalent anywhere else in the world that our customers will recognize the artistry and the quality and continue to support us, even if the tariffs mean higher prices,” he says.
The new tariff regime
At the national level, the Irish government has been slow to publicize its own predictions of the potential tariff impact on transatlantic trade with the United States because the situation changes from week to week, subject to Mr. Trump’s ever-changing mood. But there has been some early talk of job losses numbering up to 80,000 because of Mr. Trump’s new trade policy.
While Wild Goose Studio does not yet know the impact on its sales figures, the consequences of the new tariff regime are already being felt. “We’ve already seen orders which went out prior to the tariffs coming in being held in customs now,” Mr. McCarthy-Fisher explains, “so there is a very immediate impact in slowing down commerce. That is happening as we speak.”
The new tariff rate is “our margin gone in one fell swoop,” he says. For the short term, with a trade show coming up in New Jersey specifically for the studio’s American customers, Mr. McCarthy-Fisher is prepared to take the hit and swallow the tariff for orders placed there “as a gesture of goodwill to our customers.” But “beyond that we will have to apply an extra charge, and that inevitably has consequences,” he says.
Amid the turmoil, he finds himself reflecting on the studio's roots and its enduring connection to the Irish landscape and culture.
Mr. McCarthy-Fisher remembers the studio’s humble origins in what remains one of its most beloved pieces, a work inspired by a conversation with a local parish priest. The pastor had mentioned that there was an ancient standing stone—the remainder of what was likely an ornate Celtic High Cross—that might prove an inspiration for a new creation.
When Ms. Smyth went to visit the site recommended by the pastor, she found the age- and weather-worn Kilnaruane Pillar Stone standing in a field. “She rubbed grass onto it to bring up the patterns that were there and revealed a boat with St. Brendan, ‘The Navigator,’” Mr. McCarthy-Fisher says.
St. Brendan was a sixth-century Irish monk, best known for a legendary sea voyage described in The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot. The text, wildly popular in the medieval period, tells of Brendan and his monks sailing in search of an edenic “Promised Land for Saints.”
He encountered a sea monster, an island of silent monks and a settlement of incredibly strong men, among other marvelous adventures, before landing in what some speculate was North America.
The image from the stone that Ms. Smyth eventually translated into bronze is remarkable in part because it depicts a type of boat, the currach, that is still in use today in communities along the Irish Atlantic seaboard. Featuring four hard-working oarsmen, the piece that Ms. Smyth created displays a simple elegance.
It speaks to contemporary 21st-century people of the reality of Irish life more than a millennium ago in a way that resonates with the struggles they may face in their modern lives—or their faith—today. Like many pieces that have emerged from the studio over decades, it has established Wild Goose as one of the exemplary expressions of contemporary Irish artistic craft.
The movement of holy things
The story of Wild Goose Studio—of sacred objects crafted with care and shipped across seas—echoes a much deeper rhythm in the European Christian tradition. Long before tariff codes and trade wars, the movement of holy things across borders was already a matter of consequence.
It was not always orderly. It was rarely purely devotional. Often, it was political, contested, even violent.
The medieval church understood what contemporary creators and customers risk forgetting—that objects of faith carry power. They shape identity, establish connection and sometimes inspire conflict. Nowhere was this more evident than in the medieval trade and rivalry over relics—those fragments of saints’ bones, splinters of the True Cross and garments said to have touched the Virgin Mary.
These sacred items were not just devotional aids. They were instruments of prestige and pilgrimage. The possession of a major relic could elevate a town, draw vast crowds and legitimize a ruler or a bishop’s spiritual authority.
Pilgrimage traffic became a spiritual economy of its own. Towns that held celebrated relics found themselves on the map—economically, theologically and politically. Great abbeys like Cluny or Monte Cassino built their fame in part on the relics they housed.
Cities like Santiago de Compostela or Chartres became sites of continental convergence because pilgrims believed that in drawing close to a relic, they were drawing closer to God. And wherever relics travelled, stories followed—legends, miracles and eventually, money.
The traffic in relics was not always consensual. A striking Irish example of this comes centuries after the medieval golden age of relics: the contested remains of St. Oliver Plunkett.
Plunkett, the archbishop of Armagh, was executed in 1681—hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn during a wave of anti-Catholic persecution in England. He was the last Catholic martyr in Britain, and his death made him an immediate symbol for the beleaguered Irish church.
But in the years following his execution, his remains became the subject of a quieter intra-Catholic struggle. His head was removed from its resting place and smuggled to Rome, then returned to Ireland, where it was eventually enshrined in Drogheda, an hour north of Dublin. His body, meanwhile, ended up in a Benedictine monastery in Germany.
As interest in his cause for canonization grew, so too did debate about the rightful home of his relics. Irish clergy saw in him a national icon; English Catholics saw in him a heroic witness of their own embattled faith. His scattered bones became symbols not only of sanctity but of contested memory.
The story of Plunkett’s relics reminds us that the movement of sacred objects is never just about transport—it is about meaning. It is about who claims a saint, who displays the sacred and who gets to say what holiness looks like.
The objects exported from Wild Goose Studio are not relics in the strict sense, of course. But they are part of a related tradition—a tradition of sacred materiality, a distinctively Catholic view of human endeavour that sees labor as meaningful beyond mere economic benefit.
One of Mr. McCarthy-Fisher’s concerns is that the friendships that Wild Goose has established in the United States have become collateral damage to rising tariffs. “We’ve dealt with people over a long period of time,” he says.
Bringing that connection to an end because of a customs code or an import tax ruptures something valuable, he suggests. “These would be people who come up with new ideas for pieces for us in the past,” he says. “These are real relationships.”
If we believe in a sacramental worldview, then even a tariff policy cannot be exempt from moral scrutiny. A Catholic vision of the economy begins not with profit margins or protectionist calculations, but with people—craftspeople and customers, stories and symbols, all bound together by a shared imagination.
A bronze cross shipped from West Cork to Wisconsin may seem insignificant to the vast machinery of global trading. But it is a quiet witness to faith made material, to beauty in service of communion. And in this fractured world, protecting those connections, even ones created by commerce, may be more important than ever.
