You wouldn't expect such an innocuous term to cause such friction, but 'community art' is a loaded phrase, writes Peter Crawley.

This isn't supposed to happen at a book launch. By the time Declan McGonagle takes the podium in the Oak Room, at Mansion House in Dublin, the occasion has strayed far from the usual choreography of book summary, warm platitudes and free wine. The last of three speakers, McGonagle briskly sketches the terrain of his speech: community arts, he says, involves access and participation, ideas connecting participatory culture to participatory democracy. As Joseph Beuys once wrote, all art is political.

As McGonagle - former director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and, more recently, director of the Civil Arts Inquiry, City Arts Centre's two-year period of self-analysis - continues, disgruntlement begins to emanate from the back of the hall. McGonagle continues with his Marxist analysis of the arts - "one of the features of industrial capitalism was that it alienated the worker from the value of his or her work" - while, at the other end of the hall, the poet and broadcaster Theo Dorgan chews his cheeks.

McGonagle explains that the artist can likewise be separated from the artwork, also pointing out that the model of the "genius producer" posits the artist as an eccentric, disconnected and autonomous figure, divorced from society. Dorgan sighs audibly. Industrial capitalism, McGonagle insists, has driven a wedge between community and arts, society and the artist. The rest of the audience applauds. Dorgan does not.

Finally, the poet lets rip. Recalling a pamphlet by "the discredited Vladimir Ilich Lenin" in which the Russian revolutionary lambasted communism for its obsession with theory over practice, Dorgan questions community-arts rhetoric about "empowerment" and "permission". "I'm only a poor poet," says Dorgan, in a less than ingenuous moment, "but I don't know a single artist who considers herself or himself a signature, genius artist . . . or disconnected from community."

Dorgan's arts inquiry is civil but only just; the succinctness of his own rhetoric - "I have never in my life asked permission to write a poem" - is viciously effective. McGonagle has spoken for more than 20 minutes and been convincing. Dorgan has spoken for four and been devastating.

The title of the book that McGonagle is helping to launch could not be more apposite: An Outburst Of Frankness: Community Arts In Ireland - A Reader. It also prompts the best quip of the night: "What prompted that outburst?" As the debate rolls on Sandy Fitzgerald, the book's editor, looks on calmly, radiating the impression of one who has seen it all before.

The book's cover image, which Fitzgerald insisted on, appears both revolutionary and aggressive. A detail from a bonfire at Fatima Mansions, in Dublin, as part of a project entitled Burning the Demons, it depicts an untamed fire, the community arts going up in flames. The issues around community arts seem to have a tendency to stoke tempers. "Always, I would say, in my experience," Fitzgerald quietly agrees, a few days later.

Involved in community arts since they began in Ireland, more than 30 years ago, Fitzgerald has considerable experience. Founder, in 1973, of Grapevine Arts, which later became City Arts Centre, he was director of the centre until 2001, when he stood down following the Dublin-based venue's sudden closure - a closure precipitated by a dwindling of community-arts activity in the building.

Why does he think politics and tempers run so high? For some artists, community arts were a response to "a world they were not happy with, or a world they wanted to change", he says. Hand in hand with revolutionary spirit went the political framework of revolution. The "discrediting", then, of political theories such as socialism and communism, as Fitzgerald puts it, is a genuine loss for those who felt disenfranchised by the status quo. "Where do you go after that?" wonders Fitzgerald. "A lot of people had invested so much in it. Then it all came falling down. There is an underlying feeling, particularly from a generation at that time, that they had lost their touchstone. And artists particularly - I say it in the book - found kindred spirits within the socialist principles and values. Ideology went into communism. Socialism was more about values and the possibility for a new type of unity in society."

If such politics can now seem anachronistic, even derisory - when Bertie Ahern can claim to be a socialist an ideology has truly become a punchline - such an entrenched pocket of resistance against the tide of capitalism resembles a movement in stasis, like a black-and-white photograph of Paris in 1968.

It was not always thus. "There was a period where it looked like things might change," says Fitzgerald. "If you take 1968, or 1978, although they were very much part of a youth movement, they also represented a period where you have huge upheaval in working-class areas - the miners' strike, for example - a real show of strength and a call for change. In both cases the powerful were taken very much off guard, and they rallied quite quickly and began to discredit all of these things. . . . It's not so much that community arts got discredited, but it was up against a lot of very strong forces."

If Fitzgerald has a tendency to speak of the community arts in the past tense, it is not so much that he considers it a finished project as that he has spent two years helping to inscribe its history. The first book of its kind in Ireland, An Outburst Of Frankness begins with the transcript of a forum held in Cork on the history of community arts in Ireland, both north and south, then divides into engaging essays and articles on the context of community arts, its funding structure and questions of quality, then looks at its contemporary practice.

The book concludes with another transcribed forum. (Over the two years of the Civil Arts Inquiry, before City Arts Centre eventually sold its premises, for €4.25 million, Ireland's community arts had became world-beaters at hosting forums.)

Fitzgerald's contribution to the book traces the "uneasy alliance" between the middle-class counterculture and working-class labour movements of the 1970s that sparked community arts into being in Ireland. The backs-to-the-wall conditions of the 1980s helped to galvanise it. One wonders, however, if the pedal-to-the-metal "gentrification" of such traditionally working-class areas as Dublin's Docklands now threatens not only the community arts but also the notion of communities.

"I think it has to change," says Fitzgerald. "This might be seen in retrospect as a real point of change. [ The problem with community arts] is that it was isolated. And it was done very successfully by actually naming it community arts. We all sort of rowed in under that - we had to. [ But] once you name something you can control it much better." Hence the reluctance of many to define and then embrace the term.

Annie Kilmartin, founder of Moving Theatre and Community Arts For Everyone, says in one forum: "We didn't actually want to be labelled as community arts, because we knew that it would become marginalised and it would be undervalued and underfunded."

One can understand the frustration. Every effort to "democratise culture", to provide access to making art for those frozen out of "high art", could be simply swept into a bureaucratic ghetto.

Cordoned off, community arts became more sophisticated at procuring funding from non-arts sources, chiefly Department of Labour schemes for job creation and European Union schemes for European integration - both of which prioritised administration over art. As the arts were thus gradually squeezed out of community arts, the dispossession of communities from culture has become more nuanced, according to Fitzgerald.

"Now the oppression is really internalised," he says. "What has happened is that the ideology of consumerism has really taken over. . . . Art is being able to think creatively, engage creatively with yourself and the world. That, and being able to dream, to have ideas and have that space to do that.

"But what's happening now is that people's dreams and ideas are totally oppressed, and they buy them off the shelf, be they computer games or television or whatever. Kids have very little space to dream. You're told all the time that your ideas are crap, but if you spend €6 you'll get a great idea, a great dream."

He continues: "I think one of the problems [ with community arts] has obviously been resources. But there's also a problem, internally, of how people perceive it, what they think of their work. For instance, this is the first book on the subject for 30 years, whereas the fine arts or the established arts have been pumping out books on a daily basis - and that validates the work, that's where you get the validation.

"You need to validate your history. You need to be confident of it. You need to be aware of it and you need to be recording it." And, as it has already neatly proved, says Fitzgerald, the book is there to stimulate debate.

An Outburst Of Frankness: Community Arts In Ireland - A Reader, edited by Sandy Fitzgerald, is published by TASC/New Island, €20.

A ROUGH GUIDE TO COMMUNITY ARTS

Not to put too fine a point on it, but what are community arts? "A form of ideology critique which takes as its object the social function of art and artists and in doing so presents a challenge to dominant artistic hegemonies by rejecting the autonomy of the institution of art in favour of a revitalisation of the avant-garde attempt to integrate art and everyday life."  - Rhona Henderson

Huh? "Art happening in a community context." - Peter Sheridan

Ah. So are amateur arts community arts? "The answer must be yes. But it's not the same as what I do." - Peter Sheridan

Sorry, you're losing me again "Community arts is very much about telling your story. It didn't matter whether you did it with photography, dance, drama, visual arts, anything, but it was your voice, and that was the major difference." - Sue Richardson

But don't I get that from non-community arts? "The mainstream cultural policy indicates that it's only some people's stories that are worth telling and that most people's role is to buy a ticket and listen quietly." - Jenny Harris

I'm coming over all Marx, and I don't mean Groucho "Community arts has historically not been connected to power. In fact at its best community arts has embodied a practice-based critique of power." - Declan McGonagle

I am now inflamed with righteous anger. Enrage me further with evocative imagery of slaves from antiquity "And if art does not lead us to those new visions, then it merely leads us, tied to its chariot, in abject procession through the streets as part of somebody else's triumphal march." - Fintan O'Toole