IRELAND, YOUR IRELAND
SIR,—I agree with so much your correspondent! Stephen Fay, says about the Dublin Theatre Festiva' that I hesitate to ask you to let me take him 14 on any point. But I think he is seriously wrong ()0s Patrick Galvin's play And Him Stretched, and al the issues involved go much beyond this play I fee justified in speaking out about it. Mr. Fay, in company this time with most of dic Irish theatre critics, echoes The Furrow, the drgiol of Maynooth College and the hierarchy, in sPeak,-. r of And Him Stretched as containing 'the familine. anti-clericalism.' Over here, we applaud Osborne in company with British intellectuals vi."-e he attacks the British Establishment. But when. .oat
of our very few younger playwrights of origin
talent and power attacks our Irish Establishme"er then his work is written down in a dismissive ruallilosg not only by the Irish theatre critics, but also"..,* 1/.3t;sti dismayingly, by reviewers in respected or' "rid journals. When British liberal-minded journals: me the official voice of Maynooth speak with the 'iced voice on cultural matters, something has '13
happened. . it's
On the issue of patriotism Mr. Fay inent'',401 true the Angry Young Man of And Him Sire"' 00 exclaims, 'Patriotism is like ignorance, itLoal excuse.' Is patriotism any excuse for a lia-frore situation where thousands have to emigrate. „, or our shores yearly, to get a job, or a better 10_,',,e0 a job with reasonable prospects, in England? " "
the 'General' who is the pillar of our Establishment
today in the play's context insists that 'they' (the veterans of the Irish struggle) have given the young People their political independence, the Angry Young Man takes up an old tin can lying on the stage and shouts that this is what they have been given—and as an unemployed worker, about to emigrate, there is surely a measure of truth in his indictment? In short, And Him Stretched, far from being secondhand O'Casey or old hat aLti-clk.ricalism,
Is a raw and bruising and bawdy and desperate assertion of life amidst the death of the Republican
ideal, symbolised by the dying patriot `and him stretched.'
EWART MILNE
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