A ‘secret’ facility in Athlone was designated the national control centre during the cold war. We visit with a group of artists
Apocalypse Anxieties: inside bunker built by the government under Custume Barracks in Athlone during the cold war. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
Once designated the national control centre, this was where Ireland’s systems of government and communications were to have been kept going in case of nuclear war reaching our shores. These days, some of the warren of low-ceilinged spaces are used as storage, some are locker rooms, and many are empty. Makeshift doors made of wood and wire are unlocked, and we can see the remnants of wiring, fuse-boxes and a broken bicycle. There is an eclectic selection of graffiti.
The bunker’s genesis came in a 250-page document from 1958, says Kenneally. Prosaically titled the Report of the Working Party on Certain Aspects of Civil Defence, “it game-played a nuclear strike over Dublin. It’s an appalling document, because it said that even if the government had time to evacuate half the city, you’re talking about over 100,000 people dead, instantly.
Any Action Deemed Necessary, by Frank Sweeney and Tom O’Dea, draws on the pair’s researches into 55 years of Irish foreign-policy decisions, its name based on a refrain in government communications. Including a classic red phone, their installation invites you to respond to some of the choices facing those involved in government throughout the history of the State, while presenting the evolution of alternative histories, such as what might have happened had the Republic aligned with Nato.
Since 2007 the UK artist Jill Gibbon has been going to arms fairs, disguised variously as a war artist, security consultant and, in suit and fake pearls, as a potential buyer. Covertly sketching this hidden world of string quartets and Scud missiles, champagne and shrapnel, she also collects the incidental gifts offered by the dealers: “wittily” branded sweets, stress balls shaped like grenades, and desktop fighter jets.Apocalypse Anxieties: an imagined architecture for Mars, by Orla Punch.
Art may not stop the apocalypse, but it can open our eyes to what is out there, hiding in plain sight.
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