Visual Arts Aidan DunneReviewedCrawford College of Art and Design Degree Show 2004, Sharman Crawford Street, Cork, ends tomorrow (021- 4966777)Limerick School of Art and Design Fine Art Degree Shows, Clare Street and George's Quay, Limerick, show concluded (061- 489602)Sligo Institute of Technology Fine Art Degree Show, Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, show concluded (071- 9141405)

Sligo's fine-art graduates are fortunate in having a handsome venue, in the form of the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, for their degree show. They cannot be quite as free with the fabric of the place as Limerick's sculpture and mixed-media students can with the less architecturally august workshop at their disposal on George's Quay, but the Model Arts shows most work off to great advantage.

And most of what is there has some conviction. That is, even if you aren't too sure about the depth of the ideas or the abilities on display, a certain rigour has been invested in the process. You feel the students have been challenged and have worked their way through something, which is not always the case.

Looking at the art schools overall this year - and they are clearly a growth sector in third-level education - there is a rumbling underlying problem with skills, specifically manual skills and techniques. Many young artists are keen on technology, and usually keenness translates in to a commitment to learn the necessary techniques. But there is a tendency to take the old manual processes for granted. This may relate to the prevalent assumption that ideas matter more than their material expression, that content outweighs form, but it is a reckless assumption. Needless to say, as well, it is not uniformly the case.

This year, in Dublin and throughout the country, many impressively accomplished graduates are working in various disciplines. But, equally, many graduates seem to take their abilities for granted, seem to think one can reference "painting" or "drawing" in one's work as if quoting something fixed, intact and easy. In the ideological landscape of contemporary art at its most polarised, one tends to be viewed as being for or against painting, for or against video, conceptual art and so on.

But it's too easily forgotten that no good painters are for poor painting just because it's painting. They're more likely to be vehemently against it, and quite rightly.

This is not to argue that work should be judged purely in terms of the technical skills or natural aptitude it evidences. Often, things have a way of coming right regardless of apparent shortcomings in these areas. Sinéad Smith, of Sligo Institute of Technology, is an example of a graduate for whom things come together. But then she is clearly starting from a strong base. She knows what she's doing with a series of geometric, strongly coloured abstracts featuring jarring collisions of colour and pattern, so volatile they hardly hold together within the compositional rectangle.

They are interesting, literate in every way, but her final piece, a diptych incorporating two sets of skewed, enmeshed grids, is something of a breakthrough for her, refining and advancing all the ideas she's been dealing with. Coincidentally or not, it's the only work by her that is not for sale. Others in Sligo, including Caroline Geary, Johann Stafford and Jason McCaffrey, explore comparable conceptual territory in differing ways.

Pictorial space, coherent or fractured, is an underlying concern of Smith's. Space looms large as a preoccupation in various ways. Donna McDermott , her fellow Sligo graduate, deals with architectonic spaces. There are nods in her accomplished work to the spare purity of modernist design, but rather than implying yet another critique of modernism she seems to be interested in appropriating for painting the language of architectural design in terms of its articulation of space. She has a nice touch, good colour sense and a feeling for composition.

Donal Ward, of Limerick School of Art and Design, also deals inventively with architectonic forms and spaces, although he is more interested in the aura that can attach to particular kinds of space.

Emma Brazel, also at Limerick, maps a route through a city using diagrammatic and photographic composites in a vivid evocation of negotiating an urban space. Sinéad Guthrie (Limerick) has an extremely effective, atmospheric, carefully detailed installation on the way nature is packaged and traduced in urban settings. The print installation of Lisa Saliba (Limerick) maps a derelict cottage in a way that conjures up a sense of a particular space and its absent inhabitants.

The work of Liam Delaney (Limerick) is conceptually very strong but also has real tactile qualities. His painted, composite landscape grid, juxtaposed with earth pots and miniature wooden shelves, references nature, self-ordering systems, our instinct to seek out pattern, the transformation of materials and much more, all very convincingly.

Laura Hedderman (Limerick) has a good stab at an installation addressing our insatiable appetite for information, with masses of photocopied material, Post-its, files and the work-in-progress clutter of a desktop, recalling Katie Holten's autodidactic zeal. Underlying the randomness is the message that information does not amount to meaning and that it can feed paranoid conspiracy theories. Hedderman's approach to her theme is really promising. Bill Barhan (Limerick) also deals with information overload in his energised, percussive installation.

Gary Moynihan, a student at Crawford College of Art and Design, in Cork, is one of the few graduates to deal directly in their work with the "war on terror", and he does so very well. His maimed and mangled Action Men, burnt-out model military vehicles and other reworked toy and comic motifs are all the more effective because they short-circuit the connections between fact and fantasy, representation and reality. The only drawback is the fragmentary nature of the material, the lack of an overall form.

The compact installation of Janice Feighery (Limerick) imaginatively visualises the experience of being an outsider dealing with an unsympathetic bureaucratic environment at a typically shabby physical interface.

The body, presence and absence, and gender and identity are all usually degree-show staples, and this year is no exception. In the ethereal prints of Susan Holland (Crawford), taken from X-rays, the human presence fades to a ghostly trace. Line itself is a lingering, hanging trace in the ceramic work of Colleen Bowler (Crawford), which juxtaposes the durability of functional forms with the transience of human presence.

Tanya Costello (Limerick) finds ways to depict self-mutilation in her vivid work. Vulnerability and damage are also evoked in the sensitive pieces of Marilyn Reilly (Sligo). Fiona Kelly (Crawford) uses materials, notably glass, very effectively to convey a striking sense of pain and loss.

The paintings of Grainne Hennessy (Limerick) are subtle, delicately nuanced attempts to evoke a sense of the boundaries of the female body. In quite another vein there is real satirical flair in the anti-fashion shoot of Colette Kearney (Limerick), with its wry recognition that anything can be marketed.

Sharyn O Shaughnessy (Limerick) explores the idea of the spaces between people as being charged with communication, using anatomical motifs, ear bones and optical cones and rods.

Absence is brilliantly treated in the exceptionally good print installation of Rachael Shearwood (Limerick), a sequence of boxes each recalling a member of a family in terms of one key image or object.

Wesley Triggs (Crawford) takes the figure as starting point in a series of gestural paintings invested with great vitality. It is as if the energy of the figure is dispersed in to the ground.

The figures in the paintings of Rosemary Smyth (Crawford) seem always on the point of dissolution, fading in to their environment, while the subjects of Aidan Crotty (Crawford), photographic faces all but lost under layers of timeand forgetfulness, recall the work of Gerhard Richter.

It's a well-tried theme at this stage, but the all-woman photographic tableaux of the Last Supper by Briona Gallagher (Limerick) is exceptionally well done, as are her other, smaller pieces.

Mark Redden (Crawford) is an artist with an ambitious sense of engagement. Like Francesco Clemente, he wants his all-encompassing vision to have a sweeping, mystical breadth. He is unusual at a time when specialisation is the name of the game. With their pale flurries and inflections, the paintings of Tonia Kehoe (Crawford) aim for gestural understatement, but they too set out to encompass a world. She is one of several gestural painters.

A strain of dark, Gothic fantasy recurs. It's there in the crows of Thomas Byrne (Sligo), the dolls of Lillian Conlon (Sligo), the graphic and collage composites of Killian O'Sullivan (Crawford) and the work of Fiona O'Mahony (Crawford) - it looks that way, even though her stated aim is to recall a time of security - and John Galvin (Limerick). And the terrifically detailed, all-red installation of an artist's garret by Emily Campbell (Limerick), complete with dangling noose, is tremendously atmospheric, claustrophobic and unsettling.

The business of art and being an artist comes in for more attention. Margaret Morley (Limerick) organised her own opening and documented it. The opening is the artwork. The projects of Helle Kvamme (Crawford), relating to feelings of self-exposure and vulnerability, include a job-interview video at an art college that is both funny and very intense and unsettling.

Among a body of perfectly OK work, Untitled 2, one of the large-scale prints of decaying plants by Cecily Kenny (Limerick), is superb.

It's impossible to give everything the attention it merits here, but it would be remiss not to mention in passing significant efforts by a number of graduates: Vivienne Griffin (inspired by space and, especially, light, in some terrifically inventive mixed media pieces), Annette Dinan, Carolyn Treacy, Paul Meaney, Aissa Lopez, David Hill, Sheila Kelleher, Noilín O'Kelly, Barry Foley, Deirdre Corboy (all Crawford); Michael Stafford (Sligo); and Maura O'Connor, Sarah Curran, Helen Ryan (a clever installation), Bridget Gallagher, Aoife Murphy (a welcome excursion in to sound) and Rebecca O'Hare (all Limerick).