WHEN IAN BROAD moved the 1972 Dublin Arts Festival into the Liberties area he achieved two major developpments in the Irish arts scene: "arts" and "community" found common ground, and 'festival' took on a meaning which it had probably not deserved since the early days of the Dublin Theatre Festiival.

Tis month Senator Gemma Hussey will have come to the end of her four year term as Director of the Abbey Theatre. She was appointed in July 1974 by Ritchie Ryan. This was a direct result of her involvement with the National Women's Talent Bank and her active campaign to have more women on State Boards and Commissions. She has, for many years, been in the forefront of the women's movement. In February of this year she had a stormy confrontation with George Colley on the issue of married women's taxation.

IF THE IRISH EXHIBITION of Living Art, which opened in May and closed in June, and which was reviewed in Magill last month, was to some extent domiinated by the need or urge among its artists to be original, then the Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition is subbject to an even gloomier tyranny: that of convention.

TEN YEARS AGO, even in Dublin's rather ratsy version of Bohemia, it wasn't really acceptable to 'sleep around' (that strange euphemism) parrticularly if you were a woman, That's all changed. Virginity, our most previous gift so the nuns told us, is now disspensed with as soon as posssible. As Cass, a nineteen year old, explained: "Like I was quite old really, I was sixteen and I knew all about draw and dope and acid and stuff, but I'd never had sex. All my friends had done it and I felt really naive".

Michael Farrell replies

***

DR. NOEL BROWNE'S recent attack on Republicanism was doubtless fuelled by his fierce indignation at social injustices in the South, but generous indignation is no substitute for clear thinking and this was a piece of very muddled thinking leading to a thoroughly reactionary conclusion.

HOW TO STAY alive can be a depressing business. You can jog to your heart's content, eat plenty of fibre to keep you motile, avoid polyunsaturated fats etc. All good things to do but they may be of no use.

ABOUT THIS TIME every year we await, with a mixture of impatience and forlorn hope, that most elusive of creatures, the heatwave. Should we get it then the majority of us will relish the garden but quietly forget about gardening. Only the enthusiast will regard the plight of his plants and even then water shortages may make things difficult. Howwever, all this may be wishhful thinking so in the meanntime let's get down to some useful work.

Haughey clear favourite, O'Kennedy the dark horse.

Jack Lynch commands the almost unanimous respect of the Irish people, with 86% believing he is doing well as Taoiseach. This is the most startling result of Magill's opinion poll on Fianna Fail's first year in office.

THE FINGERPRINT AFFAIR has now assumed far larger proportions than hitherto suspected and has raised quesstions of the utmost seriousness not alone about the conduct of very senior Garda officers, past and present, but of the Department of Justice itself.