The Sound of the Shuttle. Gerald Dawe
industries and mills by which the North was globally recognised throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And also provide a portrait of Northern society for all those hundreds of thousands who had to leave to find work and a life for themselves elsewhere. Could that work? Would that not be a good way of sign-posting a really better future and even perhaps educating, away from the politically driven stereotypes addressed in part in this collection of essays, many of the present-day politicians in the social and economic history of their own place; where they actually live? Some might regard such an idea as anathema and another seditious diminution of the cultural past of unionism. But maybe, instead, such an imaginative move could secure a different kind of united future to include all the strands of Northern Irish society. For, by its very impressive physical location, Stormont and the weight that goes with it, might benefit from a new lease of creative life; of being reimagined and culturally releasing. In so doing, the carousel of ‘History’ which we have trailed behind for so long, and with such unproductive results, could be sidestepped. Who can say? A passing thought.
In recent years one striking feature of Northern Irish society has been the prominence and growing recognition of women writers from various parts of the province such as Marie Jones, Wendy Erskine, Rosemary Jenkinson, Lucy Caldwell, Jan Carson, Anna Burns and Stacy Gregg, among many others, as well as cultural commentators and analysts. Unquestionably the 33-year-old writer today would be responding to a whole range of other concerns such as the role of marginalised or migrant communities, which are merely shaded in here as a kind of analogue from an earlier time that might prove instructive (or indeed may not). The essays that follow do not cover this opening ground; nor do they pretend to hold any answers or put forward any simple solutions to the questions they raise about cultural belonging, while illustrating what it means, or has been made to mean, in the closing decades of the twentieth and the first decades of the twenty-first centuries. The intention behind The Sound of the Shuttle is to bring into critical focus the experiences, beliefs and achievements of an (at times) much maligned and often misread community generally referred to as Northern protestants but whose inner world is characterised by much difference, dispute and a healthy sense of independence; values of a stoical temperament from which we all might learn a thing or two.
Gerald Dawe
Belfast, November 2019
The modes of pain and pleasure,
These were things to treasure
When times changed and your kind broke camp.
Derek Mahon, ‘Death and the Sun’
In memory of Aodan MacPoilin
1948–2016
CHAPTER ONE
FALSE FACES
In her Irish Times review of Seamus Heaney’s poem-pamphlet An Open Letter (1983), Eavan Boland seems both cautious and uncertain about what it and the other Field Day pamphlets stand for:
A new Ulster nationalism is not my idea of what Irish poetry needs, but I would be quite willing to lay aside this prejudice if the new nationalism contained all the voices, all the fragments, all the dualities and ambiguities of reference; but it doesn’t. Judging by the ... pamphlets here in front of me, this is green nationalism and divided culture. ‘Whatever we mean by the Irish situation,’ writes Derek Mahon, ‘the shipyards of Belfast are no less a part of it than a country town in the Gaeltacht.’ Would that this were true; or, at least, would that it were real.
An influential member of Field Day’s board, Seamus Deane, is clearly conscious of this absent voice when he talks about breaking down stereotypes:
by making people have the confidence that each of us has a culture that’s not going to disappear if it comes in contact with the other. But it’s a kind of confidence severely lacking in Unionists, which is why they’re so neurotically defensive. That’s the problem with Field Day. It’s no good just performing our plays and selling pamphlets to people we know. There’s no point in continuing unless we can get through to Unionists.
But there is another important point to be made here. It is unclear what this absent voice ‘is’ and whether there is, in realisable terms, a culture that can be defined as ‘Protestant’ and unionist. It depends, of course, on how one defines culture but, taking that term in its widest sense, it is fair to say that the Protestant/unionist sense of self derives its meaning (and is ‘neurotically defensive’ for this very reason) from the fact of its being undefined, imaginatively and historically.
The famed inarticulateness, the Ulster that says No!, is, after all, a perfectly legitimate right to silence. In a way, the Protestant/unionist culture has no image of itself and consequently accepts those stereotypes which have been created for political purposes, be that within Northern Ireland or from London or Dublin. Stereotypes that are believed in. An important step would therefore be to begin a process of critical definition, if only to reveal the illegitimacy of those terms of reference and to establish new, imaginative ones.
Yet, in dealing with ‘Anglo-lrish attitudes’, Declan Kiberd addresses himself variously to ‘British liberals’, ‘British writers’ and ‘English liberals’, the very dependency that the Fifth Province justifiably challenges; as he does elsewhere in his pamphlet when he criticises those, such as F.S.L. Lyons, who have received ‘praises and prizes’ from the English. However, it ‘is certainly time’, writes Kiberd, ‘that British intellectuals applied themselves to a critical analysis of unionism, what it represents, and what it is doing to Britain as a whole’. ‘British writers’ must ‘apply themselves to the study of Ulster Unionism’; English intellectuals have also virtually excluded ‘any informed assessment of the deeper meanings of Ulster Unionism’.
Writers and critics in Ireland should indeed consider the ‘deeper meanings’, not simply of Ulster unionism, but of the entirety of ‘Protestant’ experience in the North and the common ground Northerners share, irrespective of religion, as Northerners. But if, as Declan Kiberd suggests, ‘in modern Ulster men’s emotions have been ruled not so much by culture as by cash’, then the solution will lie in that direction and the ‘full understanding of the situation in Ireland today’ resolved on that score, whatever about the current intellectual fuss.
But the unverifiability of so much talk about ‘identity’ springs from a severance from common experience and its established terms of negative feeling – hatred, anger, insecurity, bigotry and fear – being sympathetically and imaginatively absorbed. These feelings are fed by particularly virulent forms of supremacy which are themselves reliant upon political and social power-structures throughout the entire country. Only in the North have these become a matter of life and death and they pervade every aspect of contention. It is these terms and their institutionalised structures that will have to be transformed, from the inside, while the dependencies they ritualise will have to be understood and rewritten, before the simple human and ideological barriers to unity are breached in a positive and lasting way.
One notes an implicit interpretation of history as if it were a machine (or monster) which, partially of its own making, but mainly of English making, conscribes ‘the Irish’ to a world of thought detached from independent action (or creation). ‘History’ is populated by brutalised marionettes who continue to dominate the way we think and the way we imagine we feel. But the creative and critical dislocation that takes place as a result of the situation does not illuminate the emotional and subjective bonds that keep both sides in the Northern community locked in what has been described by Thomas Kilroy as ‘a struggle for the irretrievable’. It is this struggle which has most often been dealt with at the level of self-fulfilling ideas; otherwise, as Richard Kearney remarks in Myth and Motherland, it is feared that ‘we capitulate to the mindless conformism of fact’. But facts are not mindless and they dominate only when we perceive them abstractly; cascading into vicious cycles, they are seen as unfit for our solving preconceptions. Up close, fixed in the imagination and in historical reason, they have all the energy, often destructive, of life, its power struggles and their moral and political consequences.
History is not to ‘blame’, but people, and the way the two have drifted apart into exclusive orthodoxies. That is the problem: the human complexity.