Tom Ryan

Ireland

Market-driven beliefs are endangering humanity. Hills, like societies, are being ground down for short-term benefit. Many scientists advise that humans own an increasing share of the causes for greenhouse gasses. Efforts to make capitalism/consumers abandon fossil-based technology meet resistance, or there is increasing advocacy for nuclear energy as a carbon-free replacement; the latter technology binds with increased security technologies ‘protection against terror-attacks’. Instability is rising in non-Western countries, often countries colonised and/or created by former colonial, now mainly Western powers, or Russia. Economically developed and emergent countries seek strategic access to materials at a time of increasing scarcity. Western leaders are preparing for climate-change-driven resource wars and mass-migration.

Inch reflects Ireland’s brush from a figurative tiger’s tail. One sees the contour of landscape below Limerick city in hills like Inch, now in part a valley (800 x 780 m wide, by 120 m deep, with a slot over 30 m deep in the floor now flooding), hollowed out to serve roads and accommodate some of the 640,000 houses built nationwide during the boom. Inch is amongst a necklace of hills, including Knockroe, Knockainey, Derk, Pallasgréine, Lough Gur hills, Úlla, and the ‘great road’ (Bohermore) indicating human associations over millennia. Knockroe has a terrace containing many remnants of ancient occupancy, seen when searching for points used by King William organising his sieges of Limerick. Across in Inch a great hole grows. Poppies and the device of fragmentation reflects disintegration of communities or societies, in the way of powerful countries, by use of destabilisation.

(Text: reading the city catalogue, 2009)