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By Lorraine Courtney Political art is often charged with achieving the impossible: producing real, tangible change. Artists don’t pass laws or have a finger on the button, so what can they possibly do to influence governments or dislodge the structures of power? Will they ever save the world through ideas, objects and images alone? ‘Counter Culture’ is a play trying to do this. The play was first launched by the Fishamble Show-in-a-Bag scheme for the Dublin Fringe in 2013, and has toured widely in Ireland ever since. It’s a hilarious yet hard-hitting social realist fairytale, that’s set in the fictional Macken’s Department Store in Dublin on the busiest day of the year: a snowy 8th December. It’s also the day management decide to introduce zero hours contracts for their workers. The murky world of life on zero-hours contracts hit the headlines here with the recent strike in Dunnes Stores and we learned what it is like not to know how big next week’s pay cheque is going to be – or if they will receive one at all. Katie O’Kelly was inspired by an old photograph though. “I came across a picture. It was of my Granny, on strike, holding a placard outside Clery’s in Dublin in 1983. She worked there for over 30 years. She was campaigning for better pay and conditions for workers, and the right to form their own union. It was a side of my granny I had never known about, and it all seemed so different to the world of retail that I knew, where employees were treated almost like replaceable commodities”. And so O’Kelly flings her audience into the world of fashion retail, a web of hangers, sales targets and bunions, where the workers realise they as disposable as the fashion they sell. O’Kelly begins and ends her multi-character journey as a personified snowflake who flutters about and alights in the palm of the outstretched hand of Jim Larkin’s statue. This is the story of four employees (and a few other transitory characters) on a normal working day. It’s skillfully if a touch schematically done, and energetically performed by O’Kelly, who manages effortless transitions between the protagonists. We meet Gemma, a heavily pregnant young woman who is not allowed to sit down during her long shift in the bedding section, and her frail grandmother, Bridie, who has never missed a day’s work at Macken’s since she started out working there at just eighteen. “Amidst all the chaos of contracts and consumerism, at the core of ‘Counter Culture’ is the personal story of a granny and granddaughter, and their journey together through the day in Macken’s when zero-hours contracts are brought in. I think it’s important that the central two characters are female, as the majority of retail workers affected by zero and low-hour contracts are women, and their story should be told”. Through this kaleidoscopic story of inequity in the modern workplace, nostalgia, bribery, struggle, and half hope, told with the utmost industriousness by the pitch-perfect O’Kelly, the plot brims to the point of overflow for such a short play. The storytelling is not always successful. The characters (and this production) seem trapped on a roundelay, turning in ever decreasing circles. It is indulgent in its way – it could run at less than the apportioned time without losing anything. Yet O’Kelly’s baggy, blackly hilarious script is marked by a great joy in writing and a love of her characters. She imbues it with a beautifully watchable rhythm that only flags a little. Still Donal O’Kelly’s direction is taut and there are beautiful scenes like the brilliantly imaginative use of an empty metal clothes-rack. O’Kelly believes ‘Counter Culture’ can make a real impact this year in Edinburgh – the biggest international theatre window in the world, and focus attention on the issue of decent working conditions. It could. This enjoyable piece of agitprop makes no apologies for doing so. You see the truly political artist can insinuate and subtly subvert opinion without sledgehammer sermons, engaging the public consciousness on a deeper level and infiltrating the lifeblood of culture. Politics in art is still possible; in this age of apathy is vital. •

By Frank Armstrong. You know you are in trouble when the Minister for Health boasts about taking out health insurance although the Programme for Government stipulates a “universal, single-tiered health service, which guarantees access based on need, not income”. In his cheery way Leo Varadakar was effectively admitting that the provision of public health care will remain unfit for purpose and that the poor are not enjoying the same level of treatment as the rich. If his British counterpart were to make the same declaration there would be an outcry over the denigration of a national institution, the (national) health service. No-one seems to care that those who cannot afford medical insurance (otherwise known as the poor), are going to be subjected to inferior treatment in two tier Ireland. But Ireland’s Left is bedevilled by petty squabbles and attachment to nationalist aggrandisement. Moreover, the media are uninterested (the principal shareholder of Independent News and Media recently acquired a private hospital). The commodification of healthcare may also have sinister consequences even for those who can afford it. Put simply: if a private client doesn’t get sick then the medical professional doesn’t earn a living. Treatment of disease becomes the raison d’etre of the system. What motivation is there for the doctor to prevent disease by advocating the kind of lifestyle changes that promote health before they encounter a medical professional? And Big Pharma just wants to sell medicines. That is not to impugn the reputations of individual doctors, nor to question the validity of evidence-based medicine, although the work of Ben Goldacre has shown just how corrupt the system can be. Of course it goes beyond Big Pharma and their sinister machinations. It extends to Big Food and all its wretched emanations. We know that large companies actually work to engender compulsive eating. Quite how our laws permit this is staggering. Big Tobacco is getting its comeuppance but we have a long way to go before Big Food executives are hauled before the courts. In Ireland the Big Food lobby has been highly successful in telling people that without consuming meat and dairy we’ll collapse with anaemia and osteoporosis. This is achieved through extensive lobbying, skilled manipulation of media, and the funding of studies and conferences where evidence-based methods are manipulated to draw favourable conclusions. Most startling has been the success of the dairy industry in promoting baby cow food as necessary for preventing osteoporosis. This ignores that humanity domesticated cattle less than ten thousand years ago. Clearly we have not evolved a dependence in such a short time, and in any case most of humanity is still lactose intolerant: the independent Harvard School of Public Health argue that there are better sources of calcium especially green leafy vegetables. Also occluded from most of the Irish population is the firm evidence from most long-term epidemiological studies (from Okinawa to China and on to the Mediterranean) which show that predominantly plant-based diets rich in wholegrains and vegetables promote longevity and reduce disease risk. Sadly the medical community in Ireland which should be making nutritional arguments are structurally deterred from doing so. Often it’s easily ridiculed practitioners of complementary medicine that are putting these points across. And so the health of the Irish population deteriorates and we may be reaching a point where, despite advances in vaccinations and life-saving antibiotics (notwithstanding their overuse) today’s parents will enjoy greater life expectancies than their children. This, at least, was the finding of one recent US study and Ireland seems to be converging with US norms. At least many educated people are finding out about the beneficial effects of dietary change for themselves, but those without the educational capability (another sector underpinned by inequality) many are unable to untangle the cacophony of nutritional advice. Obesity is now, paradoxically, linked to food poverty. Across the water some months ago a Tory peer by the delicious name of Gayle Hunnicutt got into a spot of bother when she suggested that those availing of food banks simply had poor cookery skills. “We have lost a lot of our cookery skills. Poor people do not know how to cook” Hunnicutt said. “I had a large bowl of porridge today, which cost 4p. A large bowl of sugary cereals will cost you 25p”. Predictably a wave of revulsion greeted the dame’s remarks, especially drawing attention to how cookery facilities are often lacking in impoverished circumstances. But she does have a point. Poor immigrants arriving in Ireland from countries whose food cultures amount to more than meat and two veg display far greater dietary range and acquaint their children with different flavours at an early stage in their development. Ireland seems to have an even more dysfunctional relationship with food than its nearest neighbour and one UN agency recently predicted that Ireland will soon have the highest rate of obesity in Europe. Of course the origins of obesity are multi-factorial and include: the stress of living in a competitive capitalist society; urban environments unfavourable to walking, cycling and public transport; and the over-use of antibiotics. Nonetheless the absence of a resilient food culture drawing significantly on native crops rather than foodstuffs skillfully marketed by a capitalist system at a relatively advanced post-industrial stage is apparent. The convergence of Irish diets with those of the wider then United Kingdom at the end of the nineteenth century has had a lasting effect. Improvements in diet through the development of alternative agriculture, especially fruit and vegetable cultivation, could help confront the obesity pandemic through the appeal of increased variety, freshness and a reduction in cost. Imbalances in the present system are revealed in the 2011 healthy-eating guidelines of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), which found that foods high in fat and sugar were generally a far cheaper source of calories and that fruits and vegetables were in the most expensive category. Damningly, the report noted that “healthy eating was less affordable for families dependent on social welfare”. The authors identified a need