‘Theatre and Privatisation in 1980s Ireland’ A Lecture by Lionel Pilkington

‘Ansbacher Bankers Present . . .’ or  ‘Theatre and Privatisation in 1980s Ireland.’

**A lecture**

Lionel Pilkington

1980s Ireland is dominated by a range of political and legislative measures whose overall effects severely curtail the claims of labour in relation to capital, restrict, and substantially retract, the state’s responsibilities towards social protection, and halt altogether the state’s incipient and tentative moves (in the mid to late 1970s) towards limited income redistribution ‘downwards.’   Instead, from about 1981 onwards, government policies are marked by an urgent, all-encompassing campaign of privatisation with tax exemption incentives to promote private investment as the starring features of the state’s annual finance acts.  Encouraging entrepreneurialism by lowering taxation on profits and undermining collective structures through privatisation forms the groundwork for Ireland’s so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy in the mid 1990s, for the austerity agenda that follows on from the banking bail-out crisis of 2008, and, more generally, for most contemporary understandings of what political economy can make possible.  Today, Ireland has become exemplary for global capitalism insofar as its state form demonstrates the apparent ease with which the market can operate as ‘an alternative technology of rule’ (Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 11).

This lecture explores how and why–in Ireland in the 1980s–dominant ideas of theatre, theatrical acting and theatre institutions play a central role in achieving Ireland’s seismic and important shift to wholesale privatisation. The lecture also asks: what happens to theatre itself in such a context, and how (if at all) is it possible to think of theatrical performance as outlining an alternative?

Thursday, 2^nd November, 15:00-16:00

Moore Institute, NUI Galway. Hardiman Building, Room GO11