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Taking Yeats’s poem ‘1916’ as a point of departure, the work adopts a symbolic form and mystical tone in order to address the role of these narrative elements in the discursive construction of societies; using the case of Ireland’s journey from national to European identity as an exemplar. Employing found footage to appropriate from public discourse elements which subtlety compose our understanding of the world, the work uses representative depictions of animal behaviour to ask whether the ambiguous ‘truths’ they exhibit could productively bring into relief the problematic relationship between nationalist sentiment and notions of social origin.