Arts community to rail against Heaney motorway Sunday 18th September

Anyone involved in an Arts sector already pulverised by a sequence of proverbial punishment beatings, necessitated, apparently, by 'the cause' of austerity, has to ask themselves; what hope is there, really, for that sector? When £160 million can be INVESTED in the absolute destruction of the very source and inspiration of perhaps the most revered artwork to have emerged from this country, we can no longer accept that those beatings were ever about austerity. It was vicious contempt all along. As bulldozers assemble along the the strand at lough beg, as they darken the bashful, lethargic glow of the moss on the Lagan's Road, and prepare to cast the shadow of a motorway bridge over Mossbawn, what we are seeing is a mass mobilisation of state instruments against the only sector capable of shining a light upon ourselves, our society, and more pertinently, upon the instruments of the state itself. On Sunday evening at 8pm, some of the great voices within the Arts community of Northern Ireland, will gather at the Lyric to articulate the profound sense of hurt and abuse and violation many within that community (and beyond) feel, at the government’s decision to consign the landscape Heaney pined for, to a fictional fallacy. To a commuter's slab. To a disappeared, cultural myth, buried under some forgotten bog of revised legacy.