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This BTW was the first Indymedia Ireland story uploaded all those years ago onto the site as we warmed up for the 'official' launch of open source news in Ireland.

Spacecraft’s previous production to ‘Bleeding the System’ - ‘The Hypothetical Death of an Activist’ - was a localised to Dublin re-write of Italian Playwright Dario Fo’s celebrated farce ‘The Accidental Death of an Anarchist’. It was set in a City Centre Garda Station in the immediate aftermath of the events of 6th May 2002 when a Reclaim the Streets protest had been greeted by a spectacular police riot on Dame Street. The police riot was filmed and subsequently widely broadcast on TV to a stunned Nation. The play was at the time, and still remains, the sole theatrical representation and affirmation of the existence of a growing political culture in Ireland which identifies with the radically internationalist counter-globalisation movement.

The Fo re-write by Les Shine and Felix Ford set a high bar for Spacecraft for future productions as it was that rare beast in the theatre – a knockabout farce with satirical teeth which had the audience in no uncertain terms rolling in the aisles. It was obvious to anyone who saw it that the Spacecraft gang had hit on a novel and productive update of a surreal and satirical mode in Irish Comedy rooted in the glory days of ‘Halls Pictorial Weekly’ when broad and topical mockery of the institutions of Irish Life was not only tolerated but expected. The only question at the time was how Spacecraft would manage to live up to the expectations generated by such a successful and timely re-write of an iconic piece of theatre.

Well they have managed it in spades in the form of an original farce by Fergal Leddy set this time around May 2004 as the country gears up for a referendum on citizenship and awaits its tabloid guaranteed (seconded by McDowell) destruction at the combined hands of the WOMBLES and ‘hordes’ of pregnant immigrant mothers. I had the pleasure of catching ‘Bleeding the System’ at the final night of it’s trial run at the Convergence Festival.

It opens with the recounting of an incident witnessed by the dramatist on Dame Street in Dublin in April 2003 in the course of which a Uniformed Guard without further comment snatched a bunch of roses from an immigrant street trader and drove off. Fergal wrote an account of his attemts to lodge a complaint with the Gardai about the incident for Indymedia Ireland at the time. The play, with this symptomatic incident as a starting point, takes the form of a rapid-fire fictional recounting of the onward progress of the bunch of flowers, the Flowerseller and the Garda and is set against the backdrop of the Celtic Tiger reaching towards some kind of grim societal climax of empty, property obsessed, misanthropic and insular grandiosity.

These elements orbit and eventually spectacularly collide around Bean - the unlikely anti-hero of Bleeding the System. He is a failed impotent Irish Businessman of dubious repute with Nietzschean delusions of an imminent rebirth into grandeur, omnipotence and riches. . . .

A quote from Ulysses - more than 3 lines!!@!!

--People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians.

From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.

As Dublin celebrates Bloomsday, it turns out that any reading or publication of more than 3 lines of Ulysses is protected by copyright. Policing this is made more difficult by the brief period that the work was out of copyright in the 1990's before the extension of copyright period for 70 years after artists death. The Irish Dail had to pass a special law to enable it to mount an exhibition of Joycean manuscripts, there are stories doing the rounds of copyright lawyers scouring the city for people quoting more than 3 lines from Ulysses and the Joyce breakfast had to take place with no readings from Joyce.

You can still read Ulysses thanks to the internet – but no quoting, at least not in Ireland, on Bloomsday
Read Ulysses here
The Project Gutenburg site where you can download the text

Yet another midnight communique from Captain White and his merry mob has arrived to once again add some sparkle to the dreary unpaid lives of pale tired post-Mayday frenzy IMC hacks. The plot thickens . . . this time we leave you in the capable hands of Captain Blue.

"On October 2 1969 the then British Ambassador to Dublin, AW Gilchrist wrote to AKK 'Kevin' White in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The letter quoted the then Proprietor of the Irish Times, Major Thomas B. McDowell, as referring to Douglas Gageby, the Editor, as a “renegade or white nigger”. This was a reference to Gageby’s coverage of “northern questions”. The letter quoted Major McDowell, a member of the Judge Advocates Department of the British Army, as asking 10 Downing Street for guidance in cancelling out the editor’s views and in eliminating “unauthorised” news items further down the chain of journalistic command. The British authorities released the letter under the ‘30 Year Rule’ in late 1999.

As he promised when he signed off the last time (Thursday, Apr 29 2004, 1:38pm) , Captain White has mobilised the intelligence corps in order to discover who suppressed publication of the “renegade.. white nigger” letter in January 2000. While the intelligence corps of most armies tries to plug information leaks, ours unplugs them. The Captain tasked me (Blue) and my team with doing whatever was necessary to get to the bottom of this matter. I wish to report that the chaps have come up trumps and have unearthed the person responsible for sitting on the British Ambassador’s October 2 1969 letter."

Captain Blue Continues his Tale Here >>

Whodunnit Background
1. “The correspondence is being destroyed” : First Part of the Whodunnit
2. Jack Lane Slams Irish Times: Letter to Madam Revealed: Second piece of the Jigsaw
3. Deep Background: Gilchrist Indonesia Ireland Dossier