Green, Green Grass of Home

As I knit the three projects which follow, I was looking at these colours and thinking what I think about them collectively.... For the most part, I see it as a benefit to be Irish, and I like living here. I always felt that having had to consider how to work around others quite a lot has fostered a certain creativity.  Mostly we use the same words as other English speakers, but we communicate differently – I’m especially conscious of this when I travel abroad – slightly amending the way I speak to make myself understood.  Of course this could be a generational thing - a soon-to-be forgotten nuance,  because I grew up in a more internationally isolated world.

I don’t dwell in the past, distant or close. There are so many variables that we can never truly know it.  There’s a place for scientific study of past events, if only to make us truly grateful for those who made sacrifices for our benefit today.   You've got to be careful what you consider "your benefit" to be though, because received hindsight tends to favour winning career paths, which in my opinion favoured regimes, organisations and systems that often have had very little to do with my personal benefit.  Sentimental interpretations of times past have a role in art for sure, because visual art, theatre, literature all travel non linear routes and communicate in language other than factual.  Politicians with lumps in their throats over tragic past, however, are not for me… they leave me icy…That politicians should be empathic is a given, but addressing and combatting tragedy-in-progress professionally on our behalves is their sole meaningful function.

I still have massive faith in the next generation and their much wider world – the strengths and frailties told of in the myths of ancient Greece and Rome will never be unrecognisable to humanity, I expect, but today's communications revolution definitely makes our more bilious aspects that bit harder to conceal and long may that system prevail.