Counter-Culture Nights

Click on the image above to see the gallery

Counter-Culture Nights is a series of events created by The School of Thought art collective (Augustine O’Donoghue and Conor McCabe) as part of their Collective Futures Project with Common Ground, Dublin. The events focus on counter narratives and analysis around culture, history, and politics. The first event included a counter-historical walk-through Dublin 8 and a screening of PUSH, an award-winning documentary by director Fredrik Gertten, on the financialisation of housing. The film was followed by a post-screening discussion, the panel included Abaigeal Meek of The Liberties SOS, Aisling Hedderman of CATU (Community Action Tenants Union), and Lois Kapila, editor of Dublin Inquirer.

Counter – Compradors: A walk Through the Radical Histories of Dublin 8

Colonialism in Ireland is treated oftentimes as a legacy, albeit one still present in our collective memory and haunting our dreams, an overhang in our techno-futurist world.

However, the dynamics that shape politics and economics do not stop in the present. The past is never the past. The formation of the Irish Free State in 1922 saw very particular colonial class relations given concrete institutional expression and ossified into law, politics, trade, and policy.

These practices were not shaped by free and equal trade but by destructive, extractive colonial demands – particularly with regard to agriculture, land, and banking, leading to shocking levels of migration and depopulation. This was forewarned. The more radical elements within Irish society knew that a change in the political relationship with Britain would amount to little if the extractive colonial practices remained in place. They provided resistance to this ruling class – this intermediary/comprador class that exists in every colonial situation.

The walk mapped elements of that resistance, still embedded within Dublin 8 and the Liberties. It looked at the early worker combinations of the 1780s, the working-class movements of the 1840s, the radical socialist republicanism during the revolutionary period, and ongoing resistance up to the present day in the fight for community over extraction.