Imagining what Ireland could be

The President's remarks about drinking were not the only controversy atRe-Imagining Ireland. Ian Kilroy reports from Virginia

Turn any corner in the small Virginia town of Charlottesville last week and you came face to face with some luminary of Irish arts, music or politics. There was Colm Tóibín, browsing among the shops in the hot southern afternoon. There was Roddy Doyle, talking on a nearby corner to Gerry Stembridge. Go down another street and you might have seen Brid Rogers, Roy Foster, Frank McCourt and Paula Meehan. It was as if an Irish academy of arts, politics and letters had formed - and secretly eloped to neutral territory for some breathing space.

What was, in fact, happening was a conference on the theme of reimagining Ireland, with some of the best and brightest of Ireland's thinkers, to reconsider the meaning and future of Irish identity in a global context. Costing more than €500,000 to stage, the conference had as its catalyst the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and everyone from President Mary McAleese to David Ervine of the Progressive Unionist Party was there.

The idea came from Martin McLoone of the University of Ulster, according to Re-Imagining Ireland's project director, Andrew Higgins Wyndham. "We then contacted Fintan O'Toole, who has written much on Ireland in a global context, and we then put together a group of 10 project consultants, and the programme grew from there."

The result was one of the biggest overseas gatherings of thinkers and general movers and shakers from Irish life. Wyndham says the advantage of Charlottesville was that meeting in a neutral setting offered a relaxed space for people to exchange and develop ideas, but it is difficult to know what, if anything, will emerge from the exercise. Ireland has surely undergone massive economic, social and political change over the last decade, but talking about it is all we have done recently, and doing it in the sunshine is unlikely to offer new perspectives.

Even so, panel discussions were set up around themes such as Living with Hollywood, Celtic Music and Dance and Irish Art Today. There were plays, comedy sketches, music and not a few rows.

The participants were forthright, beginning on day one with the President's criticisms of Irish drinking habits. Some felt her comments, a striking part of a wide-ranging speech, had strayed too close to stereotyping the Irish. Others felt the media had unfairly highlighted just one aspect of the speech. At her poetry reading on the second night, Meehan criticised The Irish Times for focusing on the President's comments on drinking. Still others argued that although it was a fine speech, there was very little new in it other than those remarks.

And when one controversy died down, another was waiting to take its place. In case anyone doubted that art could still provoke strong reactions, for good reasons or bad, Tóibín reminded us that art, and in this case comedy, can be a site where identity is fought over.

Last Tuesday night, just before the conference opened, the Belfast comedy duo Grimes and McKee performed a sketch in which two farmers ended up dancing together camply. Tóibín, who was in the audience, regarded their depiction of gay men as stereotypical and offensive. He walked out.

On Friday morning, Tóibín opened his contribution to a discussion entitled Between Europe and America with an attack on the Grimes and McKee piece. It was "a crude and vulgar imitation", he said, drawing comparisons with send-ups of Jews and blacks.

Tóibín added that it was quite acceptable to walk out of a performance if offended in Europe, America or Australia but that in Ireland we had not yet developed that sensibility.

The journalist Susan McKay expressed solidarity with Tóibín; as an audience member, she said, she regretted that he was offended. Others said they felt that such send-ups were just part of comedy's stock-in-trade, that all sorts of social groups were satirised and that they could see no reason for offence.

While Tóibín stressed that art and representation form a site where identity must be struggled for, with both political and social implications, elsewhere the effects on art of globalisation was the matter of concern.

The dancer Jean Butler, in the discussion on Celtic music and dance, said she was concerned that Irish dance was in a fragile state. "Now with the commercialisation of Irish dance, dancers only learn what they need to know to dance in a line," she said.

According to Butler, Riverdance did more for Ireland than it did for Irish dance, which she said has become "uniform, with a lack of individual expression". She argued that competition and the show-business aspects of the Irish dancing world have killed innovation.

Her concern about commercialisation was echoed by Rod Stoneman of the Irish Film Board, in a discussion about living with Hollywood. "Forty per cent of all money earned at the box office last year in the UK and Ireland was earned by 10 films," he said, adding that he was pessimistic about the way things were going, including the way independent films were being squeezed out.

The film director Trish McAdam highlighted the role international trade agreements have in the process Stoneman described. Roddy Doyle offered a contribution from the floor, saying that globalisation had restricted choice. He cited music as an example: record sales are now dominated by a few large, highly marketed and globally know names, which squeezes out diversity.

Fintan O'Toole's proposition, in the opening session, that Ireland is one of the world's most globalised economies seemed to be backed up. It was a theme Declan McGonagle, director of City Arts Centre in Dublin, developed in his contribution to the debate on Irish art today.

"What we have is the simultaneous presence of modernity and pre-modernity," he said. McGonagle argued that we have often limited Irish art to the spheres of the poetical and the political and that that kind of reductionist approach was no longer viable. Yet, he added, we should not neglect the political agencies of art.

"We can no longer trap identity or art or artists into an innocent space," he said. "We cannot chose to be apolitical; we cannot remove ourselves from the political." McGonagle also argued that the artistic process needs to find "a third space" where meaning was formulated between the artist, the work and the audience.

What became clear over the four days is that Irish art and culture are hotbeds of contrasting views - and are going through radical change. Whether everyone had to go to Virginia to discover that is questionable.

An enduring image for many, however, was that of Brid Rogers, David Ervine and Chris McGimpsey of the Ulster Unionist Party taking turns to share the stage with the singer Tommy Sands and share a song from their traditions. It had taken some coaxing by Sands, but all eventually got up to sing, revealing a potential harmony between them.

It led Ervine to joke that Sands was the only man who could intimidate him who didn't have a private army. The challenge is to bring what is imagined in the cultural sphere through to the political.