Druid Theatre artistic director Garry Hynes has described the passing of the recent marriage equality referendum as an "extraordinary event", but has expressed serious concern about a lack of "civic morality" in Irish society.
“It has been extraordinary for me to find that the liberal, social, sexual-politics position is suddenly the majority position, rather than the minority position,” Ms Hynes said, admitting she “really never did think that would happen in my lifetime”.
In a very personal address to delegates at a Unesco Child and Family Research Centre conference at NUI Galway (NUIG), she questioned the tolerance for public drunkenness and for "devastating" road construction projects, and the lack of recognition given to "the power of the imagination" in society.
The NUIG graduate and holder of an honorary doctorate, who recently celebrated a civil partnership with producer Martha O’Neill, recalled the early childhood challenge of being reared only through Irish in the English-speaking environment of Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon.
Imagination
“I have a memory of standing outside the gates of our house and of not being able to talk to other kids who were passing up and down the road,”she said.
“Some of that story is part of a narrative I have made in my own head . . . but there was a certain sense of distancing and of having to go into my own imagination which was very much a part of my growing up,”she said.
Moving from Roscommon to Monaghan aged 12 had its benefits in later years, she said, referring to the importance to her of townland names, places and feelings which had been a "rich well throughout" her life.
“Being able to have a reserve of the imagination, to have a place that doesn’t necessarily match with the reality . . . is an incredibly important part of being a healthy child, and therefore a successful adult,”she said.
Ms Hynes said her childhood was “very much part of an old Ireland”, but her father was a “passionate educator” and her parents were “hugely supportive of their children in a way that seems to me often not given now”.
“Our dining table was – it sounds a bit like the Kennedys, but it isn’t – a place of fierce debate, and so therefore there were both the securities and freedoms and there was a place for the imagination,”she said.
“I don’t have children, and I think how difficult it must be to bring up children now,” she said. She expressed concern about a society that “increasingly is not clear about what its values are” and which gave so little scope to the imagination.
‘Political uptalk’
“As someone who works in the arts, I am only too aware of the political uptalk about how important culture and the arts are for our society, and yet that . . . is not supported in action,”she said.
“And it’s not supported by a civic morality which I think is probably for me the most significant, serious problem.”
“I don’t understand how we tolerate public drunkenness, I don’t understand how we pursue everything in terms of tourism and economics and we don’t seem to be able to even ask fundamental questions about what kind of society we want,” she said.
She expressed particular concern about plans for the N6 inner ring road in Galway, which, she said, is "about to devastate my family's home".
“My mother is 85 and the likelihood is that she will have to move out in the next two years,” she said, adding she had seen what roads had done in terms of destroying the physical habitat in Galway.
