THE gifted generation associated with the now defunct Irish Exhibition of Living Art is very thin on the ground today, with some notable exceptions including Louis le Brocquy and Anne Yeats. In retrospect, the really creative years of the IELA were relatively short - founded in 1943, in the depths of the second World War, it had shot its bolt by the late 1950s. After that, it was mostly on a slow downward curve, and today the Living Art no longer exists; but mid century art in this country is quite unthinkable without it.

Gerard Dillon, Colin Middleton, Patrick Collins, Nano Reid, Norah McGuinness, George Campbell, Hilary Heron, Daniel O'Neill and Father Jack Hanlon have all gone to their fathers, along with most of the lesser names, the half or wholly forgotten men and women who supplied the IELA with its annual intake of paintings, sculpture and drawings. Other talents emerged later, such as Edward McGuire, Patrick Scott and Camille Souter, but they belong to a different chapter of Irish art.

The Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar, Co Mayo is paying posthumous tribute to one of the central figures of that generation, the sculptor Oisin Kelly (1915-1981), with an exhibition of his work - mostly the smaller pieces. It is a fitting gesture, particularly since Kelly had close ties with the region and for years kept a cottage in the west. This much loved man and artist has been relatively neglected since his death - indeed, even in his lifetime he felt he was becoming rather an anachronism. The 1960s was a time of big cultural change and overthrow in Ireland, as American derived art fashions increasingly crowded Kelly's own generation out while abstraction in which he was not greatly interested - virtually took over his own chosen field, sculpture.

In 1978 he told Una Lehane, in an interview for this paper: "Sculpture doesn't exist today; there's something called Three D. All I could give people would be weapons that were useful 40 years ago, like offering them a bow and arrow when they want a Bren gun. People don't want wooden things now. Even the church has turned away from three dimensional images, and they were one of the great sources of income. I'm not terribly interested in exclusively abstract work.

"America seems to be regarded as the source of all knowledge now and I think we have nothing to learn from America, except what to avoid. In America they use sculpture to try to introduce some kind of humanity into their bloody awful buildings. I don't think that's the function of sculpture, really."

That was typical Oisin Kelly - outspoken but humorous and humane, always individualistic, paying no tribute to fashion. Yet in manner he was a gentle, quiet spoken man, erudite and fastidious, who as a rule avoided publicity and revelations - particularly about his private life, which he guarded carefully.

For much of his life he was a teacher, including a spell of 18 years at St Columba's College in Rathfarnham, Co Dublin. It was a location which must have suited him since he lived not far away, in the Knocklyon area where his wife, Ruth, had inherited a large rambling house from her mother. I remember this place well, with its walled orchard cum kitchen garden and the yard with out buildings, where the sculptor had set up his workshop (he also, remember, owned some of the most massive cats I have ever seen). Sadly, it seems to have all vanished now demolished to make way for the Southern Cross motorway.

He was himself the son of a teacher, William Kelly, principal of a national school in Dublin where the future sculptor was born on May 17th, 1915. He was actually baptised "Austin" but a teacher mistakenly Gaelicised his name as "Oisin" instead of "Oistin," and it stuck. He went to Mountjoy School and then to Trinity College, to study French and Irish, since he had a gift for languages. Certainly the Irish language always meant a lot to him and so did the west of Ireland, which he visited regularly from his teens.

In the interview already quoted, he said that he was "always mildly arty" and from boyhood attended night classes at the NCAD. Here he drew a lot and did woodcuts and some modelling in clay but his first ambition was to be a painter (he claimed to have painted occasionally up to his last years, "but nowadays I only copy other people's paintings").

When he left Trinity with an Honours BA, he went to Frankfurt on Main on a year's scholarship, with Hitler already in power and the second World War only a few years away. Modern German sculpture interested him and he told me once the artist he most admired was Ernest Barlach - he still owned a pre war book on him, with a German text and old fashioned black and white plates.

Oisin Kelly sometimes regretted that he had not become an architect, though he might have found it hard to make a living as such in Ireland nearly 60 years ago. Instead, he followed his father's example and became a teacher, getting his first post at Clones in Co Monaghan. Here he attended carpentry classes in the local tech, and later recalled: "I think the first sculpture I ever did was in Clones; I think it was a horse. Mostly I did carpentry. I made a table and chairs I made enough furniture for a modest house." It was prophetic, since wood was always his favourite material in spite of his skill in modelling clay for bronzes and his remarkable technical versatility.

From Clones he moved to Lucan where he taught Irish and English in the local technical school and, stepping voluntarily from teacher down to pupil status, attended the classes in metalwork - "but the conditions of teaching in technical schools were terrible then". He moved again, to Bishop Foy School in Waterford where he taught while attending the local art school, run by Robert Burke, a man of great enthusiasm. It was there I started carving regularly".

BY this time he had married Ruth Gwynn, a veterinary surgeon and daughter of E.J. Gwynn who had been Provost of TCD from 1927 to 1937. They moved back to Dublin in 1946, to live with her mother in the old house already mentioned, and Oisin joined the staff of Columba's College where he ended up teaching a whole range of subjects. Among his pupils there were the artist Patrick Pye and the stone engraver Michael Biggs. He seems genuinely to have enjoyed teaching, and to have been liked by his classes in return, but it was always a drain on his energies and it was many years before he could afford to become a full time artist.

A turning point was the two terms he spent (on leave of absence) in London at the Chelsea Polytechnic as a student tinder Henry Moore. In fact, Kelly seems to have spent as much of his life learning from others as in teaching them; when he came back to Dublin he did a pottery course at the NCAD and another course in metalwork. He always had the humility of the true artist craftsman: "For the most part I take ideas as given to me and work on them. I am not vouchsafed many ideas of my own, to tell the truth." And again: "I think the freedom of the artist as so called only exists from the point at which he is told what to do. Then, with his instinct and intelligence, he works on what he has been given."

He was now starting to sell his sculptures - he always regarded it as a landmark in his career when Michael Scott, the architect, bought a small wood figure of a dancer at an Oireachtas exhibition. He began to exhibit regularly at the Living Art, where he had good relations with his fellow artists (Hilary Heron, the sculptor, seems to have been a close friend) and was elected a committee member in 1951. Church commissions began to come his way, particularly from the Jesuits, and in 1951 he completed stained wooden statues for St Francis Xavier's Church in Gardiner Street. Later in the 1950s he bought a cottage in Co Mayo, looking towards Nephin Mountain, which he largely rebuilt and used as a regular bolthole from Dublin. His family grew to three girls and four boys one of whom, Benjamin, died in 1962.

Though he shunned one man exhibitions (and in any case, few galleries in those days would have risked one by a sculptor, even a relatively established one) he could sell individual pieces regularly through the Dawson Gallery, and was also coping increasingly with large commissions; so in 1964 he resigned at last from Columba's and gave himself up to sculpture full time. Not altogether, however, since even then he worked part time for Kilkenny Workshops, for whom he designed a whole range of artefacts from ceramic birds to silverware and even dishcloths. This meant he had to travel from Dublin to Kilkenny and back, two days a week but he seems, typically, to have enjoyed the challenge of producing good, practical designs to order.

In 1971 his Children Of Lir was unveiled at the Garden of Remembrance in Parnell Square, and in 1977 the full length statue of Jim Larkin was unveiled in O'Connell Street. Liberty Hall commissioned two lifesize bronze figures of working men who were to stare upwards at the building from street level but Dublin Corporation objected to this as a possible traffic hazard. So the figures were transferred to Fitzgerald Park in Cork, where they now gaze up at the City Hall. And a barrier was crossed when in 1978 a retrospective exhibition of his work - largely put together by Dorothy Walker was mounted in his old alma mater, TCD.

There were other commissions too - the statue of Casement which now stands on Bannow Strand and the big Chariot Of Life for the Irish Life Centre in Dublin. Work on the latter piece - which had to be cast in sections - seems to have put heavy strains on his health and he died of a heart attack in October 1981, before it was unveiled to the public. His wife had died four months before him, which was a heavy blow. His unfinished plaster model of the musician Carolan was prepared for casting into bronze by his assistant, Lorna Skrine, and the statue was tin veiled by President Hillary at Mohill, Co Leitrim, in 1986.

No other Irish sculptor can compete in sheer versatility and professionalism with Oisin Kelly; he produced work of many sizes and genres in a remarkable variety of media, including portrait heads (the one of Austin Clarke is a fine example). Saints and Madonnas, animals and birds, dancers and turf cutters, were among his subject matter, and he often imbued them with a distinctively "Celtic" quality which has nothing to do with the downmarket Irishness of tourist souvenirs or bog oak cudgels. He was an erudite man, well informed on Gothic and Romanesque art, while also admiring certain living sculptors such as Marino Marino.

Humour, visual poetry, fastidious taste, love of his materials and an unobtrusive knowledge of the art of the past are implicit in virtually everything he did. He was not an innovator but his intellectual open mindedness and curiosity never allowed his style to fossilise.

Oisin Kelly belonged to a generation of Irish artists who grew up without Arts Council grants or tax free schemes to carry them over lean periods and so learnt to adapt and survive without lowering their sights. In a country where art patronage was traditionally lean, he did not complain or curse his stars: "I suppose this is not a very artistic country. In many Central European countries people seemed to spend the long winter evenings chipping away at wood, creating things; it has never been the tradition here. And yet many of those European countries have had plenty of wars and revolutions. Poland has had just as bad a time as Ireland. I don't think our own misery is unique."

"WE CAN say whatever we like about politicians until one o'clock After that the stopwatch goes on ..." Thus with more than a hint of regret, the ever effervescent Gay Byrne brought us Wednesday's news about the dissolution of the Dail and the calling of a general election.

The first few days of carefully balanced coverage have surely led most listeners to share his regret. Who would credit it? An election with five major contestants, whose political ancestry is as diverse as Blueshirt and Stalinist, can come up with this as the fundamental issue facing the State: should we cut tax by widening bands or reducing rates?

The earlier sparring threw up some more unusual issues. The attempts by the Opposition to put the Government on the spot about Rwanda, for example, produced some lively radio - FF and the PDs gambling that the punters don't like the sound of Joan Burton's voice. The recent row on Tonight With Olivia O'Leary (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday), however, proved beyond doubt that Burton is our best informed politician on central Africa; if you listened closely, you could hear Des O'Malley crawling off to switch the agenda.

There may yet be some sport in this contest, and don't be surprised if Radio Ireland gets the best of the action. Daybreak (Radio Ireland, Monday to Friday) has begun to overcome its previous thinness, in large part because of the excellence of new co host Mark Costigan. Between him and Emily O'Reilly, the new commercial station finds itself blessed for an election campaign: O'Reilly, certainly, and Costigan, arguably, have more savvy about politics than anyone the competition has to offer (before 10 p.m. and Vincent Browne).

Among the first casualties of this political warfare is John Bowman's inimitable Bowman's Saturday 8.30 on RTE Radio 1. For the duration of the campaign, Morning Ireland will have a Saturday edition and Bowman will, presumably, be busy preparing for television election coverage.

Saturday 8.30 temporarily bowed out with a typically lovely programme this weekend, yet again filling in the gaps of cultural memory and reminding us where we've been. The subject was ballad singer Delia Murphy, whose career was cut short a half century ago by her husband's diplomatic postings on behalf of the young Irish State.

We heard the voice of Liam Clancy put Murphy (of Moonshiner fame) in the context of a time when Irish culture was beset by a "national inferiority complex", when the "come all yes" were regarded with contempt, when the country was overrun with tenors and light opera. Murphy - whose voice contained "the real nyaah", Clancy said, and recordings confirmed - rose above the national self loathing and lit the way for the later folk revival.

In light of the new scheduling, in which Morning Ireland joins Saturday View and This Week, listeners looking for a low politics weekend may switch to Radio Ireland.

Even before the politics starts on Sunday mornings the choice is stark: religious services on Radio 1, or River Of Soul with Karl Tsigdinos on Radio Ireland. This week that soul and gospel music programme was, if possible, even better than usual. It was Tsigdinos's tribute to Bill Graham, a year after the death of that unique writer - who is, or should be, an influence on any of us documenting popular culture in Ireland. Graham's favourites included George Clinton's amazing Eunkadelic and the sweet passion of Curtis Mayfield; even a housebound Presbyterian would have been tempted to spin that dial.

Also on Radio Ireland, Robbie Irwin's sports marathons on Saturday and Sunday afternoons have been getting stronger, with good interviews and packages to make up for a certain lack of commentaries. On Saturday, however, that lack was addressed with a vengeance: the station brought us, exclusively in Ireland, full, live commentary on the English FA Cup final from Wembley.

The execution was imperfect, with commentators who hadn't mastered the genre's structure of cliche's. Thus the usual, redundant "left hand side" and "right hand side" were joined by "near hand side" and "far hand side"; "handbags at five paces" became "handbags at five o'clock"; and the historical trivia about the earliness of the first goal was missed for nearly an hour. Still, it was there, fair play to all concerned.