ISWÜ Symposium: The Animal in Ireland, Real and Imagined
Panel 3: The Economy of the Irish Animal
Speakers
[Not recorded] – Christian Huck (University of Kiel, Germany):
“The Cow that Drank all the Water”
02:26 – Selina Guinness (Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dún Laoghaire, Ireland):
“Farm Yard to White Cube: Livestock Process in Contemporary Irish Visual Arts”
23:05 – Videos from Orla Barry: https://orlabarry.be/
38:53 – Laurent Daniel (University of Southern Brittany, Lorient, France):
“The Hare, the Greyhound and the Sport of Coursing“
Chair: Jennifer Meier (University of Würzburg, Germany)
More information:
https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/irish-studies/aktuelles/single/news/symposium-the-animal-in-ireland-real-and-imagined/
D [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] the All now a warm welcome to Selena who is a lectur in English and I writing at the aid The Institute of Art design and Technology inui she also wrote at the Crocodile by the which is a mem about farming sheep in duin mountains which was SW listed all UK C award
Andam G thank you for the bo G Energy Irish book award in 2012 she is the edit the new Irish 2004 and Co Series in 2011 her current research interest are focused on contemporary narrative characters and and arts which with a particular EMP on naturality landscap and so I hand to you
And thank you very much and thank you to Christian I I think that I we are these papers are going to sing together quite nicely um because I’m also going to be talking about uh AG agronomics really um but from the position of being a a fairly marginal um
Participating in a fairly marginal livestock Enterprise which is sheep so although I’m a lecturer I’m also a sheep farmer and pictured here is a suff h hbd lamb the tag in its ear shows the national identifier my flock number and the animal number and this sheep I would
Say is a barely profitable animal um it will be slaughtered in Ireland at kildair chilling Factory to be consumed in France the factory demands that our Lambs kill out to 22 kilograms dead weight to ensure that four cutlets neatly fit inside a standard Supermarket tray other me of death are available but
This is the one that puts food on my family’s table what kinship then can this producing livestock unit and my sheep is only there’s a livestock unit is one p or 6.66 sheep so this is only part of a livestock unit that you’re looking at what kinship then can this livestock
Unit itself very insecurely commodified these days and caps current market terms and cap is the common agricultural policy in Cap’s current Mar tends what kinship can it look to have with the shipless fabled animals that animate their symbolic realm in our national imaginary Beyond dreams of rewilding how should we in the environmental
Humanities engage with those agrarians who still rely on grass-based plal systems for their income when few Family Farms outside of dairy achieve a living wage through raising livestock this paper is going to suggest that when relationality is recognized as the core object of epistemological inquiry in these times of eological collapse transnationalist transis
Disciplinary and most vitally intersectoral conversations should come to the FL this swerve I need suggest has transformative implications for area based studies now in Spring 2022 the royal Hibernian Academy held a group show of seven Irish female artists whose expanded practice explicitly engages with agriculture primarily focused on livestock Enterprises a growing inquiry
Art and agriculture reconciling values we stopped the visually oversaturated Irish landscape or those green fields that Christian spoke of with the material Commodities of agricultural trade a fertilizer spreader a wire tractor and various byproducts of meat trade appeared in the gallery these byproducts included wool Tallow straws for collecting bull seamen these featured
Among the exhibits for me this exhibition was a model of haraway’s tentacular thinking and this paper is informed by my own experience of farming sheep and writing about them while investigating how the presentation of livestock in gallery spaces disrupts post Arcadian and implicitly patriarch Al stereotypes of Irish rurality
So recently I’ve been thinking about how A Renewed focus on materiality in expanded practice offers a site of situated and embodied knowledge that is resistant to the ecocidal and unsustainable digitization of experience in this era of great acceleration inspired by haraway’s attention to the Genera of Joy inherent
To mapping new ecologies of practice I’m going to focus on two artists Maria mckin and AA Barry and I want to think with both of these artists think with and alongside Livestock in their recent projects so wool milk and semen the materiality of these substances their function in cycles of sustance the shame
And expense of their waste when consumer lust gets redirected by extractivist Industries these are the animal materials I bring to the table so this uh slide shows Maria mckin with AOW at an agricultural show this is um not just a piece of play this is actually an art performance and this multimedia project
Named sire resulted from an 18-month residency for Donny G artist Maria mckin at the UCD parity studios in 2015 now where steam collaborations are generally regarded as a good thing for everyone there are there are recently have been some concerns expressed in the art World about the implicit hierarchies
To this collaboration so a recent article in freeze queried um queried this asking in such contexts that is collaboration between researchers and artists in such context does the artist work with the scientist in a symmetrical collaboration between equals or is the artist working for the scientist to help
Disseminate their findings or is the scientist in fact working for the artist who comes to represent the wider societal good sorry The Wider social context of the public good and its coroller public opinion or is it all or none of these in this case I suggest that the transgressive practice in mck’s
Work stems from a quiet regendering of the dynamic between artist subject and Handler which is designed to unsettle a traditionally patriarchal scientific hubris working with Bulls at the at the DEA stud Farm in tarari mckin res situates the gendered battles fought by Ma armies over the stud b d kuna inside
The Flesh of the animal itself as you will see so this is one of McKinney’s artworks um the loom band structure of the X chromosome is woven from the plastic straws used for storing bull semen by the AI industry and and AI here is artificial insemination these Bulls all non-native
Breeds do not get to cover cows but have their seamen Stripped by handlers in a close moment of interspecies cooperation SAR effectively turns these icons of machismo into plins for exhibiting the genetic material expressed through the phenotype in their physique if I click here should I click
Here if I click here you will see ah yes good you will see the characteristics oh you can’t see it oh I do beg your pardon you’re very good I think yes that one yes that one perfect I think yeah it’s one anyway you get the idea that basically Bally these are the
Characteristics that the stud Farm is going to prioritize ah it’s actually the other side but it doesn’t matter we’ll come back to um can I come back to my perfect sorry so there’s been technical issues of the devil this all week so I apologize okay just go back to that side there
Perfect and then we start again and I may meet you by my side um yeah okay so uh the artwork sorry if I go back a section here perfect we up the artqu then should be understood to comprise both the structure on the animal’s back and the bull itself right because the
Bull effectively is a form of genomic one it’s a genomic Wonder in his s agenomic nature read through post-humanism Richard twine states that transhumanism attempts to render materiality economically intelligible helping to interweave science and capital promoting new accumulation strategies one phrase he uses to describe the Advent of laboratory genomics appears particularly pertinent
To McKenna’s work and that is the focus of the eye of accumulation has turned molecular and I would suggest the particular power of sire is to render this Focus visible and simultaneously absurd so this interweaving of Science and capital identified by twine as a feature of Lake capitalism is given a
Longer genealogy by the craft employed here a collection of corn dollies in the national museum of country life inspired mcken to employ the same straw binding techniques in making her sculptures Straw from the final sheath of the year’s Harvest is woven into a figure and this figure is buried with the seed
To ensure for the spring prop prospers it’s a practice that happens all over Europe mckin continues in contemporary Society however the branch of knowledge known as genomics has given humans the ability to truly influence how nature behaves in future generations of animal and plant species this body of work sire
Is proposed as a rephrasing of what was once intangible now we not only understand these forly mysterious processes of propagation but also manipulate them to our own ends this ability is in itself a cause of wonderment the if commodification relies on dematerializing labor mckin sculptures pull aside country’s cloak s’s Origins
However in these straw figures lent an elic undertoe pointing to the threat of material redundancy that is intrinsic to the genomic project in Irish the word kylo here meaning the last straw is also applied to an unmarried woman an aunt denote a ha and a witch this eological
Swerve and thank you Jessica for the term points to what harway identifies as the quick dreams that shadow transhumanist Ambitions these dreams are of procreation without the risk of anatomical entanglement with real female bodies so the pop colored range of colors in these straws has a function allowing researchers to quickly match
Specimen and bull in the Laboratories deep freeze Richard twine suggests the gamic sequencing of livestock to improve breeding characteristics requires a distancing from the sensual presence of animal bodies that Echoes the distance achieved by the consumer in the conversion of animals into the Cal of meat now I’m not sure this dist
Distancing act accurately reflects the intimate practice attending to these prize Bulls which lead a fairly Charmed Life the unnamed male handlers in these photographs hold the named bull With Arms Reach and may indeed regard him with alert respect but you’d be wrong I think to read their presence as just a
Glimpse of interspecies connection if I click through yet another one of these indexes and it may be the same one that I showed you earlier is this right yes yeah you will see actually here that one of the things they are breeding for is disil and so the rage is literally being
Bred out of the bull so that’s what the presence of the handlers testifies to is the fact that these Bulls can be handled while the woven AI STS in s make the visualization of data beautiful and are arguably perhaps complicit with the dissemination of funded genomic research these structures also Express anxiety
About what happens when the eye of accumulation Narrows in on the future of any species at molecular level the transubstantiation of data into bestial flesh Accords with pionic ambitions to overcome the natural limitations of accidental selection do these Bulls regard themselves as trans animalist wonders exemplary models of a post bovine future
Is this even a legitimate question as critical posthumanists point out transhumanism in its extropia form relies on a reading of the material world as information re relegating the experiential body to a secondary tier an inferior sight of production inside this bioinformatic economy situated knowledge is overshadowed by the constant threat of obsolesence and
Redundancy as the xenotransplantation of pig organs into human body ATT test farm animals particularly pigs fulfill dual functions both as food and production units for medical research the science mckin depicts then reaches beyond the veterinary school and into human bodies closing the genetic gap between Stockman and livestock
Between consumer and meat between human skin and the Skins we wear the HRT of my mother’s generation relied on the urine of pregnant men a to provide a compatible estrogen so how does this all impact on the farm many of the livestock Farmers I know experiened this displacement of
Husbandry as an enduring grief without being quite able to pinpoint the site of loss in the cow book John connell’s tale of returning to help run the family farm in Longford he describes the Department’s decision to upgrade the Bloodlines of the national herd through the use of by AI in the following terms
So far there has been a lot of resistance to this new system for Farmers have spent Generations breeding up their herds to a point where they are happy the new system does not favor self breeding Rory our neighbor caus it a monopoly by the genetics companies to impose their sperm banks on
Farmers now all s breeds all the breeds that mckin pictures are Continental Ian’s centile charet and these are heavy cattle little suited for longford’s rushy fields and there is concern at the mar about the reliability of that docility index the note I hear threaded through these conversations is grief at
The loss of inter species kinship the kind invoked by conell here so he here talks about calling CS as a form of oral culture and I’ll just let you read that yourselves the language he describes using brings the haptic geography of the F closer a series of Habitual sounds produced in
The human body to produce reaction and movement in the herd and ultimately these noises articulate attachment and it’s to this sense of kinship this mutuality mutuality of being being that I want to turn now so I’m going to use this Reef this coral reef famous crocheted coral reef to change
Species as Penelope would attest weaving as a female and often a strategically feminist art and to weave molecular structures out of plastic semen straws presents a teasingly feminist visual joke I read mckin sculptures as the visual embodiment of what I would propose is the rhetorical Trope for
Irish animal studies and that is an Irish Bull a ludicrous in congruent or logically absurd statement generally unrecognized as such by its author subject always to mafi’s warning that an Irish Bull is always pregnant in 2010 I visited this crochet Coral Leaf in the Trinity science gallery and perhaps mckin did too this
Fiber arts project created by 25,000 volunteer Crafters supplies harway with a key example of tentacular thinking in staying with the trouble um and there’s more I could say about it but I’m going to have to move on what I want to do is to take the wool
From The Reef and move on to a sheep so I’m next going to talk about AA baring and this is alla here oh you can’t see all okay this is all here and this is her Clint yo um and it is a um don’t worry about changing the it’s okay
Uh but effectively um last year a film came out by the director Cara Holmes uh which is an hourong documentary about alla’s relationship with her sheep um she is a pedigree CL she’s a pedigree Clint farmer so this is a Clint breed there a Welsh breed it’s white but she also has
A few what in Ireland I call sble sheep but in fact it’s swart bless uh they are um a duut sheep bread for dairy farming and she keeps a few of those as well and notes from sheep plan Cara Holmes’s film documents this hard one integration of arts practice and shepherding in
Barry’s life and work so Barry lived um for 16 years in Brussels where she worked as a speech and performance-based conceptual artist before she returned to the family farm in County Wexford and turned the tillage fields over to pastures for sheep um so Barry insists that her pedigree flock and she is a
Judge around agricultural shows that her pedigree flock should be considered as much an artwork as the other projects I’m going to show you here so this is one of Barry’s early works it’s h called golden pocket it’s not that early sorry in 2017 so Barry’s dyslexia is unexceptional among visual
Artists and this work golden pocket demonstrates her acute attention to hi self in relation is semantically constrained at the center St Ru shakas is biomorphic figure a hybrid creature that can belong to either the animal or BL Kingdom that’s this shadow in here um the phrase so to come face to
Face with this non-human being is to negotiate a textile spiral with diagrams of network phrases that label different intersectional and Inter subjective positions and the phrase shaved Rapunzel which is Barry’s recurring name for sha yo is connected to various other things including multiculture multicolored animal
Jees um I want to move ahead to another couple of her words when so much of the text we consume has only digital shape and is stored in data centers that are exponentially more ecosal than parchment and paper these nine felt Works made by Barry from nine named shearings and
These are the names of the sheep um these uh felt Works restore the labor of the body to the text not just the female body but the named animal body too so form is destroyed in the breakdown of fibers required in felting and in felt or feeling work too a sematic openness
To encounter with radical alterity also requires a breakdown in fibers of ego of sexuality of boundaries to produce the Eco and form 2 is obviously destroyed in this capitaline era by extractivist Industries whose synthetic fibers displace a core commodity in sheet production and that is raw
World so I just want to play you a quick clip here I’m aware that I’m up against the clock to give you an idea of her performance work not this um the link that’s here no it’s here so I just want to explain to you how her collaborative practice takes place
I should say this is kind of like a a compendium he’s acting he’s acting the par around and it’s a j toac this is the shepher oh okay I think I’ll stop so just to kind of conclude I I’m sorry to run on um oh if I could just keep her
Quiet um so I just uh want to conclude really to say that where pastoral Visions in the romantic era were anchored in autoist ideas of the nation Barry’s collaboration here with the Israeli former anak tman who you saw whose first language is Hebrew really is um a kind of nonnative practice the text
The text that she performs range from the kind of uh lived experience of Barry uh as a farmer and Barry the way it happens is that Barry tells these stories to in at in learns them repeats them back to Barry Barry then adapts the text again and so the way that Barry
Sums it is to say I my ideas are in in’s body so this idea of a foreign woman voicing an Irish Shepherd’s lived experience telling it back to the shepherd who then re inscribes the tale as a hybrid and composite text is a form of radical estrangement from many of the
Ideas that we have anchoring our sense of the Pastoral as a particularly Irish uh practice so I’m just going to say thank you very much would love to play you out with a song performed by a ran who is being Shor by the female Shepherd but I think I’ll leave that pleasure to
Another time so thank you very so thank you both really inspiring my my eye opening today I would say we have 10 minutes of questions are there any questions thank you both for a really wonderful insightful talks I absolutely agree I have a a more of a kind of a
Conceptual question um and really out of curiosity Chan you mentioned um and you historicized it um this entire history of the pasture and and how it developed in the period of plantations and um 16th century kind of English um settlements however I’m not sure if you avoided it
Or if it was a coincidence um you didn’t really frame it in in a colonial framework and I was just interested it was very much about politics economics and and it was obvious from um from the sources that decided and the of the English um look on or look at um Ireland
As the kind of the the producer and so on but just out curiosity um was something that um you think where postcolonialism is perhaps not really useful not really what you um kind of point or was it kind of implicit and just the term and didn’t come up well is
In a way it is implicit but on the other hand I wanted to forr I didn’t want to forr it because I think for example uh it’s more complicated than that it’s it’s it’s there it’s obviously the frame and I you know I I said that the text especially the descriptions of Irish
Nature are obviously Colonial product because they describe the land for you know if we use the gender tra you know describe the for like the male to come and all that and yeah and but um but actually it’s not English and Irish people but the the
The the grases like the the the tenants who then it’s it’s it’s Irish people who doing that so but they’re working with in a context of yes maybe colonialism but they’re they’re working within a context of emerging Capital relations so I think that’s the more forceful power here than
To say it’s the English who brought that um because it’s um in that context the the tenant grazers that are that that I mentioned here we build up stocks those are local people emerging from local power structures you know because there were power structures before and these these continue within the colon period
So it’s certain Irish people who have the ability to build up stocks and there other Irish people who do not have the ability to build out stocks and then not pushed from the from from the from their land can I come in on the back of that
Just say that you you focused a lot on quite rightly on the tenant GR system within the southeast of the country and of course one of the things that is rarely mentioned in terms of post Colonial analyses of Ireland is that in the 1860s and 1870s many of those Farmers um not many
But a sizable portion of those Farmers moved to Argentina to cut down forests and actually establish very large cattle ranches so in fact Ireland has a history of itself being a abely and that was my hunch and that’s why I’m asking because I thought it’s a wonderful case in point that
Postcolonialism as a framework you know it it’s too one-sided almost and kind of taking this um the bottom up um view you see how complicated it is so the question of Ireland is post Colonia and so on so that was my my guess that kind of and and the story is even more
Complicated I framed it a bit like it’s it’s a it’s underclass uh Uprising against Big 10 but it wasn’t as easy as that because the the interesting is that a few people of the Irish Genty were all it isn’t clear who these hackers were because they’re you know a secret um Society um
But the evidence little evidence that we have suggests that it’s not only underclass people but you know as often in these kind of uprisings there are people from various ranks of society involved so it’s also between it’s not a CL structure anymore but there are also different Irish
Families involved um you know in this struggle against each other some are more successful in adapting the profitable system of of T gring others are less um successful in that they have their own May land that is not as um easy to adapt to this kind of
Agriculture so this is also an internal struggle between different groups of different um spheres of the society thank you I see my hand around here are there any questions I what really remind Jason’s onology the capital scene um and it kind of sh from your actually
That idea that one SP but actually it’s the history of capitalism relationship between you say workers the of of land to the reshaping of land as a commodity andin people but his work is really the way bra taking it I suppose taking it away from having a colonial paradigm has the determined
Feature to me theology actually appropriate yeah yeah um I think um so I wouldn’t go exactly with this Capital Cap scene um because as I tried to show there is the framework of I mean this is not capitalism yet there’s because it’s interesting that it’s a a
Form of economy that’s not Capital based yeah so there’s little Capital there so it’s it was but it’s even even these tenant grades don’t have Capital they build up stock over a while um but um but I find it’s but on the other hand I think most of these World System studies
Are kind of synchronous you know they show what happens in former third world countries in the global South and so on so on I think a lot of Irish history prefigures many of the things we see later on in South America or we see in India and so
On so on so it’s and we have um access to these developments three 400 years ago which play out at the moment so it’s kind of a historical angle to this world ecolog world system ecology yeah thank you I was wondering how is this work
Received um and and who sort it was the intended audience yeah sorry if I had more time I’d expand that so um okay so Maria mck’s work effectively has Maria’s been uh exhibited at venicean Alle and you know she her work has been incepted in the museum of English oral life s was
Big a big thing for that’s situated in uh reading in South England so you know this is um mainstream Contemporary Arts practice um the same with or so all Barry’s position is really interesting because effectively she’s like her her indebtedness is to New York conceptualist like Sol wit but also
Actually to Hannah Daran who I think is a Bavarian born artist um who um so and aa aa H as well so but she if you like is a Belgian artist she’s wford born and bred and lives in Wexford but the really big thing for her was shant’s films and
Diaries I don’t know if any of you know shant akan but um you know she you know her work is among you know the 100 best films of all time number one number one yeah so um and Barry also that that piece has toured so what I showed you was a kind of
Compressed initial thing called breaking rainbows that was expanded into an aarm performance uh which was performed during the Dublin theater Festival also performed down in Wexford but it has also to Belgium to Anor to the Netherlands so you know you’re in a very mainstream art World in fact when I was
In Amsterdam at New Year I went to the film Museum there they had an exhibition by the Greek artist y SAA who is also a multimedia artist whose work is entirely around um postum Landscapes and animals so you know what may feel like um um yeah so it’s it’s a very
Mainstream concern within this multimedia multi- performance space of contemporary Visual Arts I thought at one stage you showed us an image where you said this is on an agrarian Festival yeah is it the plowing or something that would the national park yes so Maria showed her work at the national park but
She also goes around like they love it because actually they respond in the best way which is they respond to the joy of it so laugh is and particularly the women you know absolutely love the kind of joke of it and there is a joke but it’s actually quite the more you think
About that projects are the more complex it becomes because you can go back to a to love LA and development of competition and weaving you know you know all of this is there in that one visual arts project so yeah okay thank you Bo have run out Ty
Your discussion point and your question to really so I’m very pleased to introduce you to L Daniel he the lecturer in English with the Department of app languages and the University of souy in long he is the current de of the faculty of Arts his main research interest is
The child and Sport and he has edited sport in 200 and in 2013 which is a book on forting from the 16th century event to the 21st century Island he has also published a few papers on the G TAA which is the G Athletic Association so really warm welcome to you morning everybody
Thank you for the organizer accepting my paper which came so many dates so many days after the the closing date and for organizing a conference on island and animals as well because this is something I started 30 years ago and which I finished some 15 years ago and
All along these years I couldn’t ever come across any conference on the subject this is a kind of overview of what I did during those few years that can be really noce and so in the words of a 19th century fet sports writer at a time when
No need for justification was felt the Grayhound is the most artificial and helpless of dogs but the most perfect animal for the special sport for which is bra it is helpless in that it is quite inefficient at catching the hair uh let alone when coupled with another another Grayhound it is artificial in
That they to be several Regional variations of the gr Huns in Great Britain but the SP of coring Ure that really the best fitted lines would survive as to the for at the time coron was born as to the sport it is special in that the hair is
Central and instrumental at the same time since there can be no cing without the hair but cing is a competition between the dogs only and the killing of the hair is quite incidental now in order to decide on the best uh dog and in order to decide on
The best dog a set of rules was devised by the the Duke of norol in the second half of the 16th century at the command of Queen Elizabeth according to Legend now it is clear from a reading the rules that the most deserving competitor is the dog who do most towards killing the
The hair rather than merely kill the hair the emphasis was on forcing the hair to move away from her straightest line towards her rescape as you can read from from this slide here trying more than the other competitor to kill the hair and uh this uh to the utmost of its
Strength because the standing in the field is the greatest foil a d can take indeed as with any sport coursing was designed to both constrain and promote specific movements and Behavior now in the original version of the rules neither killing the hair nor uh reaching the hair first were rewarded except in
Case of a tie so coursing enthusiasts simply wanted their dogs to display unflinching and selfish desire to kill the hair as well as Carriage this is why in the wor of yet another writer in 1885 the greater the full the better the gr indeed gounds H by sight only so they
Have to concentrate all their energy on keeping the pre sight and reaching it before their opponent so that the two gry hounds cat up with their hair at formidable speed and as the hair is much more aile it invariably jerks sideways at the very last moment which usually
Sends the dark many meters past and forces them to make considerable effort in order to catch up with their hair over and over again as suggested by Shakespeare I apologize for the short cut as suggested by Shakespeare himself the Greyhound looks like an idealized metaphor of the Waring qualities the Fallen nights of
The Middle Ages which they were still owed with indeed as The Preserve of the arist ocracy from as far back as the first version of the forest was in 1016 the ownership of Grayhound symbolized Royal and aristocratic privileges as to the hair coming just below this tag it
Was the most aristocratic Beast whoever was legally entitled to kill gab but did not enjoy Royal favors could hunt that is Landers with a minimum income of 40 Shillings which matched exactly the the land Revenue above which the government recruited their justices of the peace and the bisi who began to play an
Increasing uh role in the hunting world of the 15th and 16th uh centuries therefore the unleashing of two gry hounds on the hair was the most honorable hunting exercise common to both the Landon Elite and the aspiring New Economic class 16th century England a kind of competitive counterpart of the
Cooperative effort of hunting a for a means of competing among betters as well as of defining oneself as a part from those who were not entitled to take part at halfway stage of the so-called civilizing process conceptualized by noras however ever since coring was abolished in Scotland uh England Wes and
Northern Ireland the Republic of Ireland is the only country in the world where coursing is legal and indulged in to any significant extent given the englishness of this sported symbolism the historical antagonism between the two islands as well as the role of sports in defining irishness as against britishness this is
A paradoxical to say the least uh for some Irish enthusiasts of coursing this is because coring is the oldest Irish national sport however such a view is difficult to sustain yet Irish forcing does have claims to being somewhat National from several points of view social political economic and eventually
Folkloric um little is known about coursing before the creation of the national coursing CL the controlling Authority for both Great Britain and and Ireland in 1858 there used to be occasional coursing meetings Gathering the a social and political Elite but my study of the number of coursing clubs shows that the
Development of this sport in Island um dates from the very end of the 19th century and first three decades of the 20th century given the period when it developed it is tting to see the rising popularity of coring is a consequence of the land War which saw a massive
Transfer of land ownership from a small landowning Elite to a large group of small farmer owners indeed the type of forcing organized in Great Britain required hug Estates on which wealthy land owners would prepare to tolerate a high population of hairs for their winter leure in Ireland breaking up of
Such States made this impossible to stage in addition to that it is very likely that once day we given the opportunity Irish tenant Farmers to to unting with great relish reducing the population of HS this is what happened in England when the ground game Act of 1880 gave English Farmers the right to
Kill game on their land this caused a sharp decline in the number of years and forced many clubs to Sease their operations this in turn gave birth to enclosed coring where hairs raised onsite were taught to run in a straight line towards the upper part of the field
Where they could take refuge from the grous traditional courses were adamant in their criticism of so-called Park coursing which they saw as a perversion of the original and despite initial success with a new followers coming by train from nearby towns the new entertainment did not live
Long however this is the very version of corsen which has proved popular in I except that the hairs are not raised on site and that the winning dog is the dog that reaches the hair first no matter how well and hard the the dog tries to snap the hair which is very different
From the original English version did every February around 30,000 people flock to the National cing at postone Park a race force in PL mail County T are for three days it brings together the 128 animals that W their ticket at one of 64 qualifying meetings for prize money worth 440,000 and eternal local
Glory pairs are next in their natural habitat they locked up in an enclosure at one end of the field and they are TR trained sorry to run in a straight line to the other end as the already said um on the day of the competition the pairs of gray hands are passed onto
The slipper then the hair is released and once it has passed the scen behind which the slipper and the dogs have been hiding the trio moves out the socalled shine and when when the hair has a lead of 60 to 80 M the the slipper releases the
Docks uh in the crowded stands just in front of where the grayhounds reach the hair The Spectators cheer on the duck they have bet on with uh one of the numerous book makers on attendance the judge on Horseback keeps level with the dogs during the race and
Signals the winner by holding up a handkerchief the color of the winning color and and a few days later the hairs are released back into the white where they were netted now even though such setting is not typical of all coursing held in Ireland this picture showing course a a
Coursing competition taking place on GAA grounds points to some affinities between the two indeed for Thomas Morris the most prominent cring official of the early 20th century in Ireland in Ireland as a SP that builted success on the dismantling of great Estates and extension of rights to the rural
Community it is not without similarities with the role played by the the emancipation of the country and especially so since Recent research has shown that So-Cal G sports are part and parcel of the British sports revolution of the 19th century and very few if any of today’s emblematically Irish sports are originally specifically
So um the parallel can even be stretched further on the political field indeed conflicts were so numerous in Ireland that in 1906 the national poring Club decided to set up a subcommittee in charge of settling those conflicts the British controlling Authority grew so dis dissatisfied with its working that
On uh the 13th of July 1916 it decided to take full control of Irish Affairs again baring those who did not comply from competing now it appears that the subcomittee deliberately triggered the crisis and and on August the 14th 1916 like 32 years early the very same place
In thess delegates voted a resolution that enjoyed the British national cing Club to place Irish foring within the jurisdiction of an autonomous Irish body or else face the possibility of Irish forces setting up their own step and pocketing their registration fees as foring in Ireland was as popular as in
Great Britain the British body was left with little choice but to comply or face bankruptcy therefore 3 days before the expiry of the ultimatum an extraordinary general meeting of the NCC ratified the creation of the Irish for and cl the process which was symbolically started immediately after the rising
Came to a logical end after the Anglo Irish treaty and uh the civil war with the publication of the first Harish Graham St book in 1923 now economically gr hounds are not without claims to being National either indeed all the foring BR hounds no longer have much in common with racing
Gr hounds all the gr hounds that appeared on the first race tracks came de facto from Corson and most of them came from Ireland with the arrival of racing in Great Britain in 1926 the Irish rare Hound start book so the number of new registrations rise from
Around 5,000 a year between 1923 and 1927 to 30,000 in 1929 and nearly 50,000 in 19 47 and whereas in Great Britain National coursing Club refused to manage the development of racing which considered the ultimate perversion of the original idea and what a bit too pre
To its liking in Ireland where the two sports were attended by the same owners and Spectators the Irish foring Club was quick to place bround racing under its control now even though opinions on the subject differ the type of coursing organized which fees tound over T once probably
Also played a part whatever the case through the period from the appearance of grandon racing to the immediate end of the second world war the number of cours in clubs increas again with monster making up for a fullen lamster as one of the most Rural and agricultural province of the country it
Is very likely that breeding of gr Huns offered many small farmers an opportunity of living their um AER daily lives in an alien economy and for some courses there there was hardly a f without the old gound at the time however with the end of second world war and the lifting of the
Restrictions imposed during the blitz British dark tracks emptied of their Spectators as a result this formidable export Market dried up this is when and why in 1958 the the Irish government passed the gound industry act which established B Nar a semi-state body placed under the supervision of the
Ministry of Agriculture indeed in Irish law the gound breed is not a dog it is a farm anymore and Greyhound breeding is an industry ever since that day the Irish bround board as it is now being called has been in charge of the running and promotion of the gound industry
Including breeding and poring as to the Irish poring Club it has remained in charge of compiling the St book and it receives the financial resources generated by the activity so that whoever owns and registers a gron in island is an indir contributor to the perpetuation of coursing in the Republic
With the blessing of the state now in addition to the social political and economic reasons for which gr Hound courts have been relatively so popular for so long in Ireland it is also necessary to mention the fact that coring has been able to take into account the growing sensitivity of the
Irish population to the animal cause by agreeing in 1993 to have the bare mused when it came under pressure from Tony regor B to B the practice as a result very few hairs die anymore this is to too many for 34s of the population but in June 2016 for example the bill to
Have the practice abolished in the do received just 20 votes in favor and 114 against and all ministers in charge of coring have defended this uh sport as part of the country’s popular culture and it is a fact that Ireland has already been celebrated for its great hands beginning with master mcrath the
Most famous Grayhound Of All Times whose 1860s victories on English soil were celebrated in ballads as well as by The Dubliners themselves and the D was immortalized by a stone monument in Den Garden County Waterford where he was born as well as a bronze statue in luran
County armor where he spent his short life in the property of the lord of the place and in spite of the denials of the comittee in Char of designing the new Irish parents in 1928 many enthusiasts as well as the Walker Food Museum um persist in seeing the old six Penny coin
As a commemoration of the famous Grayhound rather than an Irish W hand Ireland is also the birth place of M the mid the first racing Superstar of hor near tore count off at father brought this place there again a life uh a life-sized bronze statute of M deu was
Inaugurated by the prime by the then prime minister Brian Cohen in 2011 as a matter of fact even though it is the responsibility of the ministry for agriculture the survival of foring is now highly dependent on the ministry for Arts and Heritage um however it is the preservation of the
Hair not its social political or economic history that has earned coursing a place in this ministry indeed every coursing meeting has to obtain a license delivered by this government Department to catch the hairs necessary for running the competition yet apart from conservation issues the hair also has a place of
Choice in the Irish animal world and it to feature on the three Pence coins of the new National coinage that followed the Anglo Irish Treaty of 1991 1921 this is mainly because in Celtic mythology and Irish F hairs are Orly believed to have connections with the other world uh indeed the folkore commission
Collected many stories of witches taking the shape of a hair to steal milk from house and people firing after her with a gun loaded with a cred six pant there again um or there we are setting a ground on her preferably on May the 1st this might be because in Celtic mythology there
Used to be a metaphorical equivalence and relationship between woman and nature as givers of life I am I am using here the work of C the r life and death in the ritual and Irish Tales an essay on the evolution of representations of nature culture and made female relationships according to her the
Celtic calendar was fashioned on the moon which under go in one month what nature and women go through in one year and as the yielding earthquake was logically seen as the end of the natural cycle the year began on the 1 of November which marked the beginning of
The second quarter marked beginning of the Agricultural year and the third the passage from flower to fruit therefore nature was thought to reproduce life thanks to the rotting process vegetation went through in Winter and given the metaphorical equivalence between nature and women women were L produce life
Thanks to the blood they no longer shed when pregnant so much so that men and nature were thought to entertain and exchange relationship nature fed men in their lifetime then the decaying bodies of dead men fed nature similarly the blood of women fed nature when menstrual and babies to be born when used
Prestation life and the alternation of seasons were made possible thanks to blood and such a clear parallel was was drawn between the fertility of women and that of nature that it was necessary that land take a blood B in winter in order to impregnate it this is why the
Supreme King the Supreme C King as the representative of mankind used to be ritualistically put to death as a sacrifice to nature for nature to be able to Fe his people again later on as humans came to think of themselves as aart from nature the Supreme King was
Replaced by uran chased killed and paraded by young men on a bush decorated with ribbons as a symbol of Nature and Men creation that is as a symbol of the wheel of the year that needs blood to to turn now even though no similar traditional Festival has ever taken
Place is possible to hypothesize that the hunting or coursing of hairs with dogs partake of the same symbolism as suggested by your North k k Club as well as by Le writer Brian Matt Mah who whose novel Children of the rainbow opens up on foring field in the fictional carry
Village of clud in the 1920s where the white marked hair funed with ribbons is released and eventually takes the reader back into a pre colonization pre Christian and Island in which black shed is necessary for life to be rewarded now as a symbolic and ritual representation of menstruation hairs are
Beneficial when when Earth is in need of blood but for blood to turn into milk it is necessary that they should be sent underground in order to feed earth with their own blood and Make Way for summer before the 1 of May after that day this
Ping of blood was likely to trigger a counterclockwise reaction from Mil to blood or summer to Winter and spread fruitlessness however logically enough as s explains the more humans came to think of themselves as aart from nature the more males came to think of themselves out apart from females and
Think and think of themselves as the Guardians of the retention but also they sheded of women’s blood this might be why in some probably later version of the s hair story The Witch has turned into a young woman and why in Children of the rainow forcing field is highly
Sexualized and why Tommy conin in the Sunday independent of February the 10 2002 could write of muscle warehous as Unix in a har of hairs that’s it thank you so much for your talk um we still have five minutes left for questions as we start 11 so um are there any
Questions I don’t have a question but I have a story from my family that might be of interest uh my when my mother was born in 1936 uh the story her father told this is a North Rural rcom so not far from SLO you know back then you would have to
Go get the Midway and you know babies are often born in the middle of the night that’s and so my my grandfather whom I never met he always told the story that when my my his wife was in labor with my mother when he was running to get the
Midwife it got very very Misty and he was lost because he’s going across Fields he’s not going on a road two ghostly Greyhounds appeared one and I decide and led him to the Midway any other stories that one no to ask questions I’m going to feeled I just wondered blood Sports get
A very bad R um and um I was just interested in how your um paration of coursing and I would have a lot of sympathy with the coursing pro coursing Lobby um how that feels of a as a relationship how do you you know you spoke very of legislative Frameworks
That are now happening the passage from agriculture if you like into agult Arts and Heritage department and that is obviously a kind of ideological shift as well so I just wanted to invite you to speak a little bit more about that well um well I well actually I skipped to
Conclusion which said and I think that going to answer your question uh if s m work is anything to go by and if there is anything like a civilizing process foring looks like being well past its usefulness and it’s probably time if not for the hair if not for the 6,000 gry
Hounds or so who are an an accounting for every year according to the famous AR documentary that c him be abandon not saying that the okay thank you so