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In his article The River would Run Red with Blood', Larry Taylor attempts to understand and put forward the answer to what appears to modern society to be a puzzling question. He is doing ethnographic research into an economically depressed area in Donegal; a community known as Teelin where an actively progressive priest, Fr James McDyer provides the community with a possible solution to the economic downturn. However, the priest's proposal was, in every sense, overlooked. As rational as it appears to be the peoples of the community completely ignored it. Taylor attempts to discover and understand why, why a community would refuse or ignore such a rational proposition, one which could possibly provide great benefits to the said community? This question becomes even more puzzling when Taylor discloses that the proposal put forward by Fr McDyer would simply entail the commercialisation of a system which is already in place and appears to work extremely well. Taylor therefore wishes to discover why, if they were accustomed to such a system, were the fishermen so averse to the priest's suggestion that they more completely regulate their own fishery by first corporately buying it?' (1987:297).

Taylor successfully constructs a conceptual account of how the local people viewed the situation by looking at the community and its historical past. In Taylor's account it appears at first as if there are a number of reasons which when combined, provides an answer to the question at hand, however, a closer look at Taylor's work shows that the overall difficulty with the priests proposal it that of authority. The community as a whole appears to have difficultly with the notion of authority, and prefers to keep all forms of authority to do with the fishery external to the community. Or as Taylor put it, the location of ultimate authority outside such communities safeguards their egalitarian ethos and strengthens the conditions for cooperation among equals' (1987:305). Taylor points out that there are several historical precedents which provide evidence that Teelin, like many other Irish communities, was a centre for common property and landholding systems, so Fr McDyer's proposal should not have come as such a surprise to the community, as common property ownership was part of their historical culture.

This type of system was present up until the end of the eighteenth century when English landlords replaced it with individual tenancies, and it was at this point that external

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