Assessing the impact of the 'Decoupling' reform of the common agricultural policy on Irish farmers' off-farm labour market participation decisions

This paper assesses the impact of the 'decoupling' reform of the Common Agricultural Policy on the labour allocation decisions of Irish farmers. The agricultural household decision-making model provides the conceptual and theoretical framework to examine the interaction between government subsidies and farmers' time allocation decisions. The relationship postulated is that 'decoupling' of agricultural support from production would probably result in a decline in the return to farm labour but it would also lead to an increase in household wealth. The effect of these factors on how farmers allocate their time is tested empirically using labour participation and labour supply models. The models developed are sufficiently general for application elsewhere. The main findings for the Irish situation are that the decoupling of direct payments is likely to increase the probability of farmers participating in the off-farm employment market and that the amount of time allocated to off-farm work will increase.

Samuel Beckett, the Gate Theatre Dublin, and the contemporary Irish independent theater sector: fragments of performance history

From 1991, when the Dublin Gate Theatre launched their Samuel Beckett Festival featuring nineteen of Beckett’s stage plays, to more recent years, the Gate dominated Irish productions of Beckett’s theater. The Gate Beckett Festival was remounted in 1996 at the Lincoln Center, New York, and at the Barbican Centre, London, in 1999, and individual or grouped productions have toured regularly since then in Ireland and internationally. However, since the Irish premiere of Waiting of Godot at the Pike Theatre in 1955, in addition to several Beckett plays mounted by the National Theatre, many independent Irish theater companies, such as Focus Theatre, Druid Theatre, and more recently Pan Pan Theatre, Blue Raincoat Theatre, The Corn Exchange, and Company SJ (under director Sarah Jane Scaife), have produced Beckett’s drama. While acknowledging earlier Irish productions, this essay will consider the role of the Dublin Gate Beckett Festival and the Beckett Centenary celebrations in Dublin in 2006 in greatly enhancing the marketability of Beckett’s work, and will discuss the proliferation of productions of Beckett’s stage plays (as opposed to stage adaptations of the prose work, which is a topic for another essay) in the independent theater sector in the Republic of Ireland since 2006. In addition to giving an overview of these recent productions, the essay will consider some issues at stake in creating or constructing performance histories