We don't see much of the outside world in McDonagh's trilogy - a cemetery by night and a favourite lakeside suicide spot are the only excursions allowed from his comfortless kitchens. In the first play we hear: 'All you have to do is look out from your window to see Ireland. And it's soon bored you'd be. "There goes a calf."' Is the Connemara out there a fit setting for these desperate comedies? If so, it is not the Connemara of cloud-shadow connoisseurs.

This crossbones landscape is the outcome of six thousand years of human demand. Stone-Age agriculturalists fired and felled the oakwoods; already by the Bronze Age peat bogs were spreading across exhausted soils. Centuries of bog growth almost closed off the interior and confined history to the shoreline. The potato came, and an exploding population crammed into a narrow coastal strip was forced to strip the peat away, as fuel for itself and for the growing city of Galway, leaving naked granite. When the potato rotted, in 1845-49, a frugal and ingenious peasant ecology, already screwed to the limit by an extortionate social system, collapsed into beggary and despair. Connemara still lives in the aftermath of millennial famine, of age-old physical and psychic deprivation. Who were the expropriators? Is it true, as one of McDonagh's characters holds, that the 'crux of the matter' is 'the English stealing our language, and our land, and our God-knows-what'? For the record - and it is complex and ambiguous - the masters of Connemara from the Middle Ages to the Cromwellian victory in 1650 were the Gaelic O'Flahertys, and folklore associates every one of their castles with murderous tyranny. In the Leenane area the Joyces, originally Norman-Welsh but thoroughly Irishised, held power under the O'Flahertys and later adapted profitably to the role of middlemen under the new landlord instated by the postCromwellian settlements, Trinity College Dublin. The will to exploitation is general, the opportunity for it passes from hand to hand.

When, towards the end of the last century, agrarian terrorism forced the British government to undertake the development of the West, one result was that the landlords were brought out, the companionable old clusters of hovels broken up, and the former tenants installed in isolation, each family in its own cottage on its own stripe of land. Was this one of the traumas, along with the death of the Irish language and the sealing up of the oral tradition, that has made rural life an insult to its setting in nature and the past? A walk in today's pastoral landscape is a succession of affronts to one's sense of belonging in the world. Stroll up the boreen: you may remember it as charming from ten years ago, but you will find that the flowery hedgerows have been ripped out in favour of barbed wire, and that the old cottage is roofless, replaced by a gaunt bungalow facing a huge shed of breezeblock and galvanised sheeting. In the slovenly yard is a silent dog condemned to life on the end of a chain. Cross a hillside black from the burning-off of furze, all its larks' nests, lizards and butterflies incinerated; skirt round the dead sheep caught in briars by its mangy tangles of wool; stride out with relief across the open mountainside. But the heathery slope has been turned into an irreparable morass by overgrazing, the ruthless grant-driven multiplication of undernourished ewes too weak to feed their lambs. If you meet the shepherd of this desert of suffering, he will tell you he must be compensated before he considers reducing his flocks so as not to leave his own children a barren inheritance. There is more, much more. The news from Connemara's waters is equally squalid: brown trout lakes contaminated with sewage, slurry and fertilisers, the salmons' spawning beds overwhelmed by peat washed down from the eroding mountain, seatrout with their fins eaten away by lice from the concentration fishfarms in the bays...

No need, I hope, for me to say that this is not the only Connemara - I have written at length about beautiful and hopeful Connemaras - but there is no doubt that this Connemara exists, this calamitous backdrop to the society McDonagh shows us, fled by its young, with its brutalised law and its old church gone in the teeth. The machine of his theatre forces us to laugh even as we pity and shudder at all this, and the bare beauty of Connemara is one of his grim implicit jokes. Perhaps it is even close to the 'crux of the matter'.

Tim Robinson has written books about the Aran Islands,
the Burren and Connemara, and has produced maps on each of the areas.
He lives in Roundstone, Connemara, where he and his wife run the Folding Landscapes studio.

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Another Threat to Roundstone Bog