An arts centre can be a catalyst for integration among the local community or, alternatively, a cause of division and stress, as the Tinahely Courthouse Centre discovered, the Parnell Summer School was told yesterday.
Ms Sharon Corcoran, the Tinahely Courthouse Centre organiser, joined the poet Theo Dorgan, Mr Fergal Gaynor, of the Munster Literature Centre, and Mr Tony O Dalaigh, of the Dublin Theatre Festival, in a symposium, "The Arts and the Community", on the penultimate day of the summer school in Avondale House, Co Wicklow.
Ms Corcoran told how she devised a courtroom drama as the subject of theatrical performances, based on real cases which had occurred in Tinahely courthouse, which had been converted into the arts centre.
Most of the cases had a strong comic element - the drunken sexton, a jilted bride, unlicensed dogs - and occurred during the early 1900s. All names were changed and the venture proved a big local success.
However, in one instance a play was made from a true story culled from the archives of the Wicklow People and dated 1907. The tale of a son prosecuted by his father for selling the family flock of sheep before trying to abscond was traced to a family in the community and caused great hurt.
With mounting community anger, the play was abandoned but not before the national media had made much mirth out of the story.
In a more successful interaction with the local community, the centre supported the playwright Sylvia Cullen in writing a play which had its roots in the area but was fiction.
Ms Cullen has interviewed more than 100 people in the area, aged from nine to 94, and the centre hopes to stage the resulting work this October.
"We are hopeful that this intense process of consultation will result in a high level of enthusiasm and investment by the `community' in the production," said Ms Corcoran.
In terms of involvement with the community, the courthouse centre has been successful. Yet
membership of the Courthouse Centre Friends, which numbered 173 people from as far away as Galway and London, includes just 55 from Tinahely. "I would like that proportion to be higher," said Ms Corcoran.
Mr Fergal Gaynor outlined the history of the Munster Literature Centre, established to promote a "Munster literary scene".
He said what had transpired since the centre was begun in 1993 was "the gathering together of regional writers; the gauging of the awareness of the region's public".
He said from the start it was obvious that the scores of local writers' groups scattered about the province would benefit by a resource and co-ordinative centre. The programme had been highly successful, and the centre was on the edge of realising its central aim "in that we seem to be becoming a recognisable entity in the public eye".
Today the summer school will hear a symposium on "Local Government Devolution and the European Dimension". It will be addressed by Mr George Reid, the deputy presiding officer of the new Scottish Parliament, and Mr Mark Durkan, an SDLP member who was elected to the Northern Assembly earlier this year.
