Paraic Breathnach

Somewhere towards the end of our interview, Paraic Breathnach, rebel artist, agent provocateur and co-founder of Galway’s world-famous Macnas theatre group, makes a rather surprising admission for a 47-year-old, six-foot-four, brick shit-house of a man from the wilds of Connemara.

“I cry most days,” he tells me, in his strong west of Ireland brogue. “I find that tears are very close to me at the moment.”

Then again, maybe it’s not such a surprising admission. He has a reputation for brutal honesty and speaking his mind, no matter how unpalatable or unpopular the truth. In fact, in many ways, it’s these very traits that have landed him in the unenviable position he’s in. It’s no big secret that Paraic Breathnach’s currently riding fairly low on life’s rollercoaster – and has been ever since he found himself ousted from the theatre group he helped to create in the mid-’80s and managed through its peak in the ’90s.

Having invested more than 15 years of his blood and sweat into Macnas, he has no job, no house, no pension. Not being a materialist, the lack of these things doesn’t really bother him per se – it’s more the manner in which they’ve been denied and the sense of betrayal he feels. He had appointed almost all of the people on the Macnas board who eventually forced him out.

“I’m angry at myself for being stupid enough to allow it to happen,” he fumes. “I’m angry at myself for thinking good of people. I’m angry at myself for not being cynical enough. But the truth is that I’m incapable of being cynical and I know I’d make all the same mistakes again.”

Post-Macnas he’s literally been scraping by, occasionally designing sets for Galway Youth Theatre and working as an artist in a variety of disciplines – predominately sculpting, writing and acting. His last halfway decent pay cheque came almost a year ago when he appeared as an ogre in a soon-to-be-released Miramax blockbuster (he has also appeared in several Joe Comerford and Neil Jordan movies, including Michael Collins, High Spirits and The Butcher Boy). Otherwise, he’s been living “poorly”, feeling a touch bitter and seeing no particular reasons to be cheerful…

“I feel sad most of the time,” he declares, matter of factly. “My life is not going as beautifully as I want it to go. I find sadness is a big part of my life at the moment and it affects me, and I cry. I wake up some mornings in tears. Sometimes I feel I should go and seek some professional help for that.”

Do you think you’re clinically depressed?

“Sometimes,” he avers. “Well, I don’t think I’m clinically depressed but I can go for weeks without hitting any high points. But I can also go for weeks without hitting a low point. I can party on for a couple of weeks, you know. You could call it depression but I don’t think anybody’s going to prescribe me any decent drugs for it.”

He laughs at that one, proving that at least he hasn’t lost his sense of humour. Nor his storytelling abilities. A moment later he’s telling me the one about his father finding drugs on Carna beach. I’ve actually heard it many times before (Breathnach stories are both legion and legendary in Galway), but never from his own mouth.

“A few years ago I was driving the car, listening to Radio na Gaeltachta – I listen to it occasionally just to keep tuned into the Irish – and I hear my father’s voice. I hadn’t been home in a couple of months and suddenly I’m hearing my father’s voice on the radio. And he’s telling the story of how he was out walking the beach, as he does every morning, and he finds this polystyrene packet on the sand. So he brings it up home and himself and the brother examine it. They take it out and it’s a bag of white powder, and they put it on the scales and it weighs a kilo, and they cut it open and dip their fingers and rub it on their gums. My father had had all his teeth pulled in the ’60s and he immediately realises that it’s cocaine.

“So he rings the Guards anyway and says ‘I think I’ve found a kilo of cocaine on the beach’. And the Guards go, ‘Leave it there, we’ll be over to collect it.’ That was on a Tuesday and it’s the following Saturday before the Guards finally come to get it. It’s been lying there all week. I rang my mother and just went ‘WHAT? There’s been a kilo of cocaine in the house all week?’ And she goes, ‘That’ll teach you to come home more often!’”

Do you use cocaine?

“No, but I know what it costs,” he laughs. “I’m telling ye, you could put on a serious fucking show with a kilo of cocaine!”

His father passed away three years ago but his elderly mother still lives in the family home in Carna, a small fishing village many miles west of Galway. The house has been in his father’s family for generations and Paraic’s parents returned to live there from Castlebar when he was just three. He recalls a simple and carefree kind of childhood, growing up with his two older brothers and two younger sisters (“I was stuck in the middle – taking shit from both sides!”).

Although he mostly enjoyed attending the all-Irish national school in Carna, he wasn’t so keen on his secondary. He boarded at St. Enda’s on Threadneedle Road, on the outskirts of Galway city, and hated every waking moment of it.

“It was a very violent, oppressive regime and I didn’t enjoy one bit of it. Never liked the system. The bounds thing just did my head in. Being told that you couldn’t go outside the grounds or beyond certain limits. I’d grown up in a place where you could leave the house and walk as far as the eye could see without anyone ever bothering ye. Suddenly there were all these fucking rules and regulations.”

The fact that the school was all-male didn’t particularly help matters.

“It was all these boys together and I always hated that. Priests in frocks and frustrated young men. Awful place. The smell of stale semen every morning in the corridors, man. It was just one of those places. Too much tossing going on in there.”

He was a poor academic student with no real interest in sports (“I played GAA well enough to get on the subs and get out of class, but that was about it”), but usually managed to scrape through his exams. After his Leaving Cert he attended UCG, where he found the looser regime – not to mention the girls – much more to his liking.

“I was there a long time – about seven years,” he laughs. “I never actually got a degree. I think the only thing I achieved there was First Arts – having already failed First Commerce twice. I think I only got First Arts on my third attempt, and then I never got Second Arts and that was about it really. I never achieved much in college. I think I made an average of two of my 9am lectures all year.”

His university years were far from wasted though. He began getting involved in the Arts from day one. “I was involved in anything that didn’t involve studying or going to lectures – music, concerts, discos, putting on plays, all that kinda craic.”

Did you see the Arts as a potential career then?

“Not really. I always thought the only way to get on was to get a cushy job as a secondary school teacher – that was my theory. But I never got around to getting that together and by the time they were throwing me out of college the only alternative I had was when Garry Hynes asked me to give them a hand building Druid Theatre.”

That was in 1978. He had met Hynes (subsequently a Tony-winning director) through the university’s Dram Soc, along with other such theatrical luminaries as Meliosa Stafford, Padraig O’Neill and Sean McGinley. Together they helped to build Druid (“We got paid in food mostly”). When that was completed Paraic was offered a job stage-managing the nearby Taibhdhearc Theatre. He worked at that for over a year, and also became involved in setting up the city’s fledgling Arts Festival – then a small scale affair. Eventually he left the Taibhdhearc to tour America with De Danann, who were being managed by Ollie Jennings at the time.

However, his contribution to all of these things was mainly physical. “At Druid I was just a carpenter. For the Arts Festival I was a stage manager. For De Danann, I was a roadie. You know, an organiser, the truck driver, the humper of gear, the guy who’d locate a stage or a microphone at short notice. That was all.”

In the early ’80s, however, he managed to get a place on the first proper arts administration course in Ireland and subsequently his role within the Arts Festival became bigger. As did the Festival itself. In 1986 the Arts Council gave them a grant of £30,000 to develop community and street theatre, and Macnas (the name is an Irish expression meaning ‘the madness of a young calf’) was born.

“Macnas was started up by Ollie Jennings, Tom Conroy, Peter Salmon and myself,” he recalls. “We were really inspired by theatre groups like Els Comediennes. I think our mission statement at the time was ‘to revive days of communal celebration and to create fun on a grand scale amongst ourselves and with others’. We wanted to bring art back into the public domain, get people out on the street to celebrate. Like, Ireland was a complete shithole in the ’80s. It was a repressed place. There was a dark cloud of Catholic oppression raining down on the country. There was no work, everyone was emigrating.”

Macnas’s first big show was a choreographed football match called ‘The Game’, which was played in front of 30,000 spectators in Castlebar. However, it was their Gulliver show – based on Swift’s book – in 1988, that really brought them to national prominence. “Gulliver – the 60-foot man who broke all of our hearts,” he laughs. “If we’d known what was involved in building him, we’d never have done it.”

But do it they did and, over the next few years, a series of hugely successful shows – including Tir Faoi Thonn, Tain, Sweeney and Ballor – and a colourful annual parade through the streets of Galway propelled Macnas into the bigtime. By the early ’90s they were undoubtedly one of the most successful theatre groups in the country – if not Europe – and were almost permanently either on tour, in production or picking up awards. It fast became a full-time job and, as things progressed, Breathnach steadily became the public face of Macnas. He claims it happened more by default than anything else.

“Initially there were four of us but then Tom went off to London to study, Peter had a couple of kids and began drawing back, Ollie was managing the Sawdoctors, so more and more it began to depend on me – and more I wanted it to depend on me. And I suppose over the last three years there, I had more or less complete and absolute control over it. That didn’t come without plenty of internecine squabbling and fighting but, for the last few years, I more or less had the choice to do what I wanted to do.”

He was certainly a colourful representative. Not only was he regularly seen driving his big black hearse around the town (“I bought a hearse because the tax and insurance on it was practically nothing and it was literally the cheapest way for me to get on the road”), but he had also taken to walking around the place barefoot and wearing a skirt.

“That was purely an accident,” he laughs. “We were doing this dance show where the culmination of the show was all these fairies competing to be king of the fairies through their dancing ability. I was king of the leprechauns – you know, six foot four, king of the leprechauns. And when I was rehearsing for the show I was doing loads of other things as well. So I used to drive down to rehearsals in the van, leave my clothes in the van and go in and work with this choreographer.

“One day I came back and one of the lads had taken the van with all my clothes, leaving me stuck in the rehearsal room wearing just a piece of curtain around my waist. I had to get back to the Macnas workshop so I just said, ‘Fuck it, I’ll walk back’. So I walked back in my bare feet with just a piece of curtain around my waist – I was naked aside from that. And it just created so much reaction – people were either horrified or they were cheering and applauding me. The whole notion just seemed to challenge people. So I decided to keep doing it and I wore a skirt and went barefoot for about a year and a half.”

This didn’t make him particularly popular with the city’s nightclub doormen – who occasionally objected to his lack of footwear – but nobody was really going to argue with a six foot four Connemara man in a skirt. “It was really funny most of the time,” he says. “My skin became really tough, but I’d be picking glass out of the soles of my feet after every night out.”

Macnas’s first big break on the world stage came in 1993 when U2 invited them to join the Zooropa leg of their world tour. “The European stadiums weren’t really big enough to handle the Trabants and all the stuff they’d used on ZOO TV,” he explains, “so they were looking for something different. I didn’t stay on the tour permanently because we were also doing the parade and preparing for another Macnas tour around Ireland, but I used to travel over every few weeks to keep an eye on things and I’d definitely be over if there was a good party going on or something. But you really had to keep an eye.

“U2 are tough, you know. If you made a mistake or in any way fucked up the schedule or the slot they sent you home. One German band, some guy in the audience threw a bottle and he threw it back. After the show he was told that was it – the band were gone from the tour. Even in Milan we got rained with bottles because we had this real anti-fascist message going on. But we managed to last the whole tour. There was a doubt as to whether we’d last the first month.”

Things really took off for Macnas after the U2 tour, with press photographs of their giant papier mache heads of Bono and co published around the world and bringing them a lot of welcome attention. The following year they were asked to perform at the Eurovision Song Contest and invites to tour Europe and America began to flood in. By now, the company was employing almost 100 people and turning over in excess of a million a year. As he puts it himself, “Gradually it got to the stage where we didn’t have to unload the trucks ourselves. We’d still do it occasionally – because that was part of the whole ethos of Macnas – but we wouldn’t have to do it.”

In 1995, an exhausted Breathnach took a sabbatical from the company and was appointed to the Arts Council (having been invited by Michael D. Higgins to take over the slot on the board vacated by Ollie Jennings). He remained on the Council for four years and spent his spare time developing his own artistic ideas.

“I needed a break from Macnas. I was really tired, it was a really stressful time. I wanted to concentrate my energies on creating stuff rather than managing processes or managing squabbles or making peace between engineers or managing money. I just wanted to be left alone. I always thought that my notion of building Macnas was building a mechanism or an organisation that could respond to artists. I just wanted to be allowed to be an artist now. I’d done the building bit, the administration bit, the personnel management bit, I’d set structures in place, I’d arranged a lot of money. So I figured let the company get on, let the administrators do their administration and let me get back to my art.”

As he readily admits, it was really only around this time that he began to seriously regard himself as an artist anyway, despite the fact that many of the ideas and concepts for their most successful shows had been his. He wanted time out to change the way he was perceived within the company so that he could return and engage in the Macnas process as an artist rather than as a boss. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. Over the years the company had become much bigger – subdividing into several different offshoots – and when he returned he found that the administrators had completely taken over the asylum.

“All those socialist ideals and things that we started out with got subsumed into something else by the end of the ’80s and the beginning of the ’90s. Macnas does more work now for corporate events than it does for community events. There’s very little community work going on at this point in time, from what I can see. And it was never designed to be that.”

The Celtic Tiger had eaten all the hippies, the company ethos had changed and there was no longer room for a troublesome maverick like Breathnach. It was a messy, complicated business but, having returned on a part-time basis, overhauled the parade and then resigned from the board in order to apply for the role of artistic director, he eventually got ousted in a boardroom shuffle in the spring of 2000.

“The whole thing got slightly fraught. In the end I severed all links with the company,” he says.

You personally appointed many of the people who ousted you. Does that not piss you off?

“Of course it pisses me off,” he seethes, barely able to contain his obvious bitterness. “Because I’m a very simple person. I come from Connemara and the thing you value most in Connemara is loyalty. Loyalty to clan, loyalty to neighbours and loyalty to your family. You value loyalty and if somebody does you a favour, you’re in their debt forever. You do a favour, you can call back on it. We had no money in the ’80s and a lot of stuff was done on a shake hands, my word is good, basis.

“But the whole American corporate thing had come into the company at this stage. The basic principles of humanity – we look after each other, we work for each other, we care about each other – had all been completely subsumed into corporate speak, engineered by expensive EU consultants.

“So, yeah, it’s disappointing that you would find yourself alienated from something that you deeply cared about and helped to create. But then again, as my mother would say, ‘It’s probably your own fault!’ I speak too straight. I challenge people.”

Would you describe yourself as bad tempered?

“Absolutely! I’m a cranky fuck.”

Do you regret that about yourself?

“No! Because it’s honest. My anger comes from deeply held beliefs. My anger is real, my anger is not some sort of pre-menstrual notion. It’s an intellectual response to the shithole I live in. And I reserve the right to be angry. You can’t accept everything. It’s vitally important to speak out in a society. This society is so corrupt. Someone’s gotta say it. All you’ve gotta do is walk down the streets of Galway and you encounter corruption in the shit architecture that’s been built in the town. The process by which a lot of that stuff was created is corrupt. And you’ve got to challenge it head-on.”

When’s the last time you hit somebody?

“I haven’t thrown a punch in years, not since my bouncer days with the students’ union. I reckon the tongue is mightier than the sword. I can talk better than I can hit. And I can reason with people better than I can hit them. I’ve never seen a punch do any good to any situation.”
Have you any contacts with Macnas now?

“I have some contacts with some of the workers there and at the ordinary level of people. I’m always polite to people but, for obvious reasons, I don’t get on with the administration there.”
He points to the fact that Macnas hasn’t held a street parade during the Galway Arts Festival for the last two years as proof of what he sees as a sell-out of their ideals.

“It’s such a huge betrayal of the city not to create that day of communal celebration. It’s a betrayal of the original mission statement of Macnas. But then again all the board of Macnas are now based in Dublin. The cheques get sent to Galway only to be sent back to Dublin again.”

It infuriates him to see that of the 25 or 30 full-time jobs created in the Arts in Galway over the past 15 years – between Macnas, Druid, the Arts Festival and Arts Centre, etc. – not a single one of them, he claims, is filled by an actual artist.

“That’s just completely fucking shocking!” he rages. “Especially seeing as it was artists who set all these things up. The whole lack of respect to artists in this country is shocking. We’re still impoverished. There’s this notion that we do these things because we like doing them or we need hardship to create art. All these bullshit notions are central to peoples’ thinking about us. We’re like the Travellers or the Romanians or something. We’re a clearly identified group of people who live on the fringes of the society and who people don’t actually really care about.

“All this bullshit and palaver about Ireland being a country of culture and that we educate the world and we speak English better than the English and all this bullshit. Our education system’s crap – nothing to do with arts or creativity. How many engineers do a liberal arts module in their training? We have plenty of empirical knowledge and education, but no liberal knowledge or education. There’s no talking about imagination or thinking beyond the box. If you think beyond the box in this country people think you’re out of your fucking box. And you should be put into a box!”

Watching him becoming angrier and more impassioned, it quickly becomes obvious that while Paraic Breathnach may be down at the moment, he’s still very far from out. Like the Terminator, he’ll be back. Currently he’s licking his wounds, sorting his head out, grafting away on various projects and considering his next move. He was very involved in the anti-war movement (projecting images of Iraqi children with targets on them all over the streets of Galway) and sees that he may have a future in politics. He vehemently believes that the country would be a hell of a lot better off without the Fianna Fail party and he certainly enjoys enough popular support in Galway to give Frank Fahy a run for his money. That’s all a little further down the road though. Just another possibility.

Right now, he’s concentrating on getting his health together (“I don’t want to croak just yet, I want to be like Tony Benn – still kicking ass at 70!”) and working flat-out on a couple of writing and theatrical projects.

“I’m working on a commission for a play for a group in Connemara at the moment. I’m really excited about that because it’s the first time I’ve ever really done something out there. It’s with a local group and it’s a local idea. So it’s just great to be working out there, back home with my people.

“I’m also working on a novel that somebody’s given me some money for. I’ve been working on it for a long while but I haven’t done a lot in recent months, so I’m just getting back into it now. I’m really enjoying it because it’s examining things that I find interesting – like the nature of revolutionaries and why they fail and why they end up being alienated.”

Well, they do say you should write about what you know.

PADRAIC BREATHNACH’S TOP TEN TUNES

EMMYLOU HARRIS - ‘Boulder To Birmingham’
VAN MORRISON - ‘Madam George’
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - ‘Jungleland’
DEXY’S MIDNIGHT RUNNERS - ‘Gino’
THE CLASH - ‘London Calling’
ELVIS COSTELLO - ‘Watching The Detectives’
U2 - ‘One’
NICK CAVE / JOHNNY CASH - ‘Wanted Man’
LOU REED - ‘Street Hassle’
LEONARD COHEN - ‘Tower Of Song’