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COMHRÁ:
GABRIEL
To explore the Gaelic typography means to come up with these primordial
images of birth and renewal and eroticism. I was born in Co Limerick.
There's a prehistorical site there, Lough Gur. There's many a
time I passed it. I've never actually explored it, and it's to
my shame. And it was only reading the book Mythic Ireland by Michael
James that I discovered that the word Lough Gur, that Gur there
means hatching. So this was the place where the cosmos was hatched.
SEÁN
It is a womb. It's a very secret little valley with a secret lake.
And you feel when you go there, that time will stop still.
RUÁN
This picture more than any other feels like it captures Ireland.
It has got a sense of the fairy tale about it. This land, this
landscape filled with heroes. Around the next mountain is another
extraordinary magical place to be found. This is the Ireland that
I certainly fed when I was a kid, by my grandmother, by the old
stories of Cú Chulainn and Fionn MacCumhail. This is the
Ireland I expected to grow up in.
SEÁN
When I started to make this, we talked about having something
about the relation between the earth and the Goddess. I just clicked
immediately on the idea of the hills that I knew are called called
the 'Paps of Anu'. I had always been fascinated by, and just loved
this idea, because I'm fascinated by breasts in culture, religion
and myth and in reality. My idea was to photograph the real Paps
of Anu, and collage in real, beautiful, fantastic, breasts into
them, in a way that they would both read as landscape, and that
they would be so obviously part of a human being that it would
make your hair stand on end. It says I suppose that the earth
is hermaphrodite, as it has a phallus as well.
RUÁN
The tower is also a possible solution to the planning problem,
as a foil to one-off housing!
GABRIEL
We're living in funny times. Around the time of the foundation
of this State, when you had people like Senator William Butler
Yeats and his sometimes friend, George Russell, AE, these were
serious intellectuals who believed in fairies. In fact George
Russell one time was staying in the Shelbourne Hotel. He got up
early in the morning, stayed in bed, but did a little bit of painting.
The chamber maid came in and he said, 'don't disturb me'. Seemingly
he was 'painting a fairy' that was 'on his big toe'.
RUÁN
My mother swears she saw a leprechaun. With her hand on her heart
she swears to this day that she met one. With all those 'lios
timpeall na tíre;' the fairy forts that no farmer would
dare touch. I am sure that nowadays there are farmers that do
bring in JCBs and dig the bloody thing out.
GABRIEL
A woman in Cork was asked about fairies, 'do you believe in them?'
and she said, 'personally sir, I don't believe in them myself,
but they are there anyway.'
RUÁN
One wonders whether the powers that be, the government, the state,
the civil servants, and all the rest who are responsible for this
culture that we are supposedly losing or reviving, or whatever,
might be better giving the fairies a little phone call.
GABRIEL
Do you know the origin of the word fairy? The word Sí may
be related to Sida Yogic powers.
SEÁN
I thought they were the same. How do you spell them Sí
then?
GABRIEL
Sí or Sidhe. One of the Yogic powers of Sida is the power
to be invisible. But the actual word Sí originally meant
in Irish 'a mound'. It is thought that there may have been an
aboriginal people (in India) who were displaced by invaders and
they went to live in the mountains. Now and again they would come
down from the mountains and snatch a child or a woman, for their
own purposes of procreation and so on. By a process of osmosis
or evolution, they became the Sí, the fairy folk.
RUÁN
Irish and Hindu have essentially the same root, which is why we
can make a lot of these cross-references to Indian culture.
GABRIEL
Absolutely. Especially in early Irish law. There are many comparisons
between early Irish law and texts in Sanskrit. And there are many
mythological similarities as well.
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