Where’s the support for Margaretta D’Arcy?

As we go through a cold, wet and windy March, the mood of the elements seems a perfect match for the response and indifference of the artistic community to the imprisonment of one of their own, Margaretta D’Arcy.

If a practising dramatist, actor, writer, producer and peace activist were to be jailed for a matter of conscience and political belief, in distant Asia or Africa, it would be a matter of some agitation, but in this land of saints and scholars, hardly a squeak!

Is the pioneer of social street theatre in the dark 1970s, to be parked in our darkest detention centres, because she dared demand the investigation of military aeroplanes going through Shannon? Is a 70-year-old with an aluminium Zimmer frame such a major threat to the security of the airport, that she must be made an example of and imprisoned for three months?

Does this treatment of a peace activist and five decades of practice in the craft of drama merit some acknowledgement or comment in our drama houses of 2014? Are our television, radio producers and journalists, with a few exceptions, so cautious of offending the establishment, that they have decided to turn their backs and look the other way? Where are RTÉ Prime Time specials, or Late Late Show discussions on our neutrality and complicity with the war machine going through Shannon?

If artists are to earn the respect of an impoverished public, let them find out and tell the real story of what it is like on the edge of society.

Give us the plays, the songs, the poetry, the documentaries on how an elite have taken over €20bn of our reserve pension funds and given even more in bonds or promissory notes to bail out their banker friends, which we will have to repay in punitive budgets for generations. Give us the picture of how we really treat dissent in austerity Ireland.

One of D’Arcy’s earliest plays was called ’The hunting down of the mongrel fox’ which vividly exposed the pack mentality. The irony is that now, some 40 years later D’Arcy is herself the fox. What a pity!

Jim McNamara and Aileen Dillane

Knockaderry

Co Limerick