The Border Interpretative Centre
Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times - Wednesday, January 24, 2001


"The new show at Dublin's Temple Bar Gallery entitled The Border Itself, documents a remarkable cultural experiment. When the Irish Border had it's own interpretative centre.

Like all great ideas, it's startlingly obvious. We live in the age of the interpretative centre and are, it would seem, collectively unsure of what to make of any phenomenon, natural or synthetic, without a mediating guide. And, as Belfast-born John Byrne points out, the Border is our most significant inland feature.... By drawing attention to the kind of thing that the heritage industry, North and South, goes out of it's way to avoid, he was foregrounding an uncomfortable truth, which actually affords him great satirical scope. To underline it's taboo status, he simply conflates the Border with sex something that 'people were reluctant to talk about'...."



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