The festival of St. Patrick was celebrated last week, and with it a reflection of what it is to be Irish on a global scale. A time to view ourselves through the eyes of others. As the global experiment in greening the planet expands, our thoughts turn inwards, because this very cultural identity has been under siege now for more than a year. The essence of what it means to be Irish has been appropriated by the pandemic and may yet be its single biggest victim.

Our position as a cultural nation has always been one of immense authority. Far bigger than our diminutive size would infer. We have a poetic tradition which is one of the oldest recorded on the planet. The Song of Amergin a testimony to the place the arts have traditional held in our hearts. The words of Yeats, Wilde, Shaw, Joyce and Heaney echo in the great halls of the world where the ‘word’ holds significance and bears testament to the fact that we have always sought to frame our world in the poetic. Our visual artists who hold a mirror for us to gaze upon ourselves and encapsulate our love of place. The works of Le Broquy, Jellet, Yeats, Orpen, Bourke and Keating all sing of an imagined world of light and half-light where we play and become other. Our playwrights,  Dancers, Novelists, all contributing to the daily conversation. Our beautiful music now a global language in itself bears witness to our heritage in every corner of the world.

We have worn well the image of Saints and Scholars bestowed upon us in earlier times but have now mutated into a land of dreamers and visionaries. There is nowhere else that the artist is so formative a part of the community. In a city with no cultural infrastructure, no Significant Art Gallery, no Proper Concert Hall for our music in an acoustic setting, no Appropriate setting for Dance, no School of Music, and, crucially, no plans to develop any of those things, Europe was brought to believe in the worth of the community of Galway. Not because of any persuasive powers of the administrators tasked with winning the bid, but because it was the truth.

And now in the time of Covid, this very community has taken such a severe beating that when the dust settles on Covid the harsh reality will slowly dawn. In such a time we are reminded of the words of W.B.Yeats.

From the Fisherman:

The craven man in his seat,  The insolent unreproved— And no knave brought to book, Who has won a drunken cheer— The witty man and his joke, Aimed at the commonest ear,  The clever man who cries  The catch cries of the clown,  The beating down of the wise  And great Art beaten down. 

Words, sadly, that might have been written yesterday. No amount of re-imagining or pivoting to a digital landscape will ever replace the essence of the artistic experience. The temp of a room, the variations in acoustic, the scent of the audience, the moment of pure magic that happens at the end of a work when the notes linger, waiting, giving us space to inhale once more, crucially the rapport that can only exist in live performance between an artist and his or her audience. A connection stolen in a world of ones and zeros, captured on screens with cheap speakers, or on phones. Our artistic friends and performers are struggling to be heard across the city. Trying to find a place in a market of free entertainment. To define as special something that popular media has rendered commonplace.

The danger is that we then ignore this. We dismiss all, because some aspects no longer measure up. Part of this is because we have never been made to examine such things. There is little in a movie that will compare with a theatre experience, yet movies have become dominant in entertainment. They are available at any time, in any location and can be re-watched over to catch elements missed on first viewing. In teaching we learned that the message had to be refocused and that word needed to replace gesture. But in time we have all learned that the quality of the message prevailed. That is what we must also look to about us. We must look to what survives the digital and focus on the voice created for and speaking directly to us. That is a rare and beautiful privilege. An invitation to share in the artistry and magic of superlative performers. So please now as we sense with spring a re-awakening of life about us. The promise of a way out of Covid should also bring a sharpness to our need to fight for our cultural legacy. We all survive and grow from this or we all suffer. Art is a collective.

Look to Musicians now preparing beautifully curated concerts and online festivals for us in our city, refusing to accept constraints, and please support them. Support our novelists, playwrights and poets, and buy their books of wonder and imagination. Enrol in Circus or Dance. Take up Painting or invest in a special piece for your home. Buy an instrument. Give tickets or lessons as gifts. There is a myriad of ways to invest in the intangible, but they all bring immense reward, and allow us to connect with our creative selves. Because if we do not then we face a future in which the uniqueness of us, our cultural identity will be what suffers.