When All is Ruin Once Again

Though firmly embedded in Gort and Crusheen in the west of Ireland, this powerful documentary essay, quickly transcends the local to reveal national, even universal, truths. Capturing a rural community as a motorway carves through their land, director Keith Walsh (a Gort resident) weaves an epic recessionary tapestry of his neighbours in bog lands, farms, fire-sides, race tracks and hurling pitches and reflects on the value of memory and the impermanence of existence.

Taking its title from a line from a poem by W.B. Yeats, When All is Ruin Once Again was made over a seven- year period in the counties of Galway and Clare. Juxtaposing freighted images of traditional lives alongside modern incursions, the new motorway; Brazilian workers; Straw Boys; funerals and cattle marts - this ruminative essay is as potent a snapshot of Irish life and sensibility as Rocky Road to Dublin was fifty years before.