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Greek Masks - Tragic Comic Masks in Ancient Greek Theatre

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Ancient Greek masks have been used in ceremonial rites and celebrations and they have been used in Greek theatre since the time of Aeschylus. Greek mask is one of the iconic conventions of classical Greek theatre.

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Morris dance is a form of English folk dance usually accompanied by music. It is based on rhythmic stepping and the execution of choreographed figures by a group of dancers, usually wearing bell pads on their shins. Implements such as sticks, swords and handkerchiefs may also be wielded by the dancers. In a small number of dances for one or two people, steps are near and across a pair of clay tobacco pipes laid one across the other on the floor.

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IC ITE OID interweaves Aldous Huxley's seminal 1954 novel The Doors of Perception with newspaper accounts of the Limerick Meteorite Fall of 1813.

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For decades, Seanie Barron has been carving and shaping wood in a workshop at the back of his house in Plunkett Road, Askeaton. Initially, his work might be labeled as folk art, yet on further inspection it becomes apparent that his work is instead borne out of an understanding of nature and often-humorous interpretations of the environment around him.

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For The Birds is based upon the Irish myth of Buile Suibhne, or the Frenzy of Sweeney. Set in the year 637 in the midst of tensions between ancient Celtic traditions and the newly arrived Christian domination, Sweeney is cursed to be half-man, half-bird.

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Shedboadshed - Realised specifically for the exhibition Cuttings, Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No.2) is a reinterpretation of the idea of mobile architecture. The project involves the movement of a found structure, an old wooden shed, from one riverside location to another. This journey of 8 km downstream from Schweizerhalle to the centre of Basel was undertaken through the temporary mutation of the shed into a boat. This boat, a copy of a tradition Weidling, was made only with wood from the shed and was subsequently used as a transport system for the remaining parts of the structure. The shed already included an oar of the type used on Weidlings nailed to its facade as decoration. In its new location, the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, the boat was then dismantled and once again re-
configured into its original form, but for a few scars left over from its life as a boat, it stands just as it once did several kilometres up-stream.

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Realised specifically for the exhibition Cuttings, Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No.2) is a reinterpretation of the idea of mobile architecture. The project involves the movement of a found structure, an old wooden shed, from one riverside location to another. This journey of 8 km downstream from Schweizerhalle to the centre of Basel was undertaken through the temporary mutation of the shed into a boat. This boat, a copy of a tradition Weidling, was made only with wood from the shed and was subsequently used as a transport system for the remaining parts of the structure. The shed already included an oar of the type used on Weidlings nailed to its facade as decoration. In its new location, the Museum fÃ¼r Gegenwartskunst, the boat was then dismantled and once again re-
configured into its original form, but for a few scars left over from its life as a boat, it stands just as it once did several kilometres up-stream.

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Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No. 2), 2005 - Simon Starling - The Modern Institute

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Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No. 2), 2005, Simon Starling, Wooden shed, 390 x 600 x 340 cmRealised specifically for the exhibition Cuttings, Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No.2) is a reinterpretation of the idea of mobile architecture. The project involves the movement of a found structure, an old wooden shed, from one riverside location to another.

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Elizabeth Price describes her films as moving ‘from something that looks like a PowerPoint lecture, to something that looks like an infomercial to something that feels like a cinematic melodrama’. For the Turner Prize exhibition, Price is presenting her video installation THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979 2012. Comprising three parts, the video brings together distinct bodies of material into a dissonant assembly; photographs of church architecture, Internet clips of pop performances and news footage of a notorious fire in a Woolworths furniture department in 1979. The film weaves together existing archives of text, image and sound to create video installations that drift between social history and fantasy

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Turner Prize 2012: Elizabeth Price | Tate

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Elizabeth Price describes her films as moving 'from something that looks like a PowerPoint lecture, to something that looks like an infomercial to something that feels like a cinematic melodrama'. For the Turner Prize exhibition, Price is presenting her video installation THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979 2012.

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Aristophanes, (born c. 450 bce-died c. 388 bce), the greatest representative of ancient Greek comedy and the one whose works have been preserved in greatest quantity. He is the only extant representative of the Old Comedy-that is, of the phase of comic dramaturgy ( c. 5th century bce) in which chorus, mime, and burlesque still played a considerable part and which was characterized by bold fantasy, merciless invective and outrageous satire, unabashedly licentious humour, and a marked freedom of political criticism. But Aristophanes belongs to the end of this phase, and, indeed, his last extant play, which has no choric element at all, may well be regarded as the only extant specimen of the short-lived Middle Comedy, which, before the end of the 4th century bce, was to be superseded in turn by the milder and more-realistic social satire of the New Comedy.

Life and career

Little is known about the life of Aristophanes, and most of the known facts are derived from references in his own plays. He was an Athenian citizen belonging to the clan named Pandionis, but his actual birthplace is uncertain. (The fact that he or his father, Philippus, owned property on the island of Aegina may have been the cause of an accusation by his fellow citizens that he was not of Athenian birth.) He began his dramatic career in 427 bce with a play, the Daitaleis ( The Banqueters), which appears, from surviving fragments, to have been a satire on his contemporaries' educational and moral theories. He is thought to have written about 40 plays in all. A large part of his work is concerned with the social, literary, and philosophical life of Athens itself and with themes provoked by the Peloponnesian War (431-404 bce). That war was essentially a conflict between imperialist Athens and conservative Sparta and so was long the dominant issue in Athenian politics. Aristophanes was an opponent of the more or less bellicose statesmen who controlled the government of Athens throughout the better part of his maturity, and he lived to see the revival of Athens after its defeat by Sparta.

Dramatic and literary achievements

Aristophanes' reputation has stood the test of time; his plays are still frequently published and produced in numerous translations, which manage with varying degrees of success to convey the flavour of Aristophanes' puns, witticisms, and topical allusions. But it is not easy to say why his comedies still appeal to an audience more than two millennia after they were written. In the matter of plot construction, Aristophanes' comedies are often loosely put together, are full of strangely inconsequential episodes, and often degenerate at their end into a series of disconnected and boisterous episodes. Aristophanes' greatness lies in the wittiness of his dialogue; in his generally good-humoured though occasionally malevolent satire; in the brilliance of his parody, especially when he mocks the controversial tragedian Euripides; in the ingenuity and inventiveness, not to say the laughable absurdity, of his comic scenes born of imaginative fantasy; in the peculiar charm of his choric songs, whose freshness can still be conveyed in languages other than Greek; and in the licentious frankness of many scenes and allusions in his comedies.

The plays

Babylonians

This comedy, which is extant only in fragments, was produced at the festival of the Great Dionysia. The festival was attended by delegates of the city-states, which were theoretically "allies" but were in practice satellites of Athens. Because Babylonians (426 bce; Greek Babylōnioi) not only virulently attacked Cleon, the demagogue then in power in Athens, but also showed the "allies" as the slaves of the Athenian Demos (a personification of the Athenian citizen electorate), Aristophanes was impeached by Cleon. Though the details are not known, he seems to have been let off lightly.

This is the earliest of the 11 comedies of Aristophanes that have survived intact. Acharnians (425 bce; Greek Acharneis) is a forthright attack on the folly of the war. Its farmer-hero, Dicaeopolis, is tired of the Peloponnesian War and therefore secures a private peace treaty with the Spartans for himself in spite of the violent opposition of a chorus of embittered and bellicose old charcoal burners of Acharnae. Dicaeopolis takes advantage of his private treaty to trade with the allies of the Spartans. The Athenian commander Lamachus tries to stop him, but by the end of the play Lamachus slumps wounded and dejected while Dicaeopolis enjoys a peacetime life of food, wine, and sex.

Knights

This play shows how little Aristophanes was affected by the prosecution he had incurred for Babylonians. Knights (424 bce; Greek Hippeis) consists of a violent attack on the same demagogue, Cleon, who is depicted as the favourite slave of the stupid and irascible Demos until he is, at last, ousted from his position of influence and authority by Agoracritus, a sausage seller who is even more scoundrelly and impudent than Cleon.

Clouds

This play is an attack on "modern" education and morals as imparted and taught by the radical intellectuals known as the Sophists. The main victim of Clouds (423 bce; Greek Nephelai) is the leading Athenian thinker and teacher Socrates, who is purposely (and unfairly) given many of the standard characteristics of the Sophists. In the play Socrates is consulted by an old rogue, Strepsiades ("Twisterson"), who wants to evade his debts. The instruction at Socrates' academy, the Phrontisterion ("Thinking Shop"), which consists of making a wrong argument sound right, enables Strepsiades' son to defend the beating of his own father. At the play's end the Phrontisterion is burned to the ground.

This comedy satirized the litigiousness of the Athenians in the person of the mean and waspish old man Philocleon ("Love-Cleon"), who has a passion for serving on juries. In Wasps (422 bce; Greek Sphēkes) Philocleon's son, Bdelycleon ("Loathe-Cleon"), arranges for his father to hold a "court" at home, but, since the first "case" to be heard is that of the house dog accused of the theft of a cheese, Philocleon is finally cured of his passion for the law courts and instead becomes a boastful and uproarious drunkard. The play's main political target is the exploitation by Cleon of the Athenian system of large subsidized juries.

born

c. 450 BCE
ancient Greece

died

c. 388 BCE

notable works

movement / style

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Aristophanes | Biography, Plays, & Facts

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Aristophanes, the greatest representative of ancient Greek comedy and the one whose works have been preserved in greatest quantity. He is thought to have written about 40 plays in all, including Clouds, Frogs, and Women at the Thesmophoria. Learn more about his life and works in this article.

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A brilliant political cartoon can sum up the follies of the day (or the era) with a lightning-quick precision unavailable to even the most economical editorial writers. The graphic satirist has at his or her command a whole arsenal for lampoonery: exaggeration, speech balloons, and the usual draftsman's tools of line, shade, and even color. As "Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine," a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, up through March 4, makes clear, humorous or scathing works on paper, such as those by Goya or Daumier, can reach a level of artistry that goes far beyond most political cartoons on the op-ed pages of newspapers.

Caricature, the exaggeration of features and physiognomy to often comic effect, goes back to ancient times, but it was Leonardo's drawings of small grotesque heads that seemed to set the most important precedent, even if his intent was to make studies of extremes in nature, not to mock or parody. The word comes from the Italian carico and caricare, meaning, respectively, "load" and "to exaggerate," and the members of the 16th-century Carracci family in Bologna were the first to apply the terms to pen drawings of strange human heads. They paved the way for artists who "saw that selected components could be distorted without obscuring the identity of the subject," according to Constance McPhee, associate curator at the Met, in her introductory catalogue essay for the exhibition. In Northern Europe, Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder expanded upon the medieval practice of decorating the margins of manuscripts with drolleries and odd creatures, filling their canvases with hybrid life forms that still startle and inspire today.

Animals, particularly birds and monkeys, have appeared in satirical works since the Middle Ages, the latter proving particularly handy to "ape" the bestial aspects of human behavior. The Met's show includes a 16th-century woodcut by Nicolò Boldrini spoofing the Laocoön group, the famous Hellenistic sculpture, showing the principals as writhing apes rather than men. The original target, an obscure theory of anatomy, is lost in the thickets of time, but the lampoon of a revered masterpiece is still wickedly funny.

In 1827, the British engraver Thomas Landseer produced a set of 24 prints using the antics of monkeys to satirize human folly, while an anonymous French artist around the same time produced a still terrifying figure of a huge ape holding two human figures by their heads as chimps attempt to crawl up their legs. In 1812, the British social satirist George Cruikshank called on a cast of marine animals to spoof the notorious excesses of the Prince Regent, the future King George IV, showing the prince himself as a gigantic whalelike creature and his most recent mistress as a mermaid. Insects are also irresistible sources for caricature: one drawing from 1808, by Thomas Rowlandson, shows Napoleon as a fat spider trapped in his own web; a lithograph by Henry Louis Stephens transforms P. T. Barnum, who liked to describe himself as the Prince of Humbugs, into a smugly smiling face appended to a six-legged beetle.

Though the political context and inspiration for many of these works are obscure to us today, some still speak clearly across the centuries. Many amusing examples take aim at contemporary fashion-the insanely towering wigs of the prerevolutionary French court, the wasp-waisted corseting of an English dandy, or the mutton-chop sleeves popular in the Victorian era. William Hogarth, perhaps England's most famous satirical engraver, applied the terminology of classical architecture to men's wigs to illustrate class divisions.

For many, the Met exhibition's greatest appeal may lie in caricatures closer to our own time. The late David Levine captured Claes Oldenburg as an approximation of one of the Pop artist's own sculptures, Soft Toilet (1966), echoing the critical nature of the essay he was illustrating. The Dutch caricaturist Siegfried Woldhek portrayed a monstrously looming Dick Cheney whispering behind a curtain into the ear of a squinty-eyed George Bush. Enrique Chagoya appropriated an 1819 print by Cruikshank to show Barack Obama besieged by demons at the time of his struggles to pass health-care reform. The nasty little creatures, representing the conservative media and Republican politicians, blow a trumpet into his ear and attack his head with hammers and corkscrews as the president loosely grips a bottle of medicine.

At a time when cartoons critical of contemporary politics carry enough power even to elicit death threats, "Infinite Jest" is a reminder that visual sallies have a long and lively history and that no public figure is ever safe from the satirist's gimlet eye. The pen can always prove mightier than the sword, in more ways than one.

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A brilliant political cartoon can sum up the follies of the day (or the era) with a lightning-quick precision unavailable to even the most economical editorial writers. The graphic satirist has at his or her command a whole arsenal for lampoonery: exaggeration, speech balloons, and the usual draftsman's tools of line, shade, and even color.

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Banksy, Spy Booth, 2014

William Hogarth, Marriage à-la-mode, 1743-5

Grant Wood, Daughters of Revolution, 1932

Raoul Hausmann, The Spirit Of Our Time, 1920

Raoul Hausmann was one of the leading figures of the Berlin Dada of the 1920s. Hausmann was an Austrian who worked with experimental techniques like photomontage, sound poetry, and collage and was a friend to figures like Hugo Ball, George Grosz and Hannah Hoch. In his assemblage The Spirit of Our Time he created one of the defining images of Modernism. Berlin Dada was much more political than other strains of Modernism, its tone sardonic and satirical, a reaction to the extreme politics of Germany after the First World War. The Spirit of Our Time is the head of a tailor's dummy with a tape measure, wooden ruler, pocket watch, wallet and tin cup attached - a representation of modern man as a brainless robot whose existence is determined not by emotion or intellect but by money and mechanical measurements.

Honoré Daumier, Gargantua, 1831

Daumier stands alongside with James Gillray as a cartoonist whose work is regarded as high art. Sometimes known as 'the Michelangelo of Caricature', Daumier had created over 4,000 lithographs and 500 paintings at his death in 1879. His targets were the privileged French bourgeoisie and upper-classes, especially the greed and corruption of the legal profession and justice system, and the incompetence of the Government. In Gargantua he transformed King Louis-Philippe into the famously ridiculous character from the 16th century satire Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais. In Daumier's eyes the bloated and pear-headed king sits on his throne, being fed bags of coins along a plank by the poor and miserable, whilst sycophants and favourites stand beneath the throne picking up decorations. Daumier spent six months in prison for the caricature, a dig at the profligacy of the King who had recently awarded himself a salary of 18 million francs.

James Gillray, Fashionable Contrasts, 1792

Open any history of the Regency period and you're likely to find images by the cartoonist James Gillray. His witty, fearless lampooning of Napoleon, Pitt the Younger and the Prince Regent makes him the forerunner of the political cartoonists of our day like Gerald Scarfe and Martin Rowson. Fashionable Contrasts; or The Duchess's Little Shoe Yielding to the Magnitude of the Duke's Foot is one of his subtle and famous images. It was a response to the sycophancy that surrounded the marriage of the Duke of York to an unprepossessing Prussian princess, whose only striking feature was her dainty feet which the press were overly zealous in highlighting. Gillray's response was an image of two small slippered feet beside two much larger male ones in an obviously sexual position. It was a poke at the overblown praise and flattery shown towards the royal couple, which soon abated.

David Cerny, Entropa, 2009

In 2009 the Czech Republic held the EU Presidency. To celebrate, the Czech artist David Cerny was commissioned to create a sculpture. He promised a collaboration of 27 artists, one from each of the EU states. What he instead created was an ironic satire on national stereotypes and a test of whether the countries could laugh at themselves. Entropa was an eight-ton installation that looked like a modelling kit, with an image standing for each of the member states. It was installed in Brussels in 2009. And then the controversy began. Diplomats from the EU countries started to notice their states were represented rather provocatively. Belgium by a box of chocolates; Denmark by Lego bricks; Romania by a Dracula theme park; France by a sign saying 'On Strike!'; Germany by a swastika of autobahns; and the Eurosceptic UK a blank space. Removed swiftly after installation, Entropa is still displayed in Pilsen.

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q, 1919

Francisco Goya, Los Caprichos, 1799

George Grosz, The Pillars of Society, 1926

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Raoul Hausmann was one of the leading figures of the Berlin Dada of the 1920s. Hausmann was an Austrian who worked with experimental techniques like photomontage, sound poetry, and collage and was a friend to figures like Hugo Ball, George Grosz and Hannah Hoch.

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Samuel Beckett

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The Chough Bird in The Republic of Ireland 

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The Chough Bird in The Republic of Ireland 

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ICSA met with farmers on Sherkin island last Thursday (April 21) to help them in their campaign for fair play.

ICSA West Cork chairman Dermot Kelleher, who organised the meeting said that the key objective for these farmers was to be designated for the chough bird in order to avail of a realistic GLAS payment.

"The chough bird is extremely rare and found on coastal areas, including Cape Clear and Sherkin. Bizarrely Cape Clear has been designated for the purpose of the GLAS scheme as a chough area but Sherkin which is literally a stone's throw away is not. This means that Sherkin farmers cannot get a realistic payment out of GLAS and ICSA wants to see this situation rectified."

ICSA rural development chairman Seamus Sherlock said that he would be seeking a commitment from the incoming Minister for Agriculture to re-examine the anomaly.

"While designation is usually a matter for the NPWS and the Minister in charge of it, we understand that the Minister for Agriculture had the ability to rectify the situation for Cape Clear in terms of GLAS. However, this discretion was not exercised in favour of Sherkin which ICSA believes is very unfair."

ICSA also held discussions with the Sherkin farmers, led by Sean O'Neill and Martin O'Driscoll on the issue of unfair overclaim deductions under the LPIS review.

"It is essential to understand that these farmers face huge challenges and are doing a great job in keeping farming going on the island and it is outrageous that they are being penalised rather than getting support from the state," concluded Mr Sherlock.

The ICSA delegation which visited the island also included the general secretary Eddie Punch.

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Fair Play for Farmers on Sherkin Island - ICSA

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THAT'S FARMING - 26 April 2016 ICSA met with farmers on Sherkin island last Thursday (April 21) to help them in their campaign for fair play. ICSA West Cork chairman Dermot Kelleher, who organised the meeting said that the key objective for these farmers was to be designated for the chough bird in order to ...

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Island farmer Sean O'Neill is one of a number of farmers losing out on payments under the agri-environment scheme GLAS as they are not designated a home for the Chough species of birds.

However, they point out Cape Clear island - which lies just 6km away and can be seen from Sherkin - is declared a special protection area for birds and farmers there can apply for €365/ha per annum payments.

The ICSA's Seamus Sherlock said it would make a huge difference for farmers on the island if they could access the conservation payment.

Last year the online GLAS system was updated to recognise Cape Clear as Chough habitat.

The National Parks and Wildlife Service provided advice on the most important areas for particular habitats and species under GLAS.

However, a spokeswoman said the "targeting of areas for GLAS" was ultimately a matter for the Agriculture Department. It stated that past surveys showed there were no more than two pairs of Chough on Sherkin.

However, it stated the NPWS will be undertaking new surveys on the island this spring and summer.

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Island farmers in GLAS bird plea - FarmIreland.ie

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Island farmer Sean O'Neill is one of a number of farmers losing out on payments under the agri-environment scheme GLAS as they are not designated a home for the Chough species of birds.

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Red beak and legs.

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Welcome to BirdWatch Ireland, the conservation charity and membership organisation that protects Ireland's birds and habitats.

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Current bird conservation status denying island farmers 'realistic' Glas payment.
Sligo News File Online
The ICSA has taken up the case of farmers on Sherkin whose Glas

entitlements are affected by the omission of the island as an area of conservation under the EU Wild Birds Directive

Sherkin and Cape Clear, islands lying South West of Cork, are among places of the country in which the presence of the Clough, a rare bird species, has been recorded.

However, says West Cork Chairman of the Association, Dermot Kelleher, farmers on the island are faced with the "bizarre" situation where Cape Clear is designated as a Chough area for the purpose of the Glas Scheme, whilst Sherkin, "which is literally only a stone's throw away, is not."

"This means that Sherkin farmers cannot get a realistic payment out of GLAS and ICSA wants to see this situation rectified," said Mr. Kelleher, after he visited the island with a delegation of ICSA representatives, including the association's General Secretary, Eddie Punch.

The organisation's rural development chairman Seamus Sherlock said that he would be seeking a commitment from the incoming Minister for Agriculture to re-examine the anomaly. "While designation is usually a matter for the NPWS and the Minister in charge of it, we understand that the Minister for Agriculture had the ability to rectify the situation for Cape Clear in terms of GLAS. However, this discretion was not exercised in favour of Sherkin which ICSA believes is very unfair."

ICSA also held discussions with the Sherkin farmers, led by Sean O'Neill and Martin O'Driscoll on the issue of unfair overclaim deductions under the LPIS review. Mr. Sherlock said, "It is essential to understand that these farmers face huge challenges and are doing a great job in keeping farming going on the island, and it is outrageous that they are being penalised rather than getting support from the state."

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Sligo News File Online The ICSA has taken up the case of farmers on Sherkin whose Glas entitlements are affected by the omission of the island as an area of conservation under the EU Wild Birds Directive Sherkin and Cape Clear, islands lying South West of Cork, are among places of the country in which the presence of the Clough, a rare bird species, has been recorded.

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Education & Community > Projects & Research

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Education & Community > Projects & Research

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Contemporary community project style Meitheal.

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Shield, Kenya - Andrew Rogers - Google Arts & Culture

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1,270 Maasai created three major stone structures; a lion's paw, a shield and the 'Rhythms of Life' sculpture. It was the largest ever gathering of Maasai ...

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Walking Silvermines

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A Midnight Court Sitting: Inisheer

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A rural Ireland artists' Collective

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The Ground Up Artists' Collective is a support and resource organisation for a range of individual artistic practices, some of which operate autonomously while others engage in collaborative productions.

Some of the most important issues of our time are being played out in rural areas. The artists of the Ground Up Artists' Collective recognise this, and through our individual practices we address some of these complex matters.

The diversity and spread of research interests in the work of current members includes:

Land based explorations and excavations, The Geological and Biological.

Quantum Physics and the interiority of DNA.

Potentials, Nature and the Somatic.

Social architecture, Sacred spaces, Language and Connectivity.

Performance and Socially Engaged Practice

For the most part the artists are based in rural Clare in the west of Ireland. Our aspiration is that the Ground Up Artists' Collective will extend its reach outwards, nationally and internationally, in the next few years.
Collective Intelligence - Essay by Fiona Woods - October 2013
As the Ground Up Artists' Collective (GUAC) enters its second decade, I am afforded this opportunity to reflect on matters brought to light by its continued existence. It seems important to attend to the collective impulse that sustains GUAC and to consider some of the things that collectivity makes possible at this challenging moment of human history. A commitment to the concept and experience of dwelling has been cited by a number of the artists in the collective for whom emplacement is a political and poetic strategy to address forms of social and environmental alienation; this is something I would like to consider. I will also reflect on aesthetics as a form of praxis for the current moment.

The urge to come together and pool resources is as old as humanity itself. We are social beings, hardwired to work in cooperation with one another, inclined to be sociable, keen to play together and to produce and negotiate the collective meanings that we know as culture. The sense that we make of our individual lives is never made in isolation, but always in relation to the lives of others.

The current political and financial situation is having corrosive effects on the social bond; that is well documented. Complex social relations have been restructured as consumer interactions. A prevailing ideology of competitiveness impacts negatively on the psychology and sensibility of many, many people. The need to seek 'advantage' over others in order to get ahead discourages openness and generosity, distorting the free exchange of vital knowledge and information.

Writing about this situation Franco 'Bifo' Berardi has reflected upon the urgent need to re-establish social empathy and solidarity as a prerequisite for sustainable forms of being-in-common. In the absence of a coherent politics of solidarity the task falls more and more to those operating in the field of culture, the visual arts in particular. For all its limitations, art remains a space of experimentation where unlikely things can still be made visible. Although its forms of action may be symbolic we should not underestimate art's power to generate new forms of representation; in fact, a capacity to produce counter-representations is a valuable form of resistance to the ideologies disseminated through the all-pervasive mediascape.

In this context, the Ground Up Artists' Collective is in itself a representation. Its continuing existence is both recognition and assertion of the principle of mutuality. Many of the artists who are currently involved in the collective refer to the importance of non-competitive sharing and support, to the value of dialogue and critical conversation, to the exchange of information and ideas. The artist members work independently of one another and occasionally on small collaborative projects, but it is not the outputs of the Ground Up Artists' Collective that are co-produced so much as the process of organising and reflecting on what it means to produce art in response to rural situations.

A significant portion of contemporary theory exploring situational art practice emphasises the displacement and mobility of the contemporary artist. Distance is made to seem more critical than proximity, temporary association seems to be valued above long-term connection. The possibility of dwelling as a critical relationship to the contemporary world is, at best, under-theorised. This is especially true in relation to rural places.

The bourgeois aesthetics of the rural landscape, being the result of sight-seeing, short stays, and purchasing power, creates a quite different kind of space from year-round farming practices and activities: stepping, touching, digging, hitting, carrying, swinging, tearing, pulling, pushing, toeing, breaking, killing, slaughtering .

In his essay The Eye and the Hand: Professional Sensitivity and the Idea of an Aesthetics of Work on the Land , Justin Winkler attempts to conceptualize what he describes as the 'mute aesthetics of rural people' . For those people whose working hands shape the land Winkler proposes an 'aesthetics of proximity', suggesting other ways of knowing and deriving pleasure from the land, in contrast to the aesthetics of distance referred to above. The business of working the land entails an active and consistent sensory engagement with its emergent characteristics, in order to recognise and understand what is taking place. Where the distanced 'viewer' sees empty fields, the one who works the land recognises complex unfolding processes involving multiple species and forms of life.

Many of the artists working in the GUAC operate in proximity to, rather than at a distance from, the complex processes of rural existence, engaging critically with the overlaps and interactions between social realities and ecosystems. While ecological thinking has largely passed out of fashion, life in rural contexts continues to be politically entangled with environmental matters. There are many artistic practices around the globe that demonstrate concern and involvement with particular situations or places over extended periods of time. These practices understand that 'here' is the very place where social, political, economic and environmental contradictions can be perceived and addressed. Locality in this sense is a temporal-spatial condition existing within a dialectics of emplacement and displacement. By grappling with the particularities and contradictions of how and where people actually live, including an awareness of who or what are not present locally, many of these practices generate conditions in which critical, political actions can occur.

Having spoken about the power of representation I must also refer to its limitations. Representation involves a number of aesthetic operations - selection, editing, framing, choreography - that exclude and render invisible as much as they present and reveal. Representation at its best condenses and amplifies aspects of reality, but there is no getting away from the fact that it is a reductive process. In this context, the proliferation of dialogical and archival practices in contemporary art may be understood as counter-reductive strategies. Likewise, the impulse to intervene in a situation, to engage bodily, emotionally and conceptually with a particular place over time is a way of committing to a complexity that defies representation. Many of the artists in GUAC work this way, combining actions, dialogue and representations in ways that are neither reductive nor easily commodified.

Aesthetics, like play, begins as an encounter with the sensuous particularity of the material world; it is an embodied practice based on inherent capacities of the human. It can also be understood as a fluid set of operations and interactions in which faculties of perception, affect and cognition are triggered and combined to produce moments of attention, awareness and unregulated pleasure in people. This makes it a powerful tool, one that can be harnessed for the dissemination of ideology or alternatively for the generation of episodes of critical solidarity. The Ground Up Artists' Collective has developed as a form of agency through which such vital episodes might be produced and, as it faces ambitiously into its second decade, it presents an inspiring model of just how transformative collective intelligence can be.
Fiona Woods
October 2013

i Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, 2010, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)

ii See for example writings by Claire Bishop and Miwon Kwon.

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The Ground Up Artists' Collective is a support and resource organisation for a range of individual artistic practices, some of which operate autonomously while others engage in collaborative productions. Some of the most important issues of our time are being played out in rural areas.

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Walking Silvermines

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A participatory mapping project of Dun Laoghaire harbour community.

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Meitheal - a dying rural Irish tradition.

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Meitheal - a dying rural Irish tradition.

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Farm structures varied across the country in 1916, similar to today. At that time, farms in the south and east of the country were in general larger than farms in the north and west.

Over the last century the number of farms has declined across all counties and regions though the largest declines have occurred along the western seaboard and in the midlands.

With the decline in the number of farms, and in particular in the number of small farms, the average farm size has more than doubled from 13.7 hectares in 1915 to 32.7 hectares in 2010.

The dominance within Irish agriculture of cattle and dairying has increased over the past century as other agricultural activities have declined in relative importance.

The growth of milk and cattle in total agricultural output value is particularly noteworthy as is the decline in the share of other livestock products and pigs. There has been a huge decline in the importance of poultry in agricultural output; from eggs accounting for 7pc of agricultural output in 1912 and 1913 to less than 1pc in total agricultural output in 2014.
Dr Kevin Hanrahan works with the Teagasc Tural Economy and Development Programme
Then and now: a snapshot of a nation in flux

Harvest time. Photo: National Library of Ireland.

Harvest time. Photo: National Library of Ireland.
Population (1911 Census) 3,139,688. It has grown by 46pc since then to 4,588,252 in 2011.

Farm numbers 359,700 There has been a significant decline in the number of farms over the past century. The statistics on agriculture were collected differently in 1915, yet they show there were 359,700 farms over one acre. By 2010 this had declined to 139,860 farms over 2.5ac, a drop of over 60pc in the number of farms.

Area farmed The volume of land farmed dropped by 7pc between 1915 and 2010, from 4,932 to 4,569 thousand hectares. Counties Dublin, Kildare and Wicklow account for over a third of this total decline in farmland.

Farm size Average farm size in Ireland has more than doubled over the same period, from 14 to 33ha. The average farm in Donegal has quadrupled in size over the last century, from 7 to 28ha, while average farm sizes trebled in Louth, Dublin and Cavan.

Tillage The area of land used for growing barley and wheat has approximately trebled between 1916 and 2010, while the area used for potatoes dropped by over 90pc, as did the area used for growing oats.

Cattle numbers The total number of cattle in Ireland increased by 58pc from just under 4.2 million in 1916 to 6.6 million by 2010.

Government spending In 1916, the overall fiscal situation in Ireland was very favourable for the British Government, with a very substantial surplus of £11 million.

Transport There were 9,850 cars registered in Ireland in 1915, compared to 1.9 million in 2014.

Birth and infant mortality rates In 1916 the infant mortality rate was 81.3, with 81 out of every 1000 babies born dying before they reach 12 months of age. The infant death rates were higher in Dublin city, with one-room tenements likely contributing to disease.

Deaths and life expectancy There were 50,627 deaths in 1916 which gave a death rate of 16.1 per 1000 of population, by 2014 this had dropped to 6.3. About one in eight deaths was due to bronchitis and pneumonia, another one in eight was due to TB. Baby boys born in 2011 can expect to live for nearly 25 more years than those born in 1911, while baby girls can expect to live 28 years longer.

Marriages 92pc of the 15,207 marriages in 1916 were Catholic ceremonies while Church of Ireland and Presbyterian ceremonies accounted for 7pc.
- Compiled by Helen Cahill from the Central Statistics Office
An era when the horse was king

The main emphasis in veterinary education in the early part of the century and right up to the 1950s - when I studied - was the horse, writes retired vet Joe Connolly from Co Galway.

The horse was king. The working or Draught horse was the chief farm drudge and was looked on reverently, not alone for its intelligence but also for its ability to perform the hard pulling; he was the "tractor" of the early 20th century.

There was at least one horse on each middling-sized farm; the poorer farmers had to be content with a donkey on which little enough respect was conferred.

Almost all medicines during the first half of the century were derived from the plant world and from various and even exotic plants worldwide. Synthetic drugs manufacturing was far in the future.

Oil of Terebinth - derived from turpentine - was used as an internal antiseptic, an anthelmintic agent against worm infestations and as an expectorant to help the animal cough.

No farmer's shelf was without a bottle of Coopers Gaseous Fluid. It was also a turpentine derivative and used for all of the above and for the mythical condition of 'wool ball' which was understood to be very widespread at this time.

It was a sure fire remedy for wool ball in lambs and digestive orders in calves.

Milk fever in cows was treated by pumping air in to the teats and udder to create a compression, while 'blistering' of lumps and bumps was often performed by local quacks.

Swapping the spud for white bread

There were very significant changes in the diet in the decades leading up to 1916, with the potato and milk, the staples of rural Ireland, gradually being replaced by processed foods.

By the turn of the century, Ireland was beginning to copy international trends, explains UCC food historian Regina Sexton. She pointed out it depended on whether you were in an urban or rural setting, with the likes of the wealth country houses following classic French-style cooking.

However, there was a rise in the consumption of convenience foods, with tinned products and processed foods in working and middle-class diets in urban areas, while there was still a mix of vegetables, potatoes and oatmeal in the diet in rural locations.

More wheat, meat, fish and eggs were coming into working-class diets, while tea drinking became a feature of both rural and urban dwellers.

Ms Sexton said that the diet of the average labourer may have become broader, but in nutrition terms it as inferior.

This was caused by easier access to cheap food like fatty bacon, white bread and sugar. Better transport meant more goods were in circulation.

"By 1915 and throughout 1916, the subject of rising living costs, the sharp increase in food prices and how people might adapt to these changes came to fill newspaper columns and attracted a raft of advertising for cookery classes, cookery books and food products," said Ms Sexton.

She pointed out the Irish Independent on Monday, March 20, 1916 showed prices were strong for items like eggs, and prices were high as demand surpassed supply in vegetables such as Savoy and York cabbages, sprouts, cauliflowers, celery, scallions, sea kale and rhubarb.

Indo Farming

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A rural revolution - how Irish agriculture has evolved over the century - FarmIreland.ie

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Farm structures varied across the country in 1916, similar to today. At that time, farms in the south and east of the country were in general larger than farms in the north and west. Over the last century the number of farms has declined across all counties and regions though the largest declines have occurred along the western seaboard and in the midlands.

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irish statute book; irish legislation; acts; statutory instruments; constitution

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The electronic Irish Statute Book (eISB) comprises the Acts of the Oireachtas (Parliament), Statutory Instruments, Legislation Directory, Constitution and a limited number of pre-1922 Acts.

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DISTRICT COURT LICENSING AND OTHER APPLICATIONS

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DISTRICT COURT LICENSING AND OTHER APPLICATIONS

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Characteristics of Bureaucracy

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BUREAUCRATIC MALAISE

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The empty, interstitial spaces of immigration limbo; the antiquated artifacts of state "technology"; the absurdist hoops of functionary ringmasters; the deep, existential horror of one's fate swept up in financial ruin... So what if you didn't manage to file your taxes on time, there are worse things. Here are five books you should read that problematize and satirize the bureaucratic horror of the season.

Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens
"The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time, without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong, without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault-full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office."
"We admit that Mr Dickens has a mission, but it is to make the world grin, not to recreate and rehabilitate society... It is the cultus [sic] of the middle class to purchase Dickens; but an Act of Parliment would fail to enforce the serious reading of Little Dorrit." -The Saturday Review (1857)

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
"Ranyinudo, who had a cousin in America, applied for a visa but was rejected at the embassy by a black American who she said had a cold and was more interested in blowing her nose than in looking at her documents. Sister Ibinabo started the Student Visa Miracle Vigil on Fridays, a gathering of young people, each one holding out an enveloped with a visa application form, on which Sister Ibinabo laid a hand of blessing. One girl, already in her final year at the University of Ife, got an American visa the first time she tried, and gave a tearful, excited testimony in church. 'Even if I have to start from the beginning in America, at least I know when I will graduate,' she said."
"Adichie is adept at describing her characters' descent in dignity for the gambit of upward mobility. Obinze's attempt in England is cursed. In one of the book's most affecting scenes, he's captured and deported, or, as his lawyer's form states, "removed" like an object... beyond race, the book is about the immigrant's quest: self-invention, which is the American subject. "Americanah" is unique among the booming canon of immigrant literature of the last generation... Its ultimate concern isn't the challenge of becoming American or the hyphenation that requires, but the challenge of going back home." - The Washington Post

The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker
"When I drew close to the up escalator, I involuntarily transferred my paperback and CVS bag to my left hand, so that I could take the handrail with my right, according to habit. The bag made a little paper-rattling sound, and when I looked down at it, I discovered that I was unable for a second to remember what was inside, my recollection snagged on the stapled receipt. But of course that was one of the principal reasons you needed little bags, I thought: they kept your purchases private, while signaling to the world that you led a busy, rich life, full of pressing errands run. Earlier that lunch hour, I had visited a Papa Gino's, a chain I rarely ate at, to buy a half-pint of milk to go along with a cookie I had bought unexpectedly from a failing franchise, attracted by the notion of spending a few minutes in the plaza in front of my building eating a dessert I should have outgrown and reading my paperback. I paid for the carton of milk, and then the girl (her name tag said "Donna") hesitated, sensing that some component of the transaction was missing: she said, "Do you want a straw?" I hesitated in turn-did I?"
"The Mezzanine is as sure-footed an exploration of late-capitalist office life as The Pale King, but what manifests as ballooning boredom in Wallace's IRS agents is everted into a fascination with the microscopic in Baker's cubicle drone... Baker concerns himself with the preservation of "antiquated" tools of communication, such as card catalogs." -LA Review of Books

The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber
"We no longer like to think about bureaucracy, yet it informs every aspect of our existence. It's as if, as a planetary civilization, we have decided to clap our hands over our ears and start humming whenever the topic comes up... The social movements of the sixties were, on the whole, left-wing in inspiration, but they were also rebellions against bureaucracy, or, to put it more accurately, rebellions against the bureaucratic mindset, against the soul-destroying conformity of the postwar welfare states."
"Utopia of Rules, then, sets about convincing readers that the world is quite different from how they normally see it, and that there's an urgent need for change. If the first venture sounds academic and the second suffused with radical politics, you're getting a sense of the book... while Utopia of Rules stays accessible to the general public, it's still a book where Baudrillard and bell hooks make appearances; a book that discusses things like "the very grounds of political being " and the need for "general theory of interpretative labor. " That ideological stance underlies Utopia of Rules's political project: to wake the left from its slumber and remind it of its anti-bureaucratic origins, and to explore how (or if) people can upend governments without erecting more labyrinthine structures in their place. That project is itself serpentine. Graeber takes us on tours through the history of philosophy, meditations on etymology and linguistics, and digressions into topics like fantasy novels and science-fiction films, all of which are extended enough to make you wonder whether he's packed enough bread crumbs to get us back to the trail. Full credit to Graeber, though: When he eventually gets to a point, it's almost always insightful, thought-provoking and, as befits the roundabout way he got there, unexpected." -NPR

The Hole We're In, Gabrielle Zevin

" It took Vincent nearly a month to get around to calling the credit card company, and then another two weeks for him to receive copies of all the statements, including the address to which all the bills were being sent.
That address as familiar, of course. Vincent called the credit card company again. "There's been a mistake, he said. "This is my parents' credit card, not mine."But the credit card company insisted that there had not been a mistake. The primary card member was Vincent Pomeroy."But I am telling you, this is their address, not mine! I've never even lived in Texas!"The credit card company told Vincent to stop raising his voice, then courteously offered to start sending the statements to Vincent's address in New York."That's not what I want! I want this, this blemish, removed from my record! I want this transferred to the responsible parties!"The credit card company said that it was not - pause, pause, pause - unfeeling to Vincent's situation, and then it said a phrase that Vincent had never before heard: identity theft. If Mr. Pomeroy thought he had been a victim of identity theft, the only thing to do was take the appropriate parties to court."
"In many ways, The Hole We're In is a bit like watching the slowest train wreck imaginable. From the first page we sense the family's impending doom, and we read on simply to discover which straw will break their backs. We watch because we cannot look away, and, although we might hate to admit it, because we revel in their failures... The Hole We're In is nothing short of a referendum on religion, continually challenging the boundaries of blind faith by revealing faith's shortcomings. It is a case study of how one family becomes ensnared in the world's trap without ever realizing it. Yet pitying the Pomeroys is like pitying the rats that risk electric shock for the cheese they will never reach. All we can do is shake our heads and ask, 'Will they ever learn a thing?'" -Bookslut

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Five Masterpieces of Bureaucratic Malaise

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The empty, interstitial spaces of immigration limbo; the antiquated artifacts of state "technology"; the absurdist hoops of functionary ringmasters; the deep, existential horror of one's fate swept up in financial ruin... So what if you didn't manage to file your taxes on time, there are worse things. Here are five

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To understand the world of the deregulation agenda it is useful to understand the history of red tape.

In the 16th and 17th century the administration of Spanish King Charles V started identifying the more important documents of state by binding them with red ribbon rather than rope. This became a standard practice over Europe. When complex matters of state cropped up suddenly there would be red-bound documents everywhere. By the end of the American Civil War the practice was normal across the western world and when Civil War veterans wanted to get a hold of their military records (a time-consuming task by all accounts) they found them also bound in red ribbon. But long before this the phrase 'red tape' had already become a shorthand for excessive institutional bureaucracy.

This usage held fairly consistently for centuries. By the 1970s it remained a phrase which described paperwork, unnecessary bureaucracy, forms in triplicate, foot-dragging, hair-splitting, procedural obsession and so on. The meaning at this point was largely cultural; it described mainly the experience of individuals faced with bureaucracy, be that someone trying to get a decision from a local authority or a secretary having to type out the same form over and over again. It was an expression of the relationship between the individual and a bureaucratic institution. But that was all to change.

The phrase 'red tape' was becoming like a snowball, gathering new meanings by the day.

By the mid-1970s the political orthodoxy was shifting radically with the rise of the Chicago School and the neoliberal revolution they were espousing. One of the great underpinning philosophies of this movement is the belief that the perfect market is the perfectly 'free' market. By 'free' they meant that no actor in that market should be inhibited from any action (other than relating to the most basic laws) because markets are self-regulating. So interference with those markets is inefficient and unjustified in economic theory. In fact, since these are True Believers we are considering it is probably important to add that they believed this to be unjustified morally - this is the libertarian part of neoliberal. It's not just venality, it's a way of life. It isn't like regulation was ever popular with business, but it was more willingly accepted as part of the post-war settlement. No longer; regulation was to become a morally-repugnant, politically unacceptable function.

Except of course that wasn't possible, since the definition of regulation is staggeringly wide. No-one (except real neoliberal extremists) imagines there could be absolutely no checks or balances on corporate action. So it is accepted that fully-fledged market monopolies cannot be allowed. And that businesses must demonstrate some sort of duty of care for employees. And that they can't just dump toxic chemicals in the streets. And that they are not allowed to build nuclear power plants in the city centre with no permission. And so on. This, however, didn't matter. Because as we shall see, red tape is a wonderfully flexible concept.

By the 1980s neoliberalism wasn't rising, it was all-conquering. New technologies were revolutionising the routine bureaucracy and administration of the 1970s (life before mailmerge and cut-and-paste) and much of what red tape had previously meant referred to practices which were in decline. In fact, entire concepts like 'in triplicate' have disappeared, replaced by the straight forward 'three copies of'. If you're not filling forms out by hand but printing them, actions which previously seemed irritatingly futile became a simple matter of clicking the 'three copies' button rather than 'one copy' when printing. Of course bureaucratic processes hadn't ended completely, but that 1970s cultural phenomenon of rows of bored women (always women) in large rooms monotonously typing the same thing over and over again was disappearing. Even the experience of dealing with bureaucracies as an individual was changing with the photocopier killing off 'triplicate' in its own way.

These are the two drivers of what we today understand as red tape - the decline of a cultural meaning with the rise of a political philosophy. Thatcher did her thing of harnessing English Home Country 'outrage' to neoliberal economics and suddenly the difficulty of filling in planning permission application forms for your house extension and rules requiring banks to maintain firewalls between different parts of their business became the same thing. Regulation was red tape. We were all in this together.

The rhetoric just kept ramping up. The more successes there were, the more the ploy was relied on. The shock and awe of the Thatcher years became the political mainstream of the 1990s. History will show that it was a Democrat president who finally dismantled the sensible regulations which stopped banks from imploding. By the late 1990s deregulation mania had reached as crescendo as economists were 'proving' that as long as there was no public intervention the stock market would rise forever. Even now this economic analysis looks like one of the crazier fads of Victorian science, but at the time it simply said what everyone wanted to hear - the only thing standing between us and economic nirvana is red tape. The dotcom crash took the edge off things for a while, but by now we had Bush and the market fundamentalists who ran him as their candidate. And then we get Enron, to this day the single best advert for regulation.

However, something else is going on at the same time. It is perhaps dangerous to imply too strongly that there is intention in all of these changes of meaning, but it certainly helped to shore up the arguments when things were looking ropey for the deregulators. Either way, the phrase 'red tape' was becoming like a snowball, gathering new meanings by the day. In the early 1990s it was all about 'EU bureaucrats' and their straight bananas. Red tape gone mad. By the late 1990s it was 'politically correctness' which when actioned by institutions meant 'red tape'. By the 2000s it was 'health and safety' (now routinely and bizarrely typified as 'Elf and Safety' by the red-tops and mid-market right-wing press, presumably because it was handy to get rid of the word 'health' which had positive connotations). These concepts are now merged into one mega-madness, a world in which red tape is our biggest enemy in day to day life. And it can mean virtually anything. In the last few months along the phrase 'red tape' has appeared over 3,000 times in the Daily Mail. The word 'deregulation' occurred only 500 times. So here are some examples:

"Ministers burden firms with £50m of EXTRA red tape after all the pledges to cut it". "Tory MPs demand a Budget slashing taxes and red tape to kickstart growth". "Thousands of small firms boosted with red tape reprieve on new pensions". "'Coalition is strangling businesses with red tape', say British bosses". "Cost of red tape 'rose by £11bn last year'". "Half of teachers quit the classroom because of violent pupils and red tape". "EU bureaucrats are bombarding businesses with 'unwarranted' red tape, warns CBI". "Elf 'n' safety red tape prevents almost half of police and three-quarters of paramedics from helping the public". "Police are spending even more time dealing with red tape, new figures show". "£14,000 red tape bill for every firm". "EU red tape to sabotage blueprint for recovery, warn insurers".

Truly, it's a red tape apocalypse. But what exactly is the beef? "There's too much stifling anti-meritocratic equalities regulation suffocating businesses, and a rising tide of environmental regulation and bureaucracy that threatens growth". So its equalities legislation and environmental protection? Or "The biggest costs were rules stopping shops from displaying tobacco and stricter checks on doctors from overseas". So it's health legislation and immigration checks. "The Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs said its extra costs came primarily from a shift in rules on sewage pipes. Responsibility has passed from homeowners to water firms for the pipes." OK, its not more red tape, the problem is that only households should suffer, not business? "They are calling for firms with fewer than ten employees to be excluded from unfair dismissal laws to encourage them to create jobs". Ah, the problem is not being allowed to dismiss employees unfairly? "Regulations governing minimum room sizes, door widths and the number of lifts will merely become guidelines". So allowing people to make rooms and doors too small for use will save the economy? "[Government] needs to prevent the 'flow of bad regulation from Europe' from becoming another barrier to growth". Oh, Europe again. "The percentage of time spent on paperwork has risen from 18.4 per cent of all officer time in 2005 to 19.7 per cent in 2007". Police paperwork? "The blizzard of rules and regulations includes administering complex changes to tax codes, maternity benefits, paternity leave and health and safety legislation". What now, tax and motherhood? "A major initiative to encourage private investment in infrastructure faces a regulatory hurdle that could limit the amount of money committed to new roads, railways and power stations." Now its rules preventing financial institutions putting all their liquidity into risky project? How is one to keep up.

But in one neat chunk of right-wing diatribe we get to the heart of the matter. "They are calling for firms with fewer than ten employees to be excluded from unfair dismissal laws to encourage them to create jobs ... and a clamour for the death penalty - preferably by hanging - to be reintroduced." This one is from the 'wish list' of red tape the public has said it wants removed in a government consultation. And what it shows is that preventing people from being hung by their necks until dead is a problem of 'red tape'. So is allowing speed cameras. But curiously preventing traveller communities from setting up home wherever they like isn't seen as a red tape problem.

What red tape has come to mean is populism in the technical sense married to neoliberal economics. Populism is a way of defining the point at which 'we' becomes 'them'. Red tape is the line at which the majority are beset by the minority. The minority can be liberal do-gooders, environmental bureaucrats, secularists, Europeans, trade unions - anyone who challenges the right to complete free action from the left (but not from the right - a place from which red tape becomes 'common sense'). The neoliberal element is straightforward - business should be above the law, so long as it doesn't physically hurt its customers (or indeed annoy 'the majority' too much by selling petrol, electricity, gas or mortgages too expensively). But the contradictions must me kept to a minimum - on which side of the red tape is 'maternity'? The 'protect the family' side or the 'set business free' side?

Unless we understand that red tape as an aggregate idea is meaningless then we can't engage with the debate. It means precisely what those deploying it want it to mean. So it is a construct of the Daily Mail and the Institute of Directors. And together they let slip the extent of their ambitions: "At that rate it would take 4,000 years to completely eradicate the £112billion cost of regulation on business" they collectively say. Eradicate? No regulation at all? Complete freedom for big businesses to do as they please?

There can only be one response to this - a relentless defence of the importance of regulation and a rigorous challenge to the baseless arguments for deregulation. I have now ploughed through more Daily Mail than I'd ever want to and found that red tape stories manage to encompass all things known to man. Except one; detailed evidence. Over and over again numbers are thrown around - how much it will cost, how much time policemen spend on paperwork, why teachers say they will leave the classroom. It's only by reading on that one starts to find the holes. I have yet to find a single detailed explanation of why this is costing '£122 billion' (or 'up to £14,400 a year' or whatever). We just have to accept it. I read the story about the school teachers and despite 'red tape' featuring prominently in the headline I could find no mention of it in the story - "The top reasons for quitting were found to be poorly behaved children, excessive workload and lack of family time". And as I read the story about the police I gained not a shred of information about what this paperwork was that they were filling in. It occurred to me that it might be something to do with 'health and safety' or it might well be a result of modern forensics, or data protection or who knows. In fact, red tape is a religion in which you believe, you don't ask questions.

The market will not protect the environment or workers or communities or desist from monopolistic practices if something does not prevent them. It is called regulation. For individual we call it 'the law'. And we should support both for very good reasons.

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To understand the world of the deregulation agenda it is useful to understand the history of red tape. In the 16th and 17th century the administration of Spanish King Charles V started identifying the more important documents of state by binding them with red ribbon rather than rope.

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With the the abortion referendum result as tight as discretionary income in the Ireland of frugal comforts, Irish identity appears on the cusp of transformation, writes Eddie Holt.

Broadcasting on Radio Éireann on St Patrick's Day, 1943, Taoiseach Éamon de Valera delivered his famous/notorious "dream" speech. In the 59 years since, phrases from that speech - "comely maidens", "sturdy athletic youths", "cosy homesteads", "frugal comforts" and "dancing at the crossroads" - have become for many people a sneering idiomatic shorthand for the Ireland dreamt of by Dev. On the eve of St Patrick's Day, 2002, all has changed, if not quite utterly, at least substantially.

In the course of two generations, the maidens have metamorphosed into feminists, power-women and, in media-speak, at least, "stunning babes". The sturdiest of our athletic youths employ agents to haggle for outlandish loot in professional sport. A cosy homestead costs hundreds of thousands of pounds and is a dream many young adults can't afford. Frugality means joining the Government savings scheme and the crossroads are more likely to be traffic-jammed roundabouts.

As for dancing . . . it's now "clubbing", with ecstatic (or Ecstasised?) bare-chested youths and scantily-clad maidens lepping about and guzzling water instead of the furtive porter and chaste soft drinks that respectively fortified male and female céilí-goers in Dev's day.

Indeed, on the night of his "dream" speech, Dev and other members of government celebrated the national holiday at a UCD-organised céilí in the Great Hall at Dublin Castle. There was, reportedly, "enthusiastic applause", when Dev and his ministers joined in the dancing. A dancing Dev must have been a sight to see. After all, formality frolicking always has the riveting schizoid appeal of a car crash - you can't bear to look while at the same time you can't look away.

Some 19 years later, Dev celebrated St Patrick's Day at the Vatican. The Swiss Guard greeted him and his wife, Sinéad, when they arrived for a private audience with Pope John XXIII. For the occasion, Dev wore the collar of the Supreme Order of Christ which had been bestowed on him the previous day.

Although early hairline cracks would soon appear in the then practically monolithic Catholic Republic, Dev's displays of fealty to Gaelic culture and Rome characterised the country he led. Céilís and Catholicism were badges of Irish identity in De Valera's state. s far back as the 19th century, William Butler Yeats had been advised that if he wished to effect any significant changes in Irish public life, he would require the support of either the Catholic Church or the Fenians. Coming from a line of Ascendancy Protestants, Yeats was never going to get Rome's blessing, so he sought (for a time) to make common purpose with the Fenians.

That old rule-of-thumb about crusaders for change in Ireland needing the support of either the Catholic Church or the Fenians (ideally, of course, both!) remained broadly true throughout the 20th century. However, the recent abortion referendum placed both the Church and Fianna Fáil on the losing side (although the ultra-Fenians of Sinn Féin, like the Dana-ite "ultra-Catholics", advocated a "no" vote). Thus, at the start of a new century, Irish identity appears on the cusp - the abortion referendum result was as tight as discretionary income in the Ireland of frugal comforts - of transformation.

Even soccer in Croke Park, where, in Dev's Ireland, the now unfashionable Railway Cup finals used to fill the place on St Patrick's Day, seems increasingly likely. Being a primarily urban game - Gaelic football or hurling on concrete is too macho for even the Cúchulainns among us - and overpoweringly marketed, the popularity of soccer reflects the dramatic urban/rural divide evident in the referendum result. In such a context, David Trimble's bitter outburst last weekend appears signally ill-timed.

Is the Republic, as he claimed, "a pathetic, sectarian state"? It depends on your perspective, I suppose. But given the perspective of the North - that harmonious model of non-sectarianism, cosmopolitan tolerance and socio-economic dynamism - Trimble's rant seems not only insulting but incredible. Of course, he framed the substance of his rant in the context of "the United Kingdom state", an entity which arguably is experiencing a far more profound identity crisis than the Republic of Ireland.

"Contrast the United Kingdom state," said Trimble, "[it's a] vibrant multi-ethnic, multinational liberal democracy, the fourth largest economy in the world, the most reliable ally of the US in the fight against international terrorism, with the pathetic sectarian, mono-ethnic, mono-cultural state to our south." Well, we could make that contrast, bearing in mind the vibrant racism, the watermark stain on democracy of not being permitted to elect a head of state, and the "lap-dog-of-George-Bush" status of Tony Blair.

But what's the point? For Trimble, the UK context seems untranscendable.

(Mind you, when he called for a referendum on Irish unity, the electorate of England, Scotland and Wales - a mere 97.5 per cent of the UK population - were pointedly not invited to vote.) Anyway, the increasingly disunited United Kingdom is not an untranscendable context in this pathetic, sectarian Republic. Being next door, it's still significant, of course, but Europe, the US and even the fraught wider world are now the contexts within which Irish identity seeks to locate itself. The fluctuating influences of Brussels, Washington, Rome, London and of globalising economics continue to exert pulls on how we negotiate Irish identity. In 2002, Brussels and Washington have substantially supplanted Rome and London as the dominant forces. Though less intimate than the older imperialisms of Rome and London - consequently, there is less passion about their effects - Brussels and Washington (or Boston and Berlin in Síle de Valera's terms) produce the contexts which increasingly engage Irish people.

So, as we prepare to celebrate our national holiday in the aptly palindromic year of 2002, we can look backwards and forward with equal energy. We have lost, or perhaps more accurately, traded, some of our distinctiveness for material gains historically denied by London and aspects of liberalism historically denied by Rome. In those senses, the Republic is a better country than the anachronism, formerly true, outlined by David Trimble.

Then again, there is no such thing as a free lunch in international trade, including trade in identity. With affluence has come a vacuousness, which, if it defuses divisive, even bloodthirsty passions, is often welcome.

Unfortunately, in contemporary Ireland, too much of this vacuousness parades itself as "sophistication". Usually, it's no more than a sad, James Bond-ish notion of sophistication: expensive clothes, a little knowledge of wine, sexual romps, experience of foreign travel, style over substance - the staples of "lifestyles" supplements and materialism in general. Appropriately perhaps, it's marketing culture muzak - a kind of designer sophistication, sold (literally) as international cosmopolitanism.

The ease, for instance, with which the Republic adopted the euro is telling. It was another shedding of distinctiveness, probably made easier by the sense that the pound was an inbred relative of sterling, but a suspiciously cavalier shedding all the same. Likewise the prevailing political posture of Bertie Ahern. Unlike Dev and other Fianna Fáil leaders, Ahern, as has been recently remarked, has caused difficulties within his party by presenting himself to the FF faithful, not as a leader, so much as a manager.

In doing so, of course, he is representative of the economic imperative which shapes politics nowadays. Unlike Dev, for instance, who claimed to "look into his own heart" in order to understand "the Irish people", Ahern convenes focus groups, opinion polls and handlers before formulating policy.

Certainly, Dev's internalised strategy, while undeniably offeringleadership, was patronising, narcissistic and dictatorial. But Ahern's externalised version, while putatively more democratic, seems equally narcissistic and too cute to be wholesome.

The pendulum which swings between the isolationist old country and the integrationist new one swings to extremes and in Ireland's case, it has swung with alarming speed. The irony is that in embracing cosmopolitanism and designer sophistication, we have become, in many respects, more provincial than ever. On the eve of St Patrick's Day 2002, the Republic's core identity is as a minor province of European politics and US economics.

Whether we've actively integrated or passively been absorbed, time will tell. Either way, the dominant managerialism has little time for national dreams of identity or any such unquantifiable nonsense. A utilitarian mentality has become a part of who we are.

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With the the abortion referendum result as tight as discretionary income in the Ireland of frugal comforts, Irish identity appears on the cusp of transformation, writes Eddie Holt. Broadcasting on Radio Éireann on St Patrick's Day, 1943, Taoiseach Éamon de Valera delivered his famous/notorious "dream" speech.

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Red tape gone mad!

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However, Fianna Fail senator Terry Leyden has discovered Mr de Valera's famous "comely maidens and athletic young men" were acting illegally if they were dancing at the crossroads without a licence.

Speaking to the Sunday Independent, Mr Leyden expressed shock that the existing law bans such gatherings.

The Public Dance Halls Act of 1935 "makes provision for the licensing, control and supervision of places used for public dancing" and citizens have to "apply for a licence".

The Act warns those who hold dances without a licence they are liable to a fine of "£5".

Mr Leyden is calling for a change in the law.

"As the owner of the Castlecoote Replica Dail Bar, I have a vested interest in dancing, but this is still a case of red tape gone mad in a country where Eamon de Valera and John Waters have made 'Dancing at the Crossroads' famous," he said.

"In Spain or elsewhere, one can dance where one wants, in any pub or anywhere else, without having any stupid licence," he said.

Sunday Independent

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You're dancing at the crossroads? Busted - Independent.ie

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However, Fianna Fail senator Terry Leyden has discovered Mr de Valera's famous "comely maidens and athletic young men" were acting illegally if they were dancing at the crossroads without a licence. Speaking to the Sunday Independent, Mr Leyden expressed shock that the existing law bans such gatherings.

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Waiting for Godot, a herald for the Theatre of the Absurd. Festival d'Avignon, dir. Otomar Krejča, 1978.

The theatre of the absurd ( French: théâtre de l'absurde [teɑtʁ(ə)dəlapsyʁd]) is a post- World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s. It is also a term for the style of theatre the plays represent. The plays focus largely on ideas of existentialism and express what happens when human existence lacks meaning or purpose and communication breaks down. The structure of the plays is typically a round shape, with the finishing point the same as the starting point. Logical construction and argument give way to irrational and illogical speech and to the ultimate conclusion- silence.

Critic Martin Esslin coined the term in his 1960 essay "The Theatre of the Absurd", which begins by focusing on the playwrights Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, and Eugène Ionesco. Esslin says that their plays have a common denominator-the "absurd", a word that Esslin defines with a quotation from Ionesco: "absurd is that which has no purpose, or goal, or objective." The French philosopher Albert Camus, in his 1942 essay " Myth of Sisyphus", describes the human situation as meaningless and absurd.

The absurd in these plays takes the form of man's reaction to a world apparently without meaning, or man as a puppet controlled or menaced by invisible outside forces. This style of writing was first popularized by the Eugène Ionesco play The Bald Soprano (1950). Although the term is applied to a wide range of plays, some characteristics coincide in many of the plays: broad comedy, often similar to vaudeville, mixed with horrific or tragic images; characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions; dialogue full of clichés, wordplay, and nonsense; plots that are cyclical or absurdly expansive; either a parody or dismissal of realism and the concept of the " well-made play".

In his introduction to the book Absurd Drama (1965), Esslin wrote:

The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.

In the first edition of The Theatre of the Absurd, Esslin quotes the French philosopher Albert Camus's essay "Myth of Sisyphus", as it uses the word "absurdity" to describe the human situation: "In a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. ... This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity."

Esslin presents the four defining playwrights of the movement as Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet, and in subsequent editions he added a fifth playwright, Harold Pinter. Other writers associated with this group by Esslin and other critics include Tom Stoppard, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Fernando Arrabal, Edward Albee, Boris Vian, and Jean Tardieu.

Elizabethan - tragicomedy

The mode of most "absurdist" plays is tragicomedy. As Nell says in , "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness ... it's the most comical thing in the world". Esslin cites William Shakespeare as an influence on this aspect of the "absurd drama". Shakespeare's influence is acknowledged directly in the titles of Ionesco's and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Friedrich Dürrenmatt says in his essay "Problems of the Theatre", "Comedy alone is suitable for us ... But the tragic is still possible even if pure tragedy is not. We can achieve the tragic out of comedy. We can bring it forth as a frightening moment, as an abyss that opens suddenly; indeed, many of Shakespeare's tragedies are already really comedies out of which the tragic arises."

Though layered with a significant amount of tragedy, theatre of the absurd echoes other great forms of comedic performance, according to Esslin, from Commedia dell'arte to vaudeville. Similarly, Esslin cites early film comedians and music hall artists such as Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Cops and Buster Keaton as direct influences. (Keaton even starred in Beckett's in 1965.)

As an experimental form of theatre, many theatre of the absurd playwrights employ techniques borrowed from earlier innovators. Writers and techniques frequently mentioned in relation to the theatre of the absurd include the 19th-century nonsense poets, such as Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear; Polish playwright Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz; the Russians Daniil Kharms, Nikolai Erdman, and others; Bertolt Brecht's distancing techniques in his " epic theatre"; and the "dream plays" of August Strindberg.

One commonly cited precursor is Luigi Pirandello, especially Six Characters in Search of an Author. Pirandello was a highly regarded theatrical experimentalist who wanted to bring down the fourth wall presupposed by the realism of playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen. According to W. B. Worthen, Six Characters and other Pirandello plays use " metatheatre- roleplaying, plays-within-plays, and a flexible sense of the limits of stage and illusion-to examine a highly-theatricalized vision of identity".

Another influential playwright was Guillaume Apollinaire whose The Breasts of Tiresias was the first work to be called " surreal".

Pataphysics, surrealism, and Dadaism

A precursor is Alfred Jarry whose Ubu plays scandalized Paris in the 1890s. Likewise, the concept of 'pataphysics-"the science of imaginary solutions"-first presented in Jarry's Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, pataphysician) was inspirational to many later absurdists, some of whom joined the Collège de 'pataphysique, founded in honor of Jarry in 1948 (Ionesco, Arrabal, and Vian were given the title "transcendent satrape of the Collège de 'pataphysique"). The Theatre Alfred Jarry, founded by Antonin Artaud and Roger Vitrac, housed several absurdist plays, including ones by Ionesco and Adamov.

In the 1860s, a gaucho author established himself as a precursor of the theater of the absurd in Brazilian lands. Qorpo-Santo, pseudonym of José Joaquim de Campos Leão, released during the last years of his life several theatrical works that can be classified as precursors of the theater of the absurd. However, he is little known, even in his homeland, but works such as "Mateus e Mateusa" are gradually being rediscovered by scholars in Brazil and around the world.

Artaud's " Theatre of Cruelty" (presented in Theatre and its Double) was a particularly important philosophical treatise. Artaud claimed theatre's reliance on literature was inadequate and that the true power of theatre was in its visceral impact. Artaud was a surrealist, and many other members of the surrealist group were significant influences on the absurdists.

Absurdism is also frequently compared to surrealism's predecessor, Dadaism (for example, the Dadaist plays by Tristan Tzara performed at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich). Many of the absurdists had direct connections with the Dadaists and surrealists. Ionesco, Adamov, and Arrabal for example, were friends with surrealists still living in Paris at the time including Paul Eluard and André Breton, the founder of surrealism, and Beckett translated many surrealist poems by Breton and others from French into English.

Many of the absurdists were contemporaries with Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosophical spokesman for existentialism in Paris, but few absurdists actually committed to Sartre's own existentialist philosophy, as expressed in Being and Nothingness, and many of the absurdists had a complicated relationship with him. Sartre praised Genet's plays, stating that for Genet, "Good is only an illusion. Evil is a Nothingness which arises upon the ruins of Good".

Ionesco, however, hated Sartre bitterly. Ionesco accused Sartre of supporting communism but ignoring the atrocities committed by communists; he wrote Rhinoceros as a criticism of blind conformity, whether it be to Nazism or communism; at the end of the play, one man remains on Earth resisting transformation into a rhinoceros. Sartre criticized Rhinoceros by questioning: "Why is there one man who resists? At least we could learn why, but no, we learn not even that. He resists because he is there." Sartre's criticism highlights a primary difference between the theatre of the absurd and existentialism: the theatre of the absurd shows the failure of man without recommending a solution. In a 1966 interview, Claude Bonnefoy, comparing the absurdists to Sartre and Camus, said to Ionesco, "It seems to me that Beckett, Adamov and yourself started out less from philosophical reflections or a return to classical sources, than from first-hand experience and a desire to find a new theatrical expression that would enable you to render this experience in all its acuteness and also its immediacy. If Sartre and Camus thought out these themes, you expressed them in a far more vital contemporary fashion." Ionesco replied, "I have the feeling that these writers - who are serious and important - were talking about absurdity and death, but that they never really lived these themes, that they did not feel them within themselves in an almost irrational, visceral way, that all this was not deeply inscribed in their language. With them it was still rhetoric, eloquence. With Adamov and Beckett it really is a very naked reality that is conveyed through the apparent dislocation of language."

In comparison to Sartre's concepts of the function of literature, Beckett's primary focus was on the failure of man to overcome "absurdity" - or the repetition of life even though the end result will be the same no matter what and everything is essentially pointless - as James Knowlson says in Damned to Fame, Beckett's work focuses, "on poverty, failure, exile and loss - as he put it, on man as a 'non-knower' and as a 'non-can-er' ." Beckett's own relationship with Sartre was complicated by a mistake made in the publication of one of his stories in Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes. Beckett said, though he liked , he generally found the writing style of Sartre and Heidegger to be "too philosophical" and he considered himself "not a philosopher".

The "absurd" or "new theater" movement was originally a Paris-based (and a Rive Gauche) avant-garde phenomenon tied to extremely small theatres in the Quartier Latin. Some of the absurdists, such as Jean Genet, Jean Tardieu, and Boris Vian., were born in France. Many other absurdists were born elsewhere but lived in France, writing often in French: Beckett from Ireland; Ionesco from Romania; Arthur Adamov from Russia; Alejandro Jodorowsky from Chile and Fernando Arrabal from Spain. As the influence of the absurdists grew, the style spread to other countries-with playwrights either directly influenced by absurdists in Paris or playwrights labelled absurdist by critics. In England, some of those whom Esslin considered practitioners of the theatre of the absurd include Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, N. F. Simpson, James Saunders, and David Campton; in the United States, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, Jack Gelber, and John Guare; in Poland, Tadeusz Różewicz; Sławomir Mrożek, and Tadeusz Kantor; in Italy, Dino Buzzati; and in Germany, Peter Weiss, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, and Günter Grass. In India, both Mohit Chattopadhyay and Mahesh Elkunchwar have also been labeled absurdists. Other international absurdist playwrights include Tawfiq el-Hakim from Egypt; Hanoch Levin from Israel; Miguel Mihura from Spain; José de Almada Negreiros from Portugal; Mikhail Volokhov from Russia; Yordan Radichkov from Bulgaria; and playwright and former Czech president Václav Havel.

Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice Chauve) was first performed on May 11, 1950, at the Théâtre des Noctambules. Ionesco followed this with The Lesson (La Leçon) in 1951 and The Chairs (Les Chaises) in 1952.

Beckett's Waiting for Godot was first performed on 5 January 1953 at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris.

That May, Harold Pinter's was presented at the Drama Studio at the University of Bristol. Pinter's The Birthday Party premiered in the West End in 1958.

Albee's The Zoo Story premiered in West Berlin at the Schiller Theater Werkstatt in 1959.

On October 28, 1959, Krapp's Last Tape by Beckett was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

1959 also saw the completion of Ionesco's Rhinoceros which premiered in Paris in January 1960 at the Odeon.

Beckett's was first performed at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York on 17 September 1961.

Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? also premiered in New York the following year, on October 13.

Pinter's The Homecoming premiered in London in June 1965 at the Aldwych Theatre.

Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966.

Lebanese author Issam Mahfouz's play The Dictator premiered in Beirut in 1969.

Beckett's Catastrophe-dedicated to then-imprisoned Czech dissident playwright Václav Havel, who became president of Czechoslovakia after the 1989 Velvet Revolution-was first performed at the Avignon Festival on July 21, 1982. The film version (Beckett on Film, 2001) was directed by David Mamet and performed by Pinter, Sir John Gielgud, and Rebecca Pidgeon.

Plays within this group are absurd in that they focus not on logical acts, realistic occurrences, or traditional character development; they, instead, focus on human beings trapped in an incomprehensible world subject to any occurrence, no matter how illogical. The theme of incomprehensibility is coupled with the inadequacy of language to form meaningful human connections. According to Martin Esslin, absurdism is "the inevitable devaluation of ideals, purity, and purpose" Absurdist drama asks its viewer to "draw his own conclusions, make his own errors". Though Theatre of the Absurd may be seen as nonsense, they have something to say and can be understood". Esslin makes a distinction between the dictionary definition of absurd ("out of harmony" in the musical sense) and drama's understanding of the absurd: "Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose... Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless."

The characters in absurdist drama are lost and floating in an incomprehensible universe and they abandon rational devices and discursive thought because these approaches are inadequate. Many characters appear as automatons stuck in routines speaking only in cliché (Ionesco called the Old Man and Old Woman in " übermarionettes"). Characters are frequently stereotypical, archetypal, or flat character types as in Commedia dell'arte.

The more complex characters are in crisis because the world around them is incomprehensible. Many of Pinter's plays, for example, feature characters trapped in an enclosed space menaced by some force the character cannot understand. Pinter's first play was The Room - in which the main character, Rose, is menaced by Riley who invades her safe space though the actual source of menace remains a mystery. In Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit, the main character, Alfred, is menaced by Claire Zachanassian; Claire, richest woman in the world, with a decaying body and multiple husbands throughout the play, has guaranteed a payout for anyone in the town willing to kill Alfred. Characters in absurdist drama may also face the chaos of a world that science and logic have abandoned. Ionesco's recurring character Berenger, for example, faces a killer without motivation in , and Berenger's logical arguments fail to convince the killer that killing is wrong. In Rhinocéros, Berenger remains the only human on Earth who has not turned into a rhinoceros and must decide whether or not to conform. Characters may find themselves trapped in a routine, or in a metafictional conceit, trapped in a story; the title characters in Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, for example, find themselves in a story () in which the outcome has already been written.

The plots of many absurdist plays feature characters in interdependent pairs, commonly either two males or a male and a female. Some Beckett scholars call this the "pseudocouple". The two characters may be roughly equal or have a begrudging interdependence (like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot or the two main characters in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead); one character may be clearly dominant and may torture the passive character (like Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot or Hamm and Clov in Endgame); the relationship of the characters may shift dramatically throughout the play (as in Ionesco's or in many of Albee's plays, The Zoo Story for example).

Despite its reputation for nonsense language, much of the dialogue in absurdist plays is naturalistic. The moments when characters resort to nonsense language or clichés-when words appear to have lost their denotative function, thus creating misunderstanding among the characters-make the theatre of the absurd distinctive. Language frequently gains a certain phonetic, rhythmical, almost musical quality, opening up a wide range of often comedic playfulness. Tardieu, for example, in the series of short pieces Theatre de Chambre arranged the language as one arranges music. Distinctively absurdist language ranges from meaningless clichés to vaudeville-style word play to meaningless nonsense. The Bald Soprano, for example, was inspired by a language book in which characters would exchange empty clichés that never ultimately amounted to true communication or true connection. Likewise, the characters in The Bald Soprano-like many other absurdist characters-go through routine dialogue full of clichés without actually communicating anything substantive or making a human connection. In other cases, the dialogue is purposefully elliptical; the language of absurdist theater becomes secondary to the poetry of the concrete and objectified images of the stage. Many of Beckett's plays devalue language for the sake of the striking tableau. Harold Pinter-famous for his "Pinter pause"-presents more subtly elliptical dialogue; often the primary things characters should address are replaced by ellipsis or dashes. The following exchange between Aston and Davies in The Caretaker is typical of Pinter:

Aston: More or less exactly what you...

Davies: That's it ... that's what I'm getting at is ... I mean, what sort of jobs ... (Pause.)

Aston: Well, there's things like the stairs ... and the ... the bells ...

Davies: But it'd be a matter ... wouldn't it ... it'd be a matter of a broom ... isn't it?

Much of the dialogue in absurdist drama (especially in Beckett's and Albee's plays) reflects this kind of evasiveness and inability to make a connection. When language that is apparently nonsensical appears, it also demonstrates this disconnection. It can be used for comic effect, as in Lucky's long speech in Godot when Pozzo says Lucky is demonstrating a talent for "thinking" as other characters comically attempt to stop him:

Lucky: Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment...

Nonsense may also be used abusively, as in Pinter's The Birthday Party when Goldberg and McCann torture Stanley with apparently nonsensical questions and non-sequiturs:

Goldberg: What do you use for pajamas?

Stanley: Nothing.

Goldberg: You verminate the sheet of your birth.

Mccann: What about the Albigensenist heresy?

Goldberg: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?

Mccann: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?

Goldberg: Speak up Webber. Why did the chicken cross the road?

As in the above examples, nonsense in absurdist theatre may be also used to demonstrate the limits of language while questioning or parodying the determinism of science and the knowability of truth. In Ionesco's The Lesson, a professor tries to force a pupil to understand his nonsensical philology lesson:

Professor: ... In Spanish: the roses of my grandmother are as yellow as my grandfather who is Asiatic; in Latin: the roses of my grandmother are as yellow as my grandfather who is Asiatic. Do you detect the difference? Translate this into ... Romanian

Pupil: The ... how do you say "roses" in Romanian?

Professor: But "roses", what else? ... "roses" is a translation in Oriental of the French word "roses", in Spanish "roses", do you get it? In Sardanapali, "roses"...

Traditional plot structures are rarely a consideration in the theatre of the absurd. Plots can consist of the absurd repetition of cliché and routine, as in Godot or The Bald Soprano. Often there is a menacing outside force that remains a mystery; in The Birthday Party, for example, Goldberg and McCann confront Stanley, torture him with absurd questions, and drag him off at the end, but it is never revealed why. In later Pinter plays, such as The Caretaker and The Homecoming, the menace is no longer entering from the outside but exists within the confined space. Other absurdists use this kind of plot, as in Albee's A Delicate Balance: Harry and Edna take refuge at the home of their friends, Agnes and Tobias, because they suddenly become frightened. They have difficulty explaining what has frightened them:

Harry: There was nothing ... but we were very scared.

Edna: We ... were ... terrified.

Harry: We were scared. It was like being lost: very young again, with the dark, and lost. There was no ... thing ... to be ... frightened of, but ...

Edna: We were frightened ... and there was nothing.

Absence, emptiness, nothingness, and unresolved mysteries are central features in many absurdist plots: for example, in The Chairs, an old couple welcomes a large number of guests to their home, but these guests are invisible, so all we see are empty chairs, a representation of their absence. Likewise, the action of Godot is centered around the absence of a man named Godot, for whom the characters perpetually wait. In many of Beckett's later plays, most features are stripped away and what's left is a minimalistic tableau: a woman walking slowly back and forth in , for example, or in only a junk heap on stage and the sounds of breathing.

The plot may also revolve around an unexplained metamorphosis, a supernatural change, or a shift in the laws of physics. For example, in Ionesco's Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It, a couple must deal with a corpse that is steadily growing larger and larger; Ionesco never fully reveals the identity of the corpse, how this person died, or why it is continually growing, but the corpse ultimately - and, again, without explanation - floats away. In Tardieu's "The Keyhole" a lover watches a woman through a keyhole as she removes her clothes and then her flesh.

Like Pirandello, many absurdists use meta-theatrical techniques to explore role fulfillment, fate, and the theatricality of theatre. This is true for many of Genet's plays: for example, in The Maids, two maids pretend to be their mistress; in The Balcony brothel patrons take on elevated positions in role-playing games, but the line between theatre and reality starts to blur. Another complex example of this is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: it is a play about two minor characters in Hamlet; these characters, in turn, have various encounters with the players who perform The Mousetrap, the play-within-the-play in Hamlet. In Stoppard's Travesties, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara slip in and out of the plot of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Plots are frequently cyclical: for example, Endgame begins where the play ended - at the beginning of the play, Clov says, "Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished" - and themes of cycle, routine, and repetition are explored throughout.

Ackerley, C. J. and S. E. Gontarski, ed. The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove P, 2004.

Adamov, Jacqueline, "Censure et représentation dans le théâtre d'Arthur Adamov", in P. Vernois (Textes recueillis et présentés par), L'Onirisme et l'insolite dans le théâtre français contemporain. Actes du colloque de Strasbourg, Paris, Editions Klincksieck, 1974.

Baker, William, and John C. Ross, comp. Harold Pinter: A Bibliographical History. London: The British Library and New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll P, 2005. ISBN 1-58456-156-4 (10). ISBN 978-1-58456-156-9 (13).

Bennett, Michael Y. Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ISBN 978-0-230-11338-1

Bennett, Michael Y. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-1107635517

Brook, Peter. The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate. Touchstone, 1995. ISBN 0-684-82957-6 (10).

Caselli, Daniela. Beckett's Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism. ISBN 0-7190-7156-9.

Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. New York: Da Capo P, 1997.

Driver, Tom Faw. Jean Genet. New York: Columbia UP, 1966.

Esslin, Martin. The theatre of the absurd. London: Pelican, 1980.

Gaensbauer, Deborah B. Eugène Ionesco Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1996.

Haney, W.S., II. "Beckett Out of His Mind: The Theatre of the Absurd". Studies in the Literary IMagination. Vol. 34 (2).

La Nouvelle Critique, numéro spécial "Arthur Adamov", août-septembre 1973.

Lewis, Allan. Ionesco. New York: Twayne, 1972.

McMahon, Joseph H. The Imagination of Jean Genet. New Haven: Yale UP, 1963.

Mercier, Vivian. Beckett/Beckett. Oxford UP, 1977. ISBN 0-19-281269-6.

Youngberg, Q. Mommy's American Dream in Edward Albee's the American Dream. The Explicator, (2), 108.

Zhu, Jiang. "Analysis on the Artistic Features and Themes of the Theater of the Absurd". Theory & Practice in Language Studies, 3(8).

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The theatre of the absurd ( French: théâtre de l'absurde [teɑtʁ(ə)dəlapsyʁd]) is a post- World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s. It is also a term for the style of theatre the plays represent.

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Waiting For Godot

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Tape art by Rebecca Ward. Brooklyn, New York.

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Tape art by Rebecca Ward. Brooklyn, New York.

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https://www.rebeccaward.net/works/

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Horizontal vs. vertical, red vs. green

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Notice of Application for Dance Licence.

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Notice of Application for Dance Licence.

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Jeremy Deller - Folk Archive, 2005 (with Alan Kane)

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Jeremy Deller - Folk Archive, 2005 (with Alan Kane)

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Folk Archive is a vibrant, visual account of contemporary popular British culture by the artists Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane. Bringing together drawing, painting, film, performance, costume, decoration, political opinion and humour, and some astonishing objects, Folk Archive celebrates activity from a vast range of British pastimes and pursuits, and demonstrates that folk art in the UK is both widespread and vigorous. The creation of Folk Archive provided an opportunity for a cross section of the community to have their work shown in an art gallery for the first time and includes work from prisoners and community groups, gurning and barrel rolling participants, Notting Hill Carnival troupes, protesters, pop fans, bored teenagers, villagers and the homeless. Treading the fine line between art and anthropology, Deller and Kane have selected over 280 elements to form an archive which provides a snap-shot of the state of contemporary folk art in the UK. It represents both artists’ long-term interests in creative practices and artefacts from outside the traditional art world. Collated over six years, Folk Archive was acquired by the British Council in 2007 and is now available to be shown to the general public in the form of a self-contained touring exhibition.

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Folk Archive is a vibrant, visual account of contemporary popular British culture by the artists Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane. Bringing together drawing, painting, film, performance, costume, decoration, political opinion and humour, and some astonishing objects, Folk Archive celebrates activity from a vast range of British pastimes and pursuits, and demonstrates that folk art in the UK is both widespread and vigorous.

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GLAS (The Green Low-Carbon Agri-Environment Scheme) is part of the Rural Development Programme 2014-2020. It provides funding to farmers in return for delivering environmental management on their land. Farmers must commit to the scheme for a minimum period of 5 years.
As part of the GLAS scheme farmers are asked to distribute bird houses around their farms and in the barns and sheds to facilitate birdlife. For each bird box the farmer will receive a payment of €6/box/year, subject to a minimum of one boxes per farmer and a maximum of 15. Bird boxes are included in tier three of GLAS which aims to enhance climate change, water quality and biodiversity benefits delivered.

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REPS (Rural Environment Protection Scheme) is a scheme designed to essentially award farmers for farming in an environmentally friendly manner, however, to comply with all these rules and regulations farmers have to undertake many futile tasks around the farm and fill out a huge amount of unnecessary paperwork, making this government scheme, which was designed to be beneficial, into a heinous challenge due to bureaucracy.

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Farmersjournal - How to build a bird box.

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Assemble is a multi-disciplinary collective working across architecture, design and art.

Founded in 2010 to undertake a single self-built project, Assemble has since delivered a diverse and award-winning body of work, whilst retaining a democratic and co-operative working method that enables built, social and research-based work at a variety of scales, both making things and making things happen.

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By María Teresa Gramuglio, Nicolás Rosa, 1968

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These documents were originally published in print in Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, part of MoMA's ongoing book series Primary Documents series. This selection is newly compiled by the book's editor Inés Katzenstein, Director of the Department of Art at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires.

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An intervention in mass communication, generating a circuit of counter information about the situation in Tucumán that opposed that of the dictatorship in Argentina.

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After the government decided to close down sugar mills and farms in Tucumán, people were lead to poverty and starvation.

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Plastic Bag is a short film directed by Ramin Bahrani. The film features the voice of German filmmaker Werner Herzog and an original score by Kjartan Sveinsson of the Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós. Plastic Bag premiered as the opening night film of Corto Cortissimo in the Venice Film Festival. It later screened at Telluride and the New York Film Festival. The film is part of the Independent Television Service (ITVS) online series Future states and was produced by Noruz Filmsand Gigantic Pictures.

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Plastic Bag is a short film directed by Ramin Bahrani. The film features the voice of German filmmaker Werner Herzog and an original score by Kjartan Sveinsson.

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While spending time at The Dock Farm and talking to Michael, the owner who farms the land I became aware of the how much red tape is involved.

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Things often described as "red tape" include filling out paperwork, obtaining licenses, having multiple people or committees approve a decision and various low-level rules that make conducting one's affairs slower, more difficult, or both. Red tape can also include "filing and certification requirements, reporting, investigation, inspection and enforcement practices, and procedures".

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Image: Áine Tierney

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Propel Schools: Cutting Through the Red Tape

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Propel Schools: Cutting Through the Red Tape

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Anne Brodie - I focused my campaign on the resistance Propel Schools has faced from local governments and school boards when asking for charters. The red tape represents the bureaucracy that Propel must cut through in order to open schools and continue to survive. The sticker campaign was designed to spark curiosity and increase awareness about Propel's successes and difficulties throughout the city.

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Propel Schools: Cutting Through the Red Tape

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I believe in solving problems through design, creating intuitive interfaces with stunning visuals, and letting my imagination fuel my creativity.

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The Irish Cattle and Sheep Association (ICSA) met farmers on Sherkin island last week to help them in their call to be designated for the chough bird in order to avail of a realistic GLAS payment.

ICSA west Cork chair Dermot Kelleher, who organised the meeting, said that the key objective for these farmers was to be designated for the chough bird in order to avail of a realistic Green Low-Carbon Agri-Environment Scheme (GLAS) payment.

"The chough bird is extremely rare and found in coastal areas, including Cape Clear and Sherkin," he said. "Bizarrely, Cape Clear has been designated for the purpose of the GLAS scheme as a chough area but Sherkin, which is literally a stone's throw away, is not. This means that Sherkin farmers cannot get a realistic payment out of GLAS and ICSA wants to see this situation rectified."

ICSA rural development chair Seamus Sherlock said that he would be seeking a commitment from the incoming Minister for Agriculture to re-examine the anomaly.

"While designation is usually a matter for the NPWS and the minister in charge of it, we understand that the Minister for Agriculture had the ability to rectify the situation for Cape Clear in terms of GLAS. However, this discretion was not exercised in favour of Sherkin, which ICSA believes is very unfair."

Much of Sherkin is already designated as a natural heritage area (NHA), an area which holds species of plants and animals whose habitat needs protection. Some of the land is also designated as special area of conservation (SAC). Therefore Sherkin farmer Seán O'Neill says the farmers calling for the designation would not be under any further constriction with the chough bird designation than they are at the moment.

"We don't get any real compensation for being an NHA or an SAC," he told the Irish Farmers Journal, "so at least if we had the chough bird designation we would be getting some worth out of being constricted."
Chough bird funding under GLAS
The chough bird is included in Tier 1 under GLAS, meaning that all farmers who protect the bird receive priority access to the scheme over the 2014-2020 Rural Development Programme lifetime.

Under the current payment structure of the scheme, farmers receive €365/ha annually for their role in protecting the species, plus a top-up under GLAS+.

Sherkin has just 90 residents, three of whom are aged between 18 and 40. There are 10 registered herds with 350 cattle in total. There are no sheep on Sherkin and there hasn't been a dairy enterprise since the 1970s. Some eleven farmers on Sherkin are involved in this campaign to see their land designated.

Related stories
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Sherkin farmers want chough bird designation

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The Irish Cattle and Sheep Association (ICSA) met farmers on Sherkin island last week to help them in their call to be designated for the chough bird in order to avail of a realistic GLAS payment.

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Ancient Greece

The Greeks had no word for what later would be called "satire", although the terms cynicism and parody were used. Modern critics call the Greek playwright Aristophanes one of the best known early satirists: his plays are known for their critical political and social connentary.

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Mike Birchall (Tate Liverpool) public talk on Sherkin Island

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Mike Birchall (Tate Liverpool) public talk on Sherkin Island

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We had the pleasure of attending a talk on Sherkin Island by Michael Birchall from Tate Liverpool. I found Mike's talk extremely beneficial to my practice.

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David Quinn makes modestly sized, abstract paintings on paper, wood and more recently perspex. He has developed a large body of work to a uniform size of 8 x 5 1/2 inches which originated in notebooks he kept as a design student. He is exhibiting a new series of work for his solo show at Uillinn.

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Joanna Kidney's Metamurmuration is a monumental, site-responsive, spatial drawing composed of approximately 100,000 particles of suspended felt, trailing, pulsing and swarming through Gallery II, the Mezzanine and South Stairwell at Uillinn.

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O.K. - The Musical is an evolving project directed by Christopher Kline, based around the history and lore of his hometown Kinderhook, New York.

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Tate Liverpool is throwing open its doors for a unique experiment that will see the gallery's main exhibition space given over to a collaborative project.

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‘A good collaboration is like going on a long journey without a map, never knowing quite where you will end up’.

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A slideshow with commentary from Jeremy Deller, shows just such a work that couldn't sit in a gallery - performances and public installations.

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Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport. Rosler refers to her practice as "the cheap media movement". This raw style of filming appeals to me.

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Dotted across Paul Henry’s landscapes are the scarlet splashes of the cótaí dearga, the traditional red skirts of the West of Ireland. Beautiful and practical, they could be worn over the head as a cloak, enveloping the wearer like a hijab. Images of them are so familiar yet alien.

Who were the women who wore them? Spurred by the question of how tradition is created and authenticity judged, Cótaí Dearga explores the iconography of the cótaí dearga, and discovers an invented history for them.

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Amú/Cótaí Dearga are two short dance pieces, each about half an hour in length that were presented as part of the Dublin Dance Festival, in the Civic Theatre on May 28th for one night only.

Amú is a solo dance piece by Robert Jackson, which uses film and sound bites. The dancer is on stage as the lights go up, standing barefoot in unusual garb for a dancer. He looks more like an office worker in blue shirt, jumper and pants. There is a length of black fabric on one side of the stage and white on the other. The fabric runs along the floor and then up to a rail hanging high above the stage.

According to the associated text, the piece references the work of artist William Utermohlen, poet John Killick and the HSE, and is a meditation on loss and resilience, although in truth you would be doing well to work this out for yourself. The piece stands easily in its own right and is unnerving and unsettling.

At the opening of the performance, Jackson dances without music accompaniment, with only the sound of his breathing. At another times he performers over sounds of voices or of nature and occasionally instruments. His movements are harsh and deliberately lack fluidity, as he explores unusual poses and stances. These are awkward and at times almost look disjointed, but this adds to the drama and the visual appeal.

Cótaí Dearga is quite a different work, with two female dancers performing in loose and playful form. The dancers wear traditional coloured clothes from the Aran islands, with red skirts and black tops. There is a projection on the back wall of the theatre of a cliff top, with strong grey stone. The movements start small and build as the dancers move to explore different forms. The programme notes explain that the piece is an imagining of a mask ceremony, drawing a link between the shamanistic traditions and that of the Aran Islands.

After the initial sequence, the two dancers pull their skirts over their heads, to form unusual shapes. They use their clothing with great creativity to adapt to a number of different guises, appearing like nuns at times and wild beasts at others.

Amú/Cótaí Dearga was performed in the Civic Theatre, Tallaght on Wednesday, 28th May 2014 @ 8.15pm Presented by Dublin Dance Festival

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Amú/ Cótaí Dearga - Civic Theatre - Dublin Dance Festival - Review

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Amú/Cótaí Dearga are two short dance pieces, each about half an hour in length that were presented as part of the Dublin Dance Festival, in the Civic Theatre on May 28th for one night only. Amú is a solo dance piece by Robert Jackson, which uses film and sound bites.

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Interview wth Martha Rosler. "I wanted my videos to look like shit".

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In Conversation With Martha Rosler - Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal

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Image: Áine Tierney

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Image: Áine Tierney

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I recently returned to the gate where I first performed the wrapping of the red tape - white tape.

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MEITHEAL

Meitheal is the Irish word for a work team, gang, or party and denotes the co-operative labour system in Ireland where groups of neighbours help each other in turn with farming work, such as harvesting crops.  Neighbours who give their work to others are helped in turn with their own heavy seasonal tasks to the heart of the concept is community unity through cooperative work and mutually reciprocal support.  Meitheal is the Irish expression of the ancient and universal appliance of cooperation to social need.

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Three older farmers are looking at a horse-drawn ridger, recalling what a temperamental machine it is. They've come up from Co Kerry to, in Michael Scanlon's words, "see the old stuff we used before the horse went out of fashion".

I'm at Teagasc's celebration Farming & Country Life 1916, in Athenry, Co Galway. It's partially themed around the insurrectionary actions of Liam Mellows, who billeted his forces here in 1916. But it's more accurately a celebration of 100 years of country life - and these men remember a good chunk of that. "I remember cutting banks with a scythe," says James Daly, and Scanlon jokes that soon they'll probably farm with "drones".

The farms are bigger now, but they don't employ as many people, and many of their children are part-time farmers.

Farming is no longer a communal thing, says Patrick Casey. "The meitheal system was at the core of things." he adds. (Many people here talk about the meitheal.) "When there'd be threshing the neighbours would all come together to do it. There's no more of that. The population is smaller. Many people work in towns and come home in the evening. They don't go to pubs any more because of the drink-driving. And in rural areas there are a lot of problems with suicide." Still, life was hard in the old days, Casey says. "Emigration was always an issue . . . Everyone went into farming, but that was because there was nothing else."

The artistic director of Farming & Country Life 1916 is a Teagasc forester and drama buff named Michael Somers. "We were asked to do something on the rebellion, and we felt that a lot of people were doing something about the political side of it, so we decided to explore the cultural aspect of it," he says. "We decided the major cause for rebellion in rural Ireland was the land issue, so we've basically covered the story of land from 1880 up to 1930."

A few things to note about Somers. He is, as we speak, dressed in a vintage priest's cassock, and he breaks off our conversation to wrangle a soon-to-be-sheared sheep into a pen. That's the kind of thing that happens at Farming & Country Life 1916.

When he's done he tells me that the problems that rural communities faced in the past mirror those that they face in the present. "Obviously, emigration never went away," he says. "During the Celtic Tiger people still left rural Ireland. Pubs closed. Schools closed. If there's a message across what we're doing it's that there's continuity in the problems."

The organisers have done a very good job of evoking the past. They've re-created shopfronts from 100 years ago. Fields are ploughed with horse-drawn ploughs. Actors in period clothes explain obsolete farming methods. Pop-up drama groups re-enact evictions, American wakes and arranged marriages.

At a life-size replica of the GPO (from the set of TG4's Wrecking the Rising) visitors can record their own Rising stories in a vintage phone booth. ("If you want to sing a song I'll send it to Simon Cowell," says the engineer, Garry Kelly.) Brenda Malone of the National Museum of Ireland will look over your family memorabilia. "No one has brought in the Book of Kells yet," she says. "Though amazing things can happen."

Panels of academics discuss social history. Musicians play traditional music. Old steam tractors spew smoke. A blacksmith tells a story about a stubborn mule. ("What's the difference between a mule and a jennet again?" a man asks me.) A weaver works a loom. School-touring children have their photographs taken in vintage gear, and a luxuriantly whiskered storyteller tells a tale about an enchanted army of rats.

Outside, John Whyte from Moylough is digging the earth with a loy. ("It's hard work," he says.) Whyte first encountered the loy when performing in an amateur production of The Playboy of the Western World in the 1990s. Now he does his best to keep the art alive.

"Young lads growing up have no interest in the farm now," he says. "It's all computers. And the parents don't want them to know it anyway. They don't want them to have the hardship. Though sometimes a lad looking at a cow calving might get a bit of an attachment that way, or they get a love of machinery."

Whyte is slightly ambivalent about how things have changed. "Everything is out in the open now," he says. "The abuse and all that: it's known about. That's the one good thing. But once upon a time if you wanted a drop of milk or a bit of sugar you'd go to the neighbour for it. They don't have time to talk now. They've a lot of machinery, but no one has time to talk."

Dolores Coffey, a retired teacher, presides over a perfect replica of a 1916 schoolroom. She parades before a classful of wide-eyed seven-year-olds, showing them old-fashioned canes and explaining the concept of corporal punishment: "Poor old Johnny had his spellings wrong all week, so we have to go for the thicker cane."

Coffey is from Athenry but taught in New Inn. She thinks that all the talk of dying rural communities is overblown, pointing to the GAA and a living traditional music. "The local shop did close," she says, "but we're so near everything else, and everyone has a car."

Kevin Cunniffe, who is dressed as an early 20th-century farmer, is trying to help Patricia Farmer, a visitor, into a huge pair of bloomers. Cunniffe, a Ballinasloe-based engineer, is here at the celebration to "make hay and do a bit of dancing and God knows what".

He's a bit of a wag. "Such craic I've had with those knickers," he says. Later he will put them in the hay bale he'll be working on, so he can pull them out and act shocked. He also has a chamber pot that he shows to a group of highly amused schoolchildren. ("That's called a 'chamber potty'," says one authoritatively.)

"I like a bit of craic and a bit of devilment," Cunniffe says.

"Oh, you have to laugh," says Farmer, who has never met Cunniffe before.

Cunniffe laments that nobody has time to talk any more. Young people are leaving the countryside, he says. His daughter is in Dubai teaching, "people have to go to the big towns because the shops are all closing down. The post offices are closing . . . Communication is lost."

His own connection to his community is formed through amateur drama - "and music is on fire at the moment." Later I see him dancing a jig with a traditional musical ensemble. Out come the bloomers again.

The age profile here is very young and quite old. There aren't many people in their teens and20s, but it is a Friday afternoon.

Jack Kelly, a texting young Irish Volunteer, thinks he'd like to farm part time, like his parents. "But there's not much to do around our area," he adds. "There's a lot of stuff closing down."

Anna Finnegan, who is dressed like an early 20th-century land agent, is here with her friends from Holy Rosary College in Mountbellew to re-enact a hiring fair. "It was like slavery," she says. "People would rent children out for the summer, and sometimes they'd just get fed rather than paid."

Finnegan and her friends all like their community, but the consensus seems to be that they will leave it, at least for a while.

"Oh, I'm out of here," says Finnegan, and her friends laugh.

"After college I'm emigrating. I think I'll go to Australia, because I think I'd prefer the lifestyle out there. If I lived in Ireland I'd definitely be in the city - Galway or Dublin. There's just more to do."

In the catering tent I sit next to 71-year-old Tom O'Neill, who came from Dunlavin, in Co Wicklow, using "the free travel". O'Neill keeps donkeys.

He recently won a competition for the best-turned-out donkey.

He's also a sucker for old farm machinery; if he sees a rusty contraption in a farmer's ditch he buys it. His recent acquisitions include an old-time corn crusher, a donkey hearse (a sort of 19th-century cart for transporting coffins) and a doctor's gig, "for bringing the doctor around before there were cars".

"My son and daughter wouldn't look at that stuff," O'Neill says. His son gives golf lessons. His daughter lives in Sydney and works for an insurance company. Farms are bigger and faster now, he says, but there's still a sense of community in Dunlavin.

O'Neill says to call in on him if I'm ever nearby. He tells me how to get to his house.

Declan Coyne and Johnny Johnston, a pair of balladeers, have a toy dog hitched to a wooden cart containing their song sheets. Johnston, who wears a long coat and a floppy hat, takes a while to drop out of character and regularly breaks into song.

"I got six months for incitement," he says, "for singing revolutionary songs at the Ballinasloe fair."

"In my father's time ballad singers - often Travellers - went around to the fairs, selling ballad sheets," says Coyne, who has a big beard, a cap and a waistcoat. "Now there's a whole generation who probably think music comes out of a box."

"Politics is in books," says Johnston. "But the social history is in the songs."

Johnston is also political in real life.

"The greatest insult to rural towns was the slogan 'Let's keep the recovery going', running into the last election," he says. "It was an awful slight to two-thirds of the country. I'm from Ballinasloe, and it's creaking. It's so sad . . . Factories have closed and left."

"I remember going into Roscommon on a Wednesday, and the place would be buzzing," Coyne says, "but now there's nobody in the pubs and no cinemas. People are probably drinking more than ever - but at home."

"Every State agency was asked to commemorate 1916 in an appropriate way," says Teagasc's director, Prof Gerry Boyle. "We decided to do something here because of the Liam Mellows connection. The biggest mobilisation outside of Dublin was in Athenry. We decided we'd emphasise farming and country life as it was in 1916.

"The land is what creates a continuity for a lot of people. There's something very deep about attachment to the land."

We discuss how rural communities are changing. There are fewer and bigger farms, and about half of farmers have a second job. It's a different job now, Boyle says.

"A lot of farming is associated with back-breaking physical activity, but the modern young farmer is a different type of farmer. It isn't really about the physical intensity of the labour any more. It's more about managing resources."

He says that worrying about the destruction of rural Ireland is a bit overdone. "Obviously, there are stats on people leaving agriculture, but it varies around the country. A lot of it depends on proximity to motorways and large towns."

We're joined by the archaically costumed Nuala King and Mary Doherty, who earlier demonstrated traditional methods of preserving eggs.

Back in the 1970s the women were poultry instructors, travelling Ireland's byways to instruct farmers on technique. "They used to call me a fowl woman," says King as a hen strolls under our feet.

King worries about lonely older people but isn't as sure as others I've spoken to that rural society is declining. "People are still very supportive of each other," she says. "There is a sense of community."

As I leave, Doherty even suggests that I might be part of it. "Start off with the hens," she says, "and you can continue farming from there."

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Patrick Freyne: Reports of rural Ireland's death are overblown

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Three older farmers are looking at a horse-drawn ridger, recalling what a temperamental machine it is. They've come up from Co Kerry to, in Michael Scanlon's words, "see the old stuff we used before the horse went out of fashion". I'm at Teagasc's celebration Farming & Country Life 1916, in Athenry, Co Galway.

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A study of co-operative labour in rural Ireland.

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Meitheals - What is a Meitheal? | GIY International

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We have found the meitheals generate a huge level of camaraderie and friendship - they are hard work and great fun. The picture that was at the top of the page is of a meitheal held in December 2008 in Crooke, Co.

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A look at Sherkin Island off the west coast of Cork and the people that live there.

The narration for this documentary is provided by the people who live on the island giving them the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own words. They describe the way of life in the peace and quiet of the island for young and old.

This episode of ‘Pieces of Land’ was directed by Tony Barry and broadcast on 21 June 1976.

‘Pieces of Land’ was a four part series filmed in some well known Irish havens of peace and quiet.

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A look at Sherkin Island off the west coast of Cork and the people that live there.

The narration for this documentary is provided by the people who live on the island giving them the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own words. They describe the way of life in the peace and quiet of the island for young and old.

This episode of 'Pieces of Land' was directed by Tony Barry and broadcast on 21 June 1976.

'Pieces of Land' was a four part series filmed in some well known Irish havens of peace and quiet.

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A look at Sherkin Island off the west coast of Cork and the people that live there. The narration for this documentary is provided by the people who live on the island giving them the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own words.

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I attended numerous island dance classes with the farmers where I gathered invaluable information and continued to build my relationship with the island farming community.

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This installations was made in response to the funding issues of the Chough bird. If you looked through the hole of the red binder folder you can view the video.

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This is the video which can be viewed if you look through the hole of the red folder in the instillation. The video footage of this was filmed at these dance classes.