MICHAEL Lynchehaun and other members of the Tallaght Theatre Group built their new theatre, which opened last night, with their bare hands.
They found a firm which made prefabricated barns and one of those metal structures became the bones of the theatre. They hired bricklayers to put flesh on those bones but they mixed the cement themselves.
Lynchehaun is a full time garda with a passionate interest in theatre. He developed his interest watching productions of J.B. Keane plays which the parish priest put on in the local hall in Bunacurry on Achill Island.
He says that backbiting and a lack of confidence would have made this theatre hard to build in a small rural area. However, his willingness to master practical building skills he puts down to his rural background. As the eldest son of a widow on a small farm, he could not afford the intellectual education of many arts graduates today.
The theatre may have been built by an amateur group but it will be rented by professionals - this is how most of the small theatres outside the capital have opened.
The Tallaght group explored every traditional source of funding for an arts venue. It got £20,000 from the county council and £5,000 from the Arts Council, but was turned down by the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht. Lynchehaun thinks the group was refused because it was not going to "get anyone off the unemployment register".
He says potential arts funding agencies are not making a distinction between amateur or community arts and professional arts. "There is a lot of woolly thinking about what the arts is meant to be. Sometimes it's to take young lads' off the street and get them to stop breaking into cars. Are you diluting the whole thing by having everyone doing arts and no one able to buy?"
He does not mean that amateur arts should not be funded but rather that the arts as a leisure activity should be properly recognised, without the requirement that they employ people.
In fact, Tallaght Theatre Group benefits from the interest in the arts of the national employment agencies by having a FAS worker.
When it applied to the National Lottery, however, it fell between two stools. "We weren't a professional theatre company and community funding tends to go to football and basketball, which entertain more people."
The group turned to less traditional sources of funding, like renting part of an Eire Og GAA club raffle, which netted them £20,000 over two years.
Lynchehaun talked a huge range of businesses into doing the group a favour. The Cuckoo's Nest pub gave them the site in its carpark at a rent of £10 a year. The gas was brought across the road for nothing and the doors and seats came from the old Adelphi cinema.