Paraic Breathnach, a huge man in a bright yellow T-shirt, with one toe-nail painted purple, is sitting in the foyer of the Westbury Hotel pretending to be Dana: "It's often said," he minces, with All Kinds of Everything playing in his voice, "that the Celtic Tiger got drowned in the Shannon".
Breathnach is always performing and there is nothing he can do about it. Even if he were to stand quietly in the corner (which isn't something I've ever seen him do) his physical presence is such that he would be performing despite himself. He hasn't been involved in programming the Galway Arts Festival in years and he left Macnas three years ago, but for many he is still the face of both. Although he says what he wants to do is step out of his own work and produce scripts for others to perform, Site, produced by Fir Clis with the Galway Arts Festival, will gain much voltage from the pressures and passions of Breathnach's own life.
Site sees the self-same Celtic Tiger gambolling in the green fields of Galway, and the property boom spiralling out of control to such an extent that a luxury detached home will be built by the cast every night of the show. The irony is, says Breathnach, that of the 15 people in the company, only one person has a house. The goldrush Galway which artists like Breathnach and his Fir Clis collaborators, Jane Talbot and Owen Mac Carthaigh, helped to create has little place for them.
The under-developed city of the 1980s, with its fields, warehouses and empty spaces was fertile ground for an artistic flowering. But now those spaces are gone: "The Corporation and the planners share one vision of a concrete city," says Breathnach. The magical Fisheries Field itself, where Site will be performed, beside which Macnas has its workshops and where for years the Big Top has been pitched, is scheduled for development by UCG: "UCG have been environmentally aware in the past," says Breathnach, "and perhaps they will see the light." Despite the provision of a whole new arts infrastructure in Galway, with the Town Hall Theatre, the Black Box and an extended Galway Arts Centre, Breathnach feels there is not more work for artists, just for "stage managers and administrators: in Galway, at the height of the summer, I had no difficulty getting people to work for me." Artists are being marginalised by the boom economy, he says: "I haven't been provoked to physical violence in many years but the next person who says `arty-farty' to me, I'm going to clock them."
The marginalisation of art is, he says, "endemic" in the education system; engineers don't do a single liberal arts course. Engineers can stop reading now, because they don't do well with Breathnach: "Engineers run this country. They all have the same vision, put the same house in one line and then you only have to run one sewage pipe behind them." The planning of Tullamore, he says, sums up this mentality: "There's a water treatment scheme, a sewage treatment scheme and a travellers' halting site, all in one field." Artists, he says, must "take responsibility" now that the Government and business interests are "in the same ball alley". His concern is with a sense of the aesthetic. "What roads do you want to go on? How do you like to walk by the sea? They want to build a promenade all the way from Galway to Barna. Where will the rock pools be for the kids to play in - the `portans'? The idea is, to make it beautiful, pour concrete on it."
His politics have always been to the Left, and he was once active in the Workers' Party. He now describes himself as confused. "The merger (between Democratic Left and the Labour Party) was a rational and reasonable thing on paper, but Tony Blair. . . come on. . . I'd be afraid to think Ruairi Quinn might go that way. I think they should take Joe Higgins (of the Socialist Party) and make him leader. Sinn Fein did well in the elections because they are part of the alienated people."
His political hue seems to clash violently with Dana's - she is, if possible, even less of a hit with him than engineers. "The only good reason to leave the West of Ireland is because Dana got elected. I don't want any twee, one-dimensional smile telling me I'm a second-class citizen." His conversation has always been mercurial, and five minutes after lambasting Galway, he is singing the praises of the west: "We've got things here the east of Ireland lost centuries ago. We talk to each other. Our kids have imagination."
"Are you telling me my kid doesn't have. . ."
"Of course not. Don't write that down, I didn't mean that at all," he laughs. "But if you go to Woodford or any small town in Galway, it's a quiet, peaceful place. They'll park in the middle of the road to have a chat."
Breathnach grew up bi-lingual in Carna, in the Connemara Gaeltacht, where at the time there were six bachelors and 18 houses. His father, who died at Christmas, was a national school teacher, who, says Breathnach, came home after school and "minded cows." What happened to Paraic? "I never really accepted things," he says. His mother was a national school teacher on Mweenish Island before she got married. "She and my father met at a dance. No. . . it was at the theatre! My mother had a great love of theatre. She brought me to a show when I was six years old, The Playboy of the Western World. A fantastic show. I had three major experiences of theatre. I saw a local company in Carna do Ortha na Seirce by Johnny Choil Mhaidhc when I was nine. Then when I was 10 I saw The Shaughraun and it was fantastic. It's another great one for disrespect."
He has, in the past, turned this disrespect very colourfully on the Catholic Church: "But everyone's doing that now, there's no craic in it. However, I've a friend who's as outspoken against the church as me but peer pressure won't allow the child not to make her First Communion. And she can't make her First Communion if her mother doesn't go to First Communion meetings. They might have to bring a priest in from Africa to do it, but they'll still do it." Here we go again: "Dana is another example of the hidden power of the Catholic Church."
What he hates about what he perceives as Dana's attitude towards the west is the "whinge mentality". He has had enough of it. Growing up in Connemara he saw several plans to save the west evaporate and now he stresses self-reliance: "Do you remember `sceim na tomatoes?' When I was a kid driving around the west of Ireland it was all glass-houses. The idea was to use turf to heat the glass-houses to beat the Dutch at their own game. Then there was Screeb power station. There's not one stick or bolt of that left now. Then there were the half-deckers brought in by Bord Iascaigh Mhara. There's no boats at the piers now. Now we have Teilifis na Gaeilge, a beautiful glass and stone building on the edge of a bog. We hope it will last." It has one big advantage: "As one fella said, `There's a lot of girls working there - they'll want to settle down and have babies in the area.' "
Breathnach's Connemara background also relates to the theme of Site: "I grew up bilingual with a certain anger and an institutionalised inferiority complex. Connies spoke English with a rough accent. They were rough people on building sites." His own experience on building sites was anything but traumatic, however. "It was great aul craic," he says. That came after partying through UCG and gaining, he says, "no academic qualification whatsoever". He was one of the group, including Marie Mullen, Maeliosa Stafford and Sean Mc Ginley, who built Druid Theatre with their bare hands on £25 a week, with breakfast, dinner and tea thrown in. His next job was as stage manager with the Taibhdhearc Theatre in Galway. " `Can you read music?' they asked. `Yes, of course', I said. It was an opera and I figured out when to open the curtains by watching out for the big, black lines on the score. The big chords. The curtain opened on time every night."
Later he worked as a roadie for De Dannan and a group called Fuse, and formed a theatre company called Situations Vacant, which came to a bad end. "I still cannot speak about it. I offended the audience horribly." Before founding Macnas in 1986 with Tom Conroy, Ollie Jennings and Pete Sammon, he was production manager with Druid, director of the Galway Arts Centre and director of the Galway Arts Festival itself.
"The festival has to make up its mind what it is, whether it's a big, established arts festival where the level of credit card booking is a measure of its success, or whether it redefines itself in terms of the community," he says. Last year, he ran a Fringe; this year, no-one has run with the idea. He thinks a Fringe would give the festival the space to "go on and become Edinburgh".
He faults the festival for not commissioning enough new work in the past, but this year its main commission is Site itself. Laying his hands on the £100,000 that the show will cost has been a nightmare. "I would have thought that as a former member of the Arts Council who sat on the Theatre Review team, I could make an application and make progress. But of course, things have changed and every Arts Council likes to put its own stamp on things. We haven't seen the new Arts Plan yet, but decisions like cuts for Rough Magic and cuts for Macnas seem extraordinary in terms of their critical and audience acclaim. And the business of challenge grants for private sector funding - if they knew how difficult it was, they wouldn't put such millstones around our necks."
The construction industry's "lack of imagination" was shown up, he says, by the fact that they wouldn't sponsor the show. In the end, he sold percentages of the would-be profits - the first investor was his mother: "She still believes in me". So, as if the past 10 years were just a dream, yet again it is the artists who are putting themselves on the line to create the show. "We'll probably make the mortgage on it. That's a joke."
Still, his love of theatre is undimmed. "It's the most liberating of the art forms. It's real - it's not like celluloid. I'd like to share that. Most theatre in this country is done for peers or critics and that annoys me because there won't be any theatre in 10 years time, we'll be dominated by film and video. The theatre establishment is making no attempt to bring in new audiences." This desire is always what's driving him, even though the line he travels on is never, and probably will never, be straight: "I've made certain decisions in terms of my art which would not be popular," he says. "But I've had fun."
Site runs from Tuesday, July 13th to Saturday, July 24th, excluding Sunday 18th and Monday 19th, at 9.30 p.m. on all nights except Friday, 16th and Saturday, 17th, when it runs at 10.30 p.m.
