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THE ABSOLUT FRINGE 2012has over 100 shows playing out across Dublin until 23 September. Each day, TheJournal.ie will bring you our readers’ reviews of the pick of the crop and everything in between. You’ll get the chance to get in on the act yourself with our daily reader review tickets giveaway!
Today’s review:
(Willfredd Threatre)
Derek Dunne’s review: After being herded into a small room that smelled of hay, to see three office workers playing with toy animals on the ground, I thought I knew what I was in for. I was wrong. “Farm” changes pace faster than anything I’ve been to – from tap-dancing in wellies, to a queen-bee strip-tease, to the dating rituals of Macra.
Shane O’Reilly’s dance with a pitch-fork deserves a special mention, as does Emma O’Kane’s impression of a heifer after calving. Full of surprises, and memories, for anyone from Ireland. Exactly what the Fringe is meant to be: a mad idea, well-executed.
In three words? Dynamic. Balletic. Country.
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Now that is leading by example
When will people cop on to the evil that is organised religion. Those that make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
@Aidan Bergin: unfortunately that’s very true ..
@Aidan Bergin: ‘Those that make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities…’ That’s true in all walks of life and not just with organised religion. Organised secular politics has a spectacularly bad track record in this area as well. How bad either one will impact the world depends on the essence of the particular absurdity proferred. It’s part of the human condition to choose and adopt beliefs about the nature of the world and to follow leaders both secular and religious. It gives people a feeling of security in their lives when they believe. One person’s belief system is another person’s absurdity. Anyone, priest, politician, scientist or guru who claims to know what the truth is for you, what you should believe and how you should view and live your life is lying to you.
@Aidan Bergin: this isn’t orginised religion. This is the effect of European colonialism. The Schools are just a part of it. The violence still continues.
The Sixties Scoop, hundreds upon hundreds of children taken away from their families and given to foster families and state adoption agency. It was cheaper than the schools and ended in the 80s.
Thousands of women sterilised, by force, by doctors and nurses in hospitals across Canada. A senete report from last month says it’s still on going.
Doctors have also refused or given substandard care to indigenous peoples. More likely to live in poverty. Hundreds of missing First Nation women.
This is not secular Vs religion. That is ease, means people can just point at the Churches and call it quits.
This is white/European colonialists Vs colonised people. And all Canadians will need to address the issue that underlines their whole system.
@William Tallon:
No.
Because this wasn’t caused by religion.
This was caused by the racism in Canada against the First Nations.
The Sixties Scoop.
The on going forced sterilisation.
This is the system of colonisation.
Blaming orginised religion is easy. But ignores that European people drove them from their land, put them into the schools, and ended their way of life. The government funded it. The churches ran it. And the White folk of Canada didn’t care until they were made to care.
@Amadán: No? A bit emphatic but thanks for correcting me! How could I not have seen this. Oh wait, racism is a belief system held by people is it not and based on the idea that their group is superior in every way to another group who look and act differently to them? It’s generally bound up with religion and politics and sadly helps a lot of people feel good about themselves by having what they consider superior morals and the power to impose them on others as they exploit them. So I really have no idea what your point is in relation to mine…
@William Tallon:
Actually it’s bound up with fear of the Other and belief in the superiority of one’s own group over the Other, and, while using the language of politics and religion to add a veneer to it, is drive by and bound with our inability to have any empathy with Other people. But thanks for missing the herd of elephants in the room.
@Amadán: When someone starts a comment with ‘actually’ it’s a classic red flag that they really want to talk down to you to show how superior they are and have no regard for views other than their own. This causes them to sometimes ignore what the other person actually said as you have done. I’d hazard a guess that you consider yourself an intellectual type, rather ‘cool’ and one who despises the strivings and views of what you consider ‘the herd’. I also reckon that for someone who talks about empathy you have precious little. This desire you have to lecture others is somewhat immature as is your hiding behind the rather apt name ‘Amadán’. I think by the way you need to read up on the psychology of racism a bit more as your view of its causes are simplistic in the extreme…
The International Criminal Court should investigate the Catholic Church for crimes against humanity. No amount of good deeds ever makes up for more than 100 years of abuse of mothers and children, all over the world. This is an out of control corrupt ev1l organisation which needs to be thoroughly investigated.
Every where in the world that societies allow religious groups control, they abuse it in the most horrendous ways!
@Wesley Conboy: Yet in Ireland the people don’t care what atrocities this church committed, they still flock to mass.
@Bat Collins: I think the word flock is grossly over stated. Mass attendance is ireland has fallen substantially since the 90′s. Mainly old men and women been preached to by old priests nowadays
No end to it. :(
@Pat Casey: only scratching the surface, investigations in Africa and South America will be next.
Evil buried beneath the earth; ..’ The Stones will cry out” for justice for the Innocent little children, and the Organization that allowed it to happen all over the earth, so corrupt will go into oblivion has been rejected by Almighty God in who’s name this Evil was perpetrated. No wonder this generation is leaving churches in their droves, soon all churches will crumble for lack of finances as people no longer believe in the; God they worship.
Surly the pope has a few apologies written and and ready for this ever increasing eventuality. Just change the names and locations of the apologies he used for Australia or Ireland.
@Caroline Otoole: Pope Surly? Nah! Can’t say I agree with you there. He always looks to me like a reasonably cheerful type of chap with a ready smile for everyone and not in the least surly. ‘Don’t call me Surly…’
Canada should follow Ireland’s example and have an inquiry and maybe set up a redress board and a commission and then maybe ask the church organisations to contribute a few bob if it’s not too much bother.
@Bramley Hawthorne: Trudeau has asked pope for an apology, Canada has created a new holiday for Truth and reconciliation. Canada Day today, flags flying at half mast. Marches planned to cancel Canada Day because of the disgust of what has been done. Ontario prime minister pledged $10M to investigate grounds. Priest has resigned after comments basically saying that the church did some good, diocese says he’s on leave now. A lot of people in Ireland always argue that they’re not all bad, Its all b*llshit. Canada has done more in 1 month than Ireland has in years. And that’s only the beginning. Is it because Canada isnt under the influence of the catholic cult? Probably, which makes the lack of action in Ireland all the more disheartening.
@Bramley Hawthorne:
They do.
It’s not just church actions. It’s all the colonial actions that have been occurring since Europeans arrived.
This, horrifying, is just the tip of a nightmarish iceberg the indigenous peoples of Canada have suffered.
@Ci: Trudeau has been stonewalling the Indigenous Peoples, who fought tooth and nail to get the truth and reconciliation project. The money from the government is not coming.
Hell, Trudeau has spend $100 million to fight the law suits the brought by the First Nations. More than any PM.
This isn’t just the church. The governments activitly kept poor records because they didn’t care about the children sent there.
This is part of the colonial experience First Nations experienced. You read about US and Mexico’s treatment of the indigenous peoples and it’s brutal. You read about Canada and it’s insidious. The government only stopped most of the residential schools because it was cheaper put the kids into foster families and adoption. So the social services and RMCP would round children up, give them different names and advertise them in the small adds section.
Even today, indigenous peoples make up 50% of the foster system despite being only 8% of the population.
This is the product of colonisation and colonial violence.
Don’t suppose we could get those lads over here.
If the local GAA club treated children as appallingly over the decades it would be defunct. Yet year after year, parents in their 30s (who should know that all God’s are man made) march little Mary and Johnny down the aisle for a day out. The mind boggles.
Aaagh but they are not all bad say the weak minded who turn a blind eye because it proves them wrong in their beliefs. Ban it all and lock up the guilty including the ones who cover up for their co workers
The Catholic church is made up of human beings. The vast majority are flawed but basically good people. A minority do bad things and give the church a bad reputation. Condemning the whole church for the actions of a minority seems unfair. It is like condemning all Irish for the murders that a few commit.
@Tom Mullally: Wow, that is some mental gymnastics you have performed there. Your whataboutery falls apart when we learn that abuse in the RCC was covered up by the entire institution, all the way up to previous popes. Ratzinger wouldn’t open up the Vatican Archives to the Italian & other international police forces trying to investigate clerical child abuse. That’s called obstruction of justice.
@Tom Mullally: “Were not all like that. Say if there’s 200 million priests in the world, and 5% of them are paedophiles, thats still only 10 million”-Dermot Morgan as Ted Crilly.
@Tom Mullally: Minority?????? What rock have you been under for the last 30 years?
@Rebecca BarrettNp: The Roman Catholic Church was headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice and speedily at that.
@Tom Mullally: Your comments are exactly what’s wrong about attitudes in Ireland regarding the catholic cult. A priest resigned in Canada this week for making comments like that. Do you have any compassion for all those poor children around the world who were neglected and abused or too brainwashed by the cult to think they can do no wrong?
https://globalnews.ca/news/7983287/mississauga-pastor-resignation-residential-school-comments/
“Schools” and “Homes” don’t have unmarked graves.
The Schools were operated by the Catholic Church on behalf of the Federal Government who like here funded and did not oversee them so the Government went along with it and could have stopped it but didn’t. They are every bit as responsible for turning a blind eye.
Indigenous people and people of colour everywhere were treated as savages but we all know now who the real supposedly well educated white savages really were. In Ireland during the Famine some of the better off Irish along with the British Government allowed millions of Irish Citizens to starve to death and millions more forced to emigrate while they exported good food daily . Any monetary relief they did give they forced starving people to work for it when they clearly were too weak to do so and caused even more deaths.
@Aine O Connor: Agree with everything you say but to add. Those Irish citizens who did emigrate to the Americas (not all) became the perpetrators in a lot of cases. Indigenous peoples were driven off their land to the point of ethnic cleansing. While church are absolutely guilty so too are the ‘lay’ people who emigrated from Europe, Irish included.
@Fr. Fintan Stack: Ethnic Cleansing was carried out all over the world. I read about an Island where a tribe lived undisturbed for 40,000 years, had developed fantastic farming practices . The island was invaded by Imperialists , the large indigenous population was wiped out in 40 years . The invaders built their Mansions on the beautiful Island and considered themselves to be superior. Makes me sick.
@Fr. Fintan Stack: Also in every society you are going to find good people, bad people and those who just don’t care. Here hoping that there will always be more of the good people with a social conscience or we are all in trouble.
This is the effect of European colonialism. The churches ran these schools but the government funded them, rounded up the children and sent them there. And the Schools are just a part of it. The violence still continues.
The Sixties Scoop, hundreds upon hundreds of children taken away from their families and given to foster families and state adoption agency by social services and cops. One women described how a dark car came to her house one day and took her and her siblings. It was cheaper than the schools; social services use to give the children new names and advertise them in the small adds section of newspapers. It ended in the 80s.
Thousands of women sterilised, by force, by doctors and nurses in hospitals across Canada. A senete report from last month says it’s still on going.
Doctors have also refused or given substandard care to indigenous peoples. More likely to live in poverty. Hundreds of missing First Nation women.
This is not secular Vs religion. That is easy, means people can just point at the Churches and call it quits. That’s not to let them off the hook. There just happens to be far more to it.
This is white/European colonialists Vs colonised people. And all Canadians will need to address the issue that underlines their whole system.
@Amadán: Governments would And were Hoodwinked by the sanctimonious Frock wearing prayer reading holy men and women who rejected a natural life excepting instead a celibate program initiated by hierarchy in Rome, thus becoming self hybrids, unholy unnatural, ungodly specimens the product of wickedness, turned out onto the weakest section of our community, to ply their unnatural intentions on the simplest of minds. Their unnatural acts, condemns the whole of the organization they were the products of, believing their; ‘Souls’ will go to heaven as; ‘It was their bodies that sinned’.
@ÓDuibhír Abú:
No. The state knew what was happening. Like the did with the other examples I mentioned. This wasn’t a case of “we didn’t know” since it’s been shown repeatedly that they did.
Reading your comment, it doesn’t sound like you would care about the dead if it was another institution. You don’t seem to care about Canada’s racism and genocide against the Indigenous Peoples.
@Amadán: My dear, I’ve met the Apache, their answer to all their troubles; ‘The missionary’s’.
I am indigenous Canadian living in Ireland. I am glad to see this being reported on here. This isn’t the beginning, or the end. This is the middle of a very long and painful era for indigenous people. I was adopted by a white family during the Sixties Scoop, yet another policy aimed at eradicating indigenous by targeting the children. I have never, and will never wrap my head around how or why this was ever a thing.
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