VISUAL ART: THERE'S A JAMESIAN quality to Willie Doherty's video installation  The Visitorat the Douglas Hyde Gallery, writes AIDAN DUNNE..

That's MR James, the master of the Victorian ghost story, rather than Henry. In fact, this new work is closely related to Doherty's own Ghost Story, until recently on view at the Farmleigh Gallery, and Empty, made prior to that again. In all three, he uses a limited iconography, including roadway, woodland, and buildings in the form of blocks of flats and offices. An unseen narrator figures prominently, performing (rather than just reciting) an elaborate, narrative text, in two of the three.

There is a common implication that Northern Ireland is a haunted house, possessed by the trauma of its recent past. In The Visitor, a restless, prowling camera shifts between views of a block of flats, adorned with a row of television satellite dishes, and of a piece of tangled, overgrown woodland. The narrator is initially "reminded of" the outline of a figure running away, but this figure inexplicably becomes a real, ubiquitous, though still ambiguous, presence, until we learn more about him, and it seems that he is in fact the recalcitrant, unhealed past personified.

All of which closely recalls an episode in Seamus Heaney's Station Islandwhen, looking into the still water, the narrator " . . . sensed a presence entering into my concentration". The presence is the apparition of a friend who was murdered during the Troubles, the victim of a sectarian killing. "Through life and death he had hardly aged." The poem's almost unbearable emotional intensity, its interweaving of past and present, and its observational precision are exceptional.

Doherty is more tentative and more distanced. As so often in his work, he uses a circular, seamless structure, presumably implying historical repetition, and he both employs and simultaneously resists narrative per se, drawing on aspects of narrative but also holding back and presenting a disjuncture between word and image. It's notable that his texts have become more developed and elaborate as his imagery has become more specific and narrowly defined, as in the stark switch between flats and forest. The tangle of the woods suggests there is no way out; the block recalls the disused offices in Empty, which implied that the world had lost interest and moved on, leaving Northern Ireland to its rawness and unresolved problems. Several lines of interpretation are left open, though the uniform tone of foreboding is limited and sometimes the cross-cutting threatens to become simply tedious.

SIR ANTHONY CARO is one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. Born in 1924, he is still going strong, making works of amazing scale and ambition. He worked as Henry Moore's assistant and his own approach was galvanized, so to speak, by his contact with US art during the 1950s and particularly with David Smith's constructed and painted steel sculptures. Caro introduced that form of plinth-less, abstract sculpture to Britain but, more, he was something of a genius at it, as Anthony Caro: Selected Worksat Hillsboro Fine Art makes clear.

Like Smith, he used and uses industrial-grade steel, often in industrial forms, with an ease and fluency that is breathtaking.

Early on, he painted his work in bright colours, but even the earliest pieces at the Hillsboro, from the late 1970s, eschew bright colour in favour of bronze-like, muted effects achieved by rusting and staining.

In the late 1980s and even more in the 1990s, his work underwent a radical change, with the introduction of literal, figurative and narrative imagery. Personally, I have never been really convinced by this later turn of events. His mammoth The Last Judgement, for example, shown in Venice in 1999, seemed woefully heavy- handed and bombastic, as though sheer force of will had taken over from instinct.

The great thing about the Hillsboro show is that we can see older and newer work side by side. For this viewer, the older work still far surpasses the more recent. But then, in a way it is bound to, since we are talking about classic pieces of contemporary art, the absolute peak of a particular way of working and seeing. Relatively large-scale pieces, including Toward Centre(1984) and Descent(1985), are compact bundles of energy, more than capable of holding really large public spaces. It would be great to see one of them finding a home here in Ireland.

BREON O'CASEY marked his 80th birthday with a solo exhibition of paintings and bronzes at the Peppercanister Gallery in Dublin. The show is dominated by a big, voluminous bronze of a female torso. Pinch-waisted, wide-hipped female forms have become something of a trademark for O'Casey, hearkening back to the Cubists' discovery of African tribal sculptures. Similarly, his simplified bird outlines recall the elegance of Georges Braque's use of the motif. His grid-based abstract paintings are mellow and well-made, though so relaxed that they lack any element of pictorial tension.

There's more of that in a series of reclining nudes, stylised and abstracted to varying degrees. With some nice, quirky touches, they are the best things in the show, as well as a couple of astutely characterised sculptures, including that of a fox.

O'Casey places great emphasis on refining form, with a risk of reducing everything to too smooth a paste: a bit of grit in the mixture helps to stir things up.

MATTHEW O'KANE'S Polish Strongholdsat the Paul Kane Gallery features paintings and video works chronicling travels in Poland. The strongholds are perhaps the ruined fortresses and expanses of forest that we see. For the most part. there is snow on the ground.

In the videos, we glimpse vast tracts of landscape in passing, and the same sense of scale and transience comes across in the paintings, so the atmosphere is well conveyed.

But, at the same time, something goes awry in the paintings. They mimic photographic effects quite well, but too often they are brusquely made to the point of crudeness, as though the artist was in an incredible hurry. He clearly has the ability to do what he is trying to, since a fair proportion of the work is very well realised, but overall it is uneven.

The Visitor: A video installation , Willie Doherty, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, until May 27;Selected Works , Anthony Caro, Hillsboro Fine Art, 49 Parnell Sq West, until May 24; Breon O'Casey, recent paintings and sculpture, Peppercanister Gallery, until May 21;Polish Strongholds , Matthew O'Kane, The Paul Kane Gallery, 6 Merrion Sq, until May 17.