TV Scope Beidh Aonach AmárachTG4, Wednesday, September 12th, 9.30pm
There will be a fair tomorrow? This hauntingly beautiful documentary placed a question mark after this line from the well-known song, used as its title.
Ostensibly it explored how the decline in the number of sheep farmers in north Mayo is casting doubt over the centuries-old sheep fairs held in Bangor Erris each September.
However, what it also achieved was a welcome alternative view of how life is lived in Ireland today.
We have become over familiar with images of sprawling commuter belts, from which uprooted, disconnected, faceless souls endure long grinding commutes from their matchbox apartments to their workplaces.
Here, through the stories of the two Pádraigs, Micheál and Máirtín, we witnessed lives rooted in a sense of place, at one with their environments, and with not a trace of angst about work/life balance.
Filmed against the majestic wilderness of the Owenduff Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, the men seemed such an extension of the elements it was impossible
to imagine them living anywhere else.
The traditional cloth caps may now be replaced by baseball caps but these men came across as timeless and directly connected with the generations gone before.
The documentary captured how the age-old ritualistic dance of haggling at the fair still continues.
In it one criticises while the other praises, all the time pulling at each other, while endlessly "splitting of the difference", hand slapping and spitting, before the deal is sealed, the luck penny paid, and the pub adjourned to.
For Máirtín, any life other than that of a sheep farmer is unthinkable.
"They were the first animals I saw when I started walking," he explains. "I'd die without animals."
Padráig looked like an archetypal image of a man with his dog and his sheep on the side of a sun-suffused mountain.
Yet, he laments that he now walks the mountain alone and longs for the time when he was one of the many "walking the hills from dawn to dusk, with smoke coming from every chimney".
The long fingers of the European Union were blamed by the
farmers for the decline in their numbers.
The directive over 30 years ago that farmers were to keep more sheep resulted in the mountains being seriously damaged by over-grazing, now even the future of the unique Mayo, hardy, black-faced mountain sheep is in doubt.
There are few young people going into sheep farming and, without them, the oldest farmers fear the death of the village community.
The older farmers did not trust people with cheques at the fairs but Pádraig reckons that a large injection of Government cash is now needed if the life of the sheep farmers is to continue.
At present, he fears that the powers that be are far more interested in preserving the heather and the birds than in the fate of
the mountain farmers and their sheep.
Let's hope for the generations to come that the question mark can be removed from "Beidh aonach amárach?"