The art of craft baskets: Every basket, from the cheapest bread basket to the most expensive shopper, is handmade. Rosita Boland reports

Here is something to think about when next you look at a basket. Any kind of basket. Even those cheap little bread baskets you see in cheap restaurants, lined with a red serviette. In fact, especially the cheap ones. Every woven basket is still made by hand.

"Every basket has to be handmade, no matter where it comes from - China or Connemara," explains well-known basket-maker Joe Hogan. "It says a fair bit for our trade that they still haven't been able to mechanise it."

Joe Hogan's basketry is in a stunningly beautiful and remote part of Connemara, overlooking Loch na Fooey, at Clonbur. Even in summer, there are few cars on the roads that wind alongside the stern grandeur of the lake, with its barricade of mountains: one of the few places in Ireland where there is no mobile coverage.

Craft-workers do not assume the usual working positions of most desk-bound jobs. Hogan is on the stone-flagged floor of his basket-making workshop, heavy boots stretched out in front of him, sitting on a slightly raised plank of wood, with his back to the wall, protected by a foam cushion. He needs to be close to the floor, because that way he can better handle the emerging shape of the basket.

Hogan has been making baskets since 1978. Originally from Caltra, basket-making in Loch na Fooey means he can make a living in a rural area. He is also the author of Basketmaking in Ireland (Wordwell). "It adds to the process if you can get the materials yourself," he says. He cuts his own willows, which need to dry out for several months. When he's ready to use them, they must be soaked for a week before they're supple and pliant enough for weaving with. He never counts how many pieces of willow he needs for a particular set of baskets: like an instinctive cook who doesn't need to weigh ingredients, he just knows.

Hogan makes baskets for turf and logs, Moses baskets, shopping baskets and skibs - bowls of different sizes, traditionally used as potato colanders. What defines a good basket? "If it's able to do what it sets out to do," says Hogan. "A good turf basket should last at least 10 years. And if you look at a basket from above, it should look round. To be a good basket-maker you have to enjoy it. Repetition is a big part of learning a craft. You won't do that repetition unless you enjoy it. It's really difficult to make a basket without any flaws, which keeps it challenging. You can learn the basics very quickly, but you're always perfecting it."

Does he think people value handicraft nowadays? Hogan weaves on for a while, thinking. "Yes. But they are trusting the craftsperson to make the craft well because it's very hard, if you're outside the discipline, to judge the work. It would be possible to make things less well and no-one but the maker would notice. So in that way, I suppose you make things to your own standards."

Hogan defines his own style with a simple statement: "I try to make them pretty strong." And indeed, his lovely turf baskets with their clean lines and chunky weave, look both substantial and satisfying to the eye; they stand out as objects that are both functional and beautiful. For his skibs, he uses a distinctive wheel-like base, which he calls a "Joyce country base". He was taught how to make the base by a now-deceased neighbour, Tommy Joyce, who was the last person making it. Later in Galway, I recognise Hogan's skibs outside Kenny's Bookshop, and inside Nimmo's restaurant.

There are fewer than 10 people like Joe Hogan in Ireland, making a full-time living from basketry, although there are more who do it part-time. One of the few others to do it full-time is Barbara Kelly, whose basketry studio is at Ballvarogue, Salt Mills, near New Ross in Co Wexford.

In addition to making standard baskets, Kelly makes sculptures, mainly of animals. Despite starting to make them as a joke, they are proving extremely popular. She's made a pig that ended up in a butcher's shop in Dublin, and a sheep that is now holding saddles at a stable in Wicklow. She also makes a lot of birds that people put in their gardens: herons, gannets, puffins and crows. "You work from the inside out, and build it up. My pigs have bones of hazel. The birds have sinews in their legs. You have to able to see spatially . . . to visualise the far side of what you're doing," she explains.

Both Hogan and Kelly offer classes in basketry, which help to keep the craft alive. "Plastic nearly killed baskets, and a lot of the older people were dying without passing it on," Kelly says. "We barely caught the craft from dying out."

For details of classes, contact Joe Hogan on 094-9548241 or Barbara Kelly on 051-397618/397645