Speech on his Visit to Tallaght Community Arts
Rua Red, Tallaght, Dublin, 16th December 2014
Mayor,
Distinguished guests and friends of Tallaght Community Arts,
I have only just arrived here, in Tallaght’s Red Rua, and already I must say how enthused I am by the joy, energy and talent displayed in your break-dancing, acting, singing and playing. I want to thank each and every one of you for a delightful performance. May I also thank Tallaght Community Arts’ Director, Tony Fegan for his kind invitation, and all of you for a warm welcome.
It means all the more to me to be with you this afternoon as the community arts movement has long been close to my heart. As a local and a national politician, as Minister for the Arts from 1993 to 1997, and as a poet, I have been interested in, and whenever I could, sought to promote, forms of artistic expression centred around community engagement, the strengthening of citizenship, and the promotion of an emancipatory role for the arts and the artist.
Tugann sé an-uchtach dom na luachanna seo a fheiceál faoi bhláth i dTeamhlach inniu ar shlite shaibhre nár samhlaíodh riamh. Óna bhunú sa bhliain naoi déag nócha sé, bhí Ealaíona Pobail Theamhlachta tiomanta do pháirteachas sna healaíona a chothú i measc mhuintir Theamhlachta agus muintir limistéar Chontae Bhaile Átha Cliath Theas i gcoitinne. Tá sé tar éis daoine de gach aois agus cumas agus ó gach cúlra sóisialta agus cultúir a thabhairt le chéile.
[It is greatly heartening to see these values blossoming in Tallaght today in such rich and unforeseen ways. Since its establishment in 1996, Tallaght Community Arts has been dedicated to fostering participation in the arts among residents of Tallaght and the wider South Dublin County area. It has brought together people of all ages and abilities, and from all social and cultural backgrounds.]
I know that participants in your programmes include members of the traveller community, asylum seekers and local migrant groups, people with disabilities – some of whom have authored the slide show we have just seen – crèches, primary and secondary schools, elders and youth groups. I congratulate you for bringing together people from so many segments of Irish society, thus enabling all of them to enjoy the depth of feeling, the intensity of vision and the infinite possibilities of the human imagination that the practice of the arts can yield.
Many of the projects developed by Tallaght Community Arts are based on collaboration between professional and non-professional artists. As a practice, collaborative art involves a mutually beneficial engagement, which nurtures and values the diverse ideas, experiences and skills of all participants in a given project.
This mutual sharing, learning and questioning enriches Tallaght’s social fabric. And beyond Tallaght, the imaginative work carried out in a diverse range of communal spaces – in traditional art venues but also in schools, community centres, community gardens and even people’s homes – has a significance for our society as a whole, made up as it is of so many different strands and identities, all of them constantly shifting. This work has a transformative potential for all of us, not just for those who are sometimes labelled as members of ‘new’ or ‘marginalised’ communities.
Place-making is another important aspect of community arts practice. Indeed a sense of place, of home, of neighbourhood, is critical to our living together and the arts have distinctive powers to explore, mark and expand that dimension of community.
Our individual personality cannot be divorced from our sense of belonging. We are social, sociable beings. Our communities do not only shape us, but they ideally give us the space to realize ourselves, and even to challenge our assigned identities and ascribed categories of belonging.
Tallaght Community Arts provides such a space for self-realisation, experimentation with novel senses of belonging, and the subversion of traditional boundaries of class, power and race.
Of course, there are those who subscribe to an elitist theory of the arts and might argue that genuine artistic practice has nothing to do with our socio-political condition, that true art is universal – not local – in its scope and inspiration. This is a false dichotomy. To those who thus set the local and the universal against one another, to those who dismiss community arts as being only a degraded, sociological, even provincial form of art, I would answer by referring to the wonderful distinction made by the great Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh between the parochial and the provincial.
For Kavanagh, the parochial are these people who are infinitely interested in what is happening in their own world. The provincials are those who are caught in the global theatre of comparisons, and who constantly look over their shoulder to see how it measures up to London, New York or Berlin. Kavanagh, who was wary of not being turned into an object as a peasant, accepted the parochial reality about himself and his parish, Inishkeen, in County Monaghan. He wrote poetry which is deeply imbued with local texture and yet can speak to a universal audience.
Kavanagh thus invites us to value the parochial as a symbol and a path to the universal. Far from foreclosing exchanges with the other, a strong sense of place and of local identity can open onto the universal. It creates the necessary conditions for a true intercultural dialogue.
It is such a positive, reflexive and open-minded approach to local identity that I see reflected in so many of the projects developed by Tallaght Community Arts. I was particularly impressed by the ‘Message in a Bottle’ initiative, which saw young people from the Basque Country, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Turkey and the UK engage – each in their own country – in an investigation of our relationship to water and its paradoxical potential to generate life and beauty as well as destruction and socio-political unrest. These young people then came together in London to create – together – a site-specific theatre performance.
The Tallaght group had drawn its inspiration from the nineteenth century reservoirs at Bohernabreena, Saint Anne’s holy well in Glenasmole as well as Irish stories associated with water, such as that of Oisín and Tír na nÓg. And they created an artistic response to their investigations using the Japanese storytelling form Kamishibai.
Such endeavours resonate with what French philosopher Simone Weil described as
“the importance of one’s active participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”
Weil also recognised the need for every human being to have multiple roots and the vital importance of reciprocal exchanges between different sorts of environments.
“But a given environment should not receive an outside influence as something additional to itself,” she wrote, “but as a stimulant intensifying its own way of life.”
In literary and even sociological accounts, suburban condition is often associated with individualism, anonymity and a globalised lifestyle.
“Individualistic material progress and the desire to gain prestige by coming out on top have taken over from the sense of fellowship, compassion and community,”
once wrote Canadian philosopher and social activist Jean Vanier to describe life in our contemporary Western cities.
“Now people live more or less on their own in a small house, jealously guarding their goods and planning to acquire more, with a notice on the gate that says, ‘Beware of the Dog’.”
Tallaght Community Arts’ projects and programmes provide a powerful antidote to such a conception of Suburbia. They encourage residents to come together, reflect, debate and create collectively.
This was evident, for instance, in ‘Home portraits’ – a collaborative art project which saw local residents, a painter and a sociology professor come together in 2012 to discuss their sense of home and explore the rich mosaic of what we understand as “Suburbia.”
These investigations were carried out in a different form in 2013, through the ‘Headin’Out’ project, which traces the development of Tallaght, from a small village of 700 inhabitants in the 1960s to the vibrant suburb of 70,000 that it has become. Through movement, stories, music, photographs, performance and street games, this project explores the lived experiences of those who have made Tallaght their home.
I was interested to learn that, having discovered that there are no published postcards of contemporary Tallaght, participants in the project have invited residents of Tallaght to provide them with a photo or a picture of their community.
All these initiatives nurtured by Tallaght Community Arts show how a sense of fellowship and community can be rekindled through art. Collective artistic endeavours enable participants to develop a greater sense of personal and collective identity, as well as new skills, both artistic and social. They encourage both participants and audiences to question set patterns of life, and to make a transformational use of their imagination.
May I conclude by saying that my wish for all of you who are present here this afternoon is that you continue to experience such joy and fulfilment in your practice of the arts as will enable you to live a more abundant and intense life, with and for others.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.