Seamus Heaney and the Unionists

Posted on Wednesday, 25 September, 2013 by andypollak

What more can be said about the wonderful human being and literary genius that was Seamus Heaney, the greatest Irish poet since W.B.Yeats and one of the finest people ever to come out of Northern Ireland?

One thing I have not seen commented on in the avalanche of words since Heaney’s death has been his generosity and sensitivity to the Unionist community. I was first struck by this a few years ago when reading Stepping Stones, his book of interviews with fellow poet Dennis O’Driscoll. Commenting on Thomas Kinsella’s angry poem ‘Butcher’s Dozen’, a response to Bloody Sunday, he criticised Kinsella’s “furious characterizations of the Unionist, Protestant collective in the North that seemed too stereotypical, a tilt towards the kind of bigotry the poem was scarifying.”

Elsewhere in that book he talked about his experience of growing up in South Derry with “Protestant neighbours in and out of the house” and his “day-to-day experience of come and go between the two communities”. I have heard him speak warmly of those Mossbawn and Bellaghy neighbours on several public occasions.

He refused to become a republican propagandist. He famously recalled meeting Sinn Fein’s Danny Morrison on the Belfast-Dublin train and refusing his demand to write for the republican cause. “When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write/Something for us?/If I do write something,/Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself”.

Equally famously, of course, he responded to being included in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry by declaring: ‘”Be advised my passport’s green./No glass of ours was ever raised/to toast the queen.” The author of ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, a Catholic farmer’s son from south Derry, was never going to write from any vantage point that was not greatly influenced by his Catholic nationalist background. The point is that his nationalism was generous and outward-looking; his strongest emphasis was always on “self-understanding, mutual understanding, imaginative enhancement, cultural diversity and a tolerant political atmosphere” as the essential ingredients of a ‘good society.’

He remained a rare voice of fair-mindedness during the deep mutual hostility and total absence of mutual understanding that marked the 1981 hunger strike period: “At that stage, the IRA’s self-image as liberators didn’t work much magic with me. But neither did the too-brutal simplicity of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘A crime is a crime is a crime. It is not political.”

He  spoke eloquently and sensitively for the victims and bereaved on both sides. Thus, from The Cure at Troy: “A hunger striker’s father/Stands in the graveyard dumb./The police widow in veils/Faints at the funeral home.”

As a poet he insisted on “a disinterested gaze at how you are situated, whereas your people will require passionate solidarity, and opposition to the Other.” He quoted Derek Mahon in holding to the belief that poets in Northern Ireland were subject to a larger call: to “hold in a single thought reality and justice.”

But don’t let anybody tell you that he was entirely disengaged from the most vital imperative of Northern Irish politics: to work to overcome the sectarian divide. In a tribute in the Irish Times, Michael Longley recalled a post-IRA ceasefire essay in which Heaney wrote about how in 1968, a few months before the outbreak of the latest round of ‘troubles’, the two poets, along with folk singer Davy Hammond (Longley and Hammond being from Protestant backgrounds), had travelled around the North with a performance called Room to Rhyme. It was a moment of anti-sectarian historical hope, soon to be dashed.

“At that time, there was energy and confidence on the nationalist side and a developing liberalism – as well as the usual obstinacy and reaction – on the unionist side. There was a general upswing in intellectual and social activity, the border was more pervious than it had been, the sectarian alignments less determining. I remember in particular feeling empowered by a week on the road with David Hammond and Michael Longley in May 1968 when we brought a programme of songs and poems to schools and hotels and libraries in unionist and nationalist areas all over Northern Ireland.”

He went on to say that the title Room to Rhyme, taken from the opening verse of a mummers’ play, “expressed perfectly the eagerness and impatience that was in the air at the time.”

In 2013 did the unionist political, religious and intellectual establishment embrace the most eminent and open minded Ulsterman of the past half century? I’m afraid not in any real spirit of generosity and inclusiveness. There were perfunctory statements from Peter Robinson and Mike Nesbitt. No Unionist political leader – to my knowledge – attended his funeral in Dublin or his burial in Bellaghy. The News Letter highlighted a letter from a reader claiming he was not such a great poet as he was reckoned to be.

Like so many things about the Protestant community in the North these days, all this made me sad. Seamus Heaney’s writings, like John Hume’s speeches, inspired me to do my tiny bit to try to build a non-threatening, mutually respectful ‘Republic of Conscience’ between Irish Ireland and its British Northern province (although I know only too well that even that title of a Heaney poem will sound threatening to many Unionists).

I don’t expect generosity from the voices of unionism: it’s not in the DNA of such a fearful ideology. There are some notable exceptions: for example see the eloquent article, ‘Seamus Heaney’s poems are for Protestants too’,  by the London-based columnist Jenny McCartney, daughter of former North Down MP and QC Robert McCartney, in the Spectator (http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9013131/seamus-heaney-and-northern-irelands-great-divide/).

If only Unionists could open their minds to see it, in Seamus Heaney they had a kindly and inclusive figure (albeit a Nationalist) who embodied the best in the Ulster character – honest, humorous, extraordinarily industrious in seeking the truth between the lines  -and who was a poetic genius into the bargain. We will not see his like again.

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A Merriman view of a new Ireland

Posted on Saturday, 24 August, 2013 by andypollak

The annual Merriman Summer School is a wonderful institution: for 46 years people interested in the language, history, literature and music of Ireland have gathered in a town in County Clare every August for lectures, discussion, poetry, dancing and other enjoyable pastimes. This year it took place in the pretty spa town of Lisdoonvarna, the topic was ‘Ireland, North and South: two societies growing apart?’ and I was privileged to be the director.

The school featured a wide range of speakers who approached this topic from very different angles. Among them were the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, Richard Clarke, and the head of the Irish School of Ecumenics, Geraldine Smyth, discussing it from a religious viewpoint; former Northern Ireland civil service head Sir Ken Bloomfield looking at the choices facing people in a Border Poll; critics Fintan O’Toole and Edna Longley forensically examining the role of culture and the arts in an ‘unreconciled Ireland’; economists Dan O’Brien and John Bradley exploring the role of economic cooperation; academics Aoibhin de Burca and Katy Hayward looking at the changing attitudes of young people; journalists Poilin Ni Chiarain and Cathal Goan at the role of the media.

The high point was a joint reading by Ireland’s two most eminent poets, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, friends since the 1960s.  In which other country would over 300 people crush into a village hall on a Friday night and listen in absolute silence – punctured by outbreaks of wild applause – to an hour and a half of poetry?  Geraldine Smyth quoted the Welsh poet R.S.Thomas on the impact this had on the listeners – it was “something to wear against the heart in the long cold.”

Because of lack of space I am going to focus on three of the most interesting political sessions. The school opened with a hard-hitting speech by Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin, warning that unless North/South relations were revived from their present torpor “historic opportunities will be lost.’ Martin accused the current leaderships in both Irish jurisdictions of showing a “dangerous complacency” in all three strands of the peace process, but particularly on North/South cooperation, where there was “absolutely no urgency or ambition” and thus a “slow but undeniable retreat from the policy of deeper cooperation.”

He gave the example of the recent ‘Economic Pact’ for Northern Ireland agreed between Peter Robinson, Martin McGuinness and David Cameron. This agreement, presented as the definitive strategy for the development of the Northern Ireland economy, “excludes any North/South dimension whatsoever” – there is not “a single mention of the Border Region or cross-border cooperation.” He stressed that this was not an agreement among unionists: “Sinn Fein was a full participant”.

Emphasising that such economic cooperation was very far from the “slippery slope” towards a united Ireland so feared by unionists, he said Fianna Fail would be publishing “a list of the areas where we believe new and expanded [North/South] bodies are not only justified but badly needed.”

He then went on to give a flavour of this expansion. He said the activities of Enterprise Ireland and Invest Northern Ireland to support indigenous Irish and Northern Irish companies exporting overseas should be merged into one body. He called for the English and History curricula in schools in the two jurisdictions to include common areas of study, e.g. the poetry and plays of Ulstermen Seamus Heaney and Frank McGuinness.

He urged agreement on a range of common topics in Irish history to be included in both curricula, and attacked a recent speech by Sinn Fein’s Gerry Kelly in which he had referred to “a double narrative of our history” when defending a controversial commemoration of two IRA men who had died on their way to bomb a mainly unionist town. “How can there ever be an understanding between traditions if this attitude prevails?” asked Martin. He noted that in the past 20 years the commemorations he attended had changed radically in that these events were now used “to signal points of unity rather than division – to explain how the concept of victory and defeat have little relevance today.”

He urged greater cooperation between Northern and Southern universities through a cross-border body to facilitate “the mutual recognition of qualifications and transfers between institutions.” He wanted a formal all-island approach to advanced research, noting that the EU’s largest research fund, the Framework Programme, actually requires cross-border collaboration.

The second interesting political session was on the final night, when six young politicians from the DUP, the new NI21 party, Sinn Fein, Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fail debated the school’s theme. The refreshing frankness and civility of the exchanges between the young participants were noteworthy.  Emma Little, a DUP advisor to First Minister Peter Robinson, said “there are a whole range of shared values across Ireland, North and South, where we can bring benefits to each other and move forward on a very positive, opportunistic basis.” Who could have dreamed of such language from a DUP politician even a few years ago?

The young Southern politicians from the governing coalition had a somewhat different view. Both the Labour and Fine Gael speakers, Rebecca Moynihan and Neale Richmond, emphasised the primacy of the Republic’s economic plight. The former didn’t put a fine tooth in it: “What I care about is our sovereignty over our own affairs in Ireland. At a time like this we can’t indulge ourselves by being involved in the North’s affairs. I don’t care that it’s the economic crisis that preoccupies us – we want to engage with the real issues that will impact on the next generation, not the Troubles or flags or parades in Belfast.”

Perhaps the revelation of the summer school was Alliance Deputy Leader and East Belfast MP Naomi Long, somebody few in the audience had heard speak before. Along with another strong independent voice, Marian Harkin MEP, she addressed the closing session. She said that an aggressive form of “frontier nationalism” had developed in Northern Ireland, a parody of national identity that must feel alien to those living in Britain and the Republic of Ireland who shared that nationality. The violence over flags and emblems was just one example of this. She said the “uber-unionism” of the North was out of touch with the rest of British society, and the same was true of the use of the Irish tricolour and, to a lesser extent, Irish language signage, as “territorial markers” in local neighbourhoods.

“Ironically, despite the tendency of frontier nationalism to emphasise differences between unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland, they have in truth more in common with each other than with mainstream British or Irish society respectively”, she went on.

She believed that just as in Scotland many who vote for the Scottish National Party will not necessarily vote for independence, so “amongst those who vote for nationalist politicians in Northern Ireland, the number who would vote for a united Ireland if a referendum were to be held now, has steadily declined since devolution. It’s not that people feel less Scottish or  less Irish than they did before; it is that they feel they can be fully Scottish or Irish without a change in the constitutional arrangements – their identity to some degree has become divorced from territorial debate. Devolution has allowed differentiation and distinctiveness within the context of wider interdependent relationships. In the case of Northern Ireland, it is a differentiation from both Great Britain and Ireland, whilst maintaining strong bonds with both.”

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Confessions of a Cross-border Collaborator

Posted on Friday, 9 August, 2013 by andypollak

The mischievous streak in me likes the word ‘collaboration’: it is a subversive word. I believe in the obvious: that the road to peace out of any conflict, short of outright military victory by one side or the other, lies in eventually collaborating with the old enemy. But in Britain collaboration still has a strongly negative undertone left over from the Second World War: those who worked with the Nazi enemy were collaborators and therefore people to be shunned and punished. And this sentiment was easily adapted by unionism to the fearful instincts of that community in Northern Ireland.

Collaboration also assumes legitimacy and equality between the two sides doing the collaborating.  Irish republicans don’t like the concept for this reason. They insist on believing that Northern Ireland and – to a lesser extent – the independent state of Ireland don’t really exist, that they are unruly half-completed waiting rooms on the journey to the ultimate destination of a proper all-Ireland republic.

In the actual Republic of Ireland collaboration has no such negative undertones. But its nice sister, cooperation, when used in the context of cooperation with Northern Ireland as part of the peace process, has an only slightly less damaging connotation: it reeks of boring ‘do-goodery’, marginal to the real problems of a republic which has been struggling for its very existence as a self-governing state for the past five years.

I have spent the last 14 years – until retirement last month – as director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, promoting and developing what many unionists still consider to be collaboration with the ancient enemy in Dublin; what many republicans believe to be irrelevant to the real business of driving towards a united Ireland; and what many people in the South think – when they think about it at all –  is a deeply uninteresting and probably fruitless endeavour to win over the seriously mad, often violent and probably unreformable people north of the border.

Most political leaders in both jurisdictions on this island now devote little thought to North-South cooperation. In the early years after the Good Friday Agreement, Bertie Ahern used to bang the table and tell his Ministers that such cooperation had to be close to the top of their agendas. However since Bertie departed and Western capitalism as we used to know it imploded after 2008, everything has changed. With the depth of the financial crisis facing both Ireland and Britain, it was quite understandable that the dreary and predictable problems of little Northern Ireland would slide rapidly down the agenda.  The 1998 Agreement’s marvellously complex interlocking architecture was always predicated on all three ‘strands’ – within Northern Ireland, North-South and East-West – working together. But in recent years – to this observer at least – this has decreased to the point where there is now a worrying lacuna in Northern Ireland policy-making in both Dublin and London.

Admittedly relations between the two states have never been better, a closeness symbolised by Queen Elizabeth’s hugely successful visit in 2011. I would argue that the East-West institutions set up by the Good Friday Agreement have become largely symbolic and the real business between Britain and Ireland is now done on a bilateral basis between the two sovereign governments. But North-South cooperation, which until recent years was much more vibrant – largely because of the Irish Government’s commitment to it – has also fallen way down that government’s agenda.

This falling off in governmental interest is reflected in other key areas of society. The media couldn’t be less interested. In Northern Ireland this is because of a provincial obsession with the goings on at Stormont and the old sectarian issues of flags and parades. In the South it is indicative of the collapse of interest in anything to do with both Northern Ireland and North-South cooperation, along with a deep bout of 26-county introspection caused by our failure as an economically independent entity.

The higher education system is another key sector which is losing its North-South dimension. The number of undergraduates crossing the border to study at universities in the other jurisdiction continues to fall: Southerners going north have dropped significantly from over 10% of the total undergraduate population there in the late 1990s to under 4% now; and Northerners coming south have declined from a much lower base to around 1%.

So why is this important? Why shouldn’t Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland retreat into their silos – one orientated almost exclusively towards London and the other increasingly towards Brussels – and have relatively little do with each other? After all, that is how the two Irelands behaved for half-a-century up to the outbreak of the ‘Troubles.’

The first answer to this question is obvious. It lies in what 50 years of discriminatory self-rule in the North and wilful ignorance in London and Dublin led to: 30 years of political violence, 3,600 deaths, and a society whose deepened wounds and divisions will take many generations to heal.  In Dublin the North was ignored for most of the first 30 years after independence and then briefly became the subject of a futile international campaign against partition – until finally Sean Lemass and Ken Whitaker embarked on an initiative in the 1960s to make friends across the border through the first fragile attempts at practical cross-border cooperation.

So practical cross-border cooperation as a tool for helping to remove fear and suspicion between the two parts of this island is nothing new. And remove fear and suspicion is precisely what it has done over the past 15 years. As the late Sir George Quigley said in 2008:

“The negative attitudes to the South, which have historically reinforced internal differences, have steadily weakened. The development of surprisingly widespread acceptance of the North-South economic project demonstrates that the straitjacket within which people mistakenly seek to preserve their identity can be exchanged for more comfortable clothing in situations where positive relationships, which are able to replace negative stereotypes, can develop.”

The economy also provides the second answer. All but a minority of unionists now agree that in a fiercely competitive, globalised environment, it makes total sense for this small English-speaking island to present a united face to the investing outside world, to cooperate where possible in developing new export markets and to capitalise on an all-island ‘domestic’ market of more than six million people.

Unfortunately Northern Ireland’s politics and society are not yet mature enough to solve their problems of division and violence by themselves. Sectarianism and  its ugly outworkings remain a constant. The sovereign governments must stay engaged: London in particular by supporting the cause of cross-community cooperation; Dublin the cause of cross-border cooperation. For the two are as intertwined as when John Hume first articulated his ideas on the tangled ‘strands’ of Northern Irish politics and identity 40 years ago.

PS  I am this year’s director of the Merriman Summer School in Lisdoonvarna, Co Clare, from 14-18 August with the title: ‘Ireland, North and South: two societies growing apart?’ Further details from http://www.merriman.ie

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A Cross-border Gun for Hire

Posted on Thursday, 27 June, 2013 by andypollak

After nearly 14 years it is time to say farewell to the Centre for Cross Border Studies and to ‘A Note from the Next Door Neighbours’, which ran for seven years on the CCBS website (as well as on Slugger O’Toole).

We have done some good things in our small centre in Armagh during that time, and I must pay tribute to my CCBS colleagues for their huge support and extremely hard work: incoming director Ruth Taillon, particularly for her superb work on impact assessment; deputy director Mairead Hughes, a brilliant financial manager, who has been my most valued colleague since the day we opened in September 1999; Patricia McAllister, as conscientious and efficient a personal assistant as exists on this island; Annmarie O’Kane, who has done wonders with the Border People cross-border information service; Eimear Donnelly and CarolAnne Murphy for their impressive organisational and ICT skills; and also to our good friends John Driscoll and Caroline Creamer, director and deputy director of CCBS’s ‘sister’ organisation, the International Centre for Local and Regional Development. Successive chairs and vice-chairs – Chris Gibson, one of the North’s leading businessmen, Helen Johnston of the National Economic and Social Council, and Pauric Travers of St Patrick’s College Drumcondra – along with the CCBS board have always been there for us when we needed them.

The Centre’s contribution to ‘Strand Two’ of the Northern Irish peace process has been welcomed by leaders from a wide range of backgrounds. The Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, has called us an ‘important entity, doing important work’ and the Tánaiste, Eamon Gilmore holds that work ‘in very high regard.’ Fianna Fail leader Micheál Martin has called us ‘a courageous and pioneering initiative.’ The Republic’s most senior civil servant, Martin Fraser, says the Centre’s publications are ‘fundamental to understanding how cross-border cooperation works on the island of Ireland.’ Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness has talked about the Centre ‘leading the North-South inter-connection process.’ For the unionists, DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson has warmly and publicly thanked the Centre for its work. Abroad, one of the EU’s top experts on cross-border cooperation, Joachim Beck of the Euro-Institut in Germany, has called the Centre’s impact assessment toolkit ‘a top project with a top partner – it would be hard to find a better one in Europe.’

Yet it is disappointing that we have become prophets with little honour in our own country. The lack of interest by the island’s third level institutions in the subject of cross-border cooperation as part of the Northern Irish peace process never ceases to baffle me. In the past 18 months I have spoken to academic and policy audiences on this fascinating topic from Norway to Israel, Austria to France, England to Belgium. But I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of such audiences I have been invited to address in Ireland over the past 14 years.

The media are another element who are almost totally uninterested in what we do. If I had not been a former senior journalist with The Irish Times (and a dab hand at putting out press releases, harassing newsdesks and writing letters to the editor), I doubt whether the Centre’s work would have raised more than a line or two in the press and on radio on this island. I have, for example, been trying in vain for a decade to interest education correspondents in the unique Irish success story that is the Standing Conference on Teacher Education North and South (SCoTENS), described by the Professor of Education at Oxford University, John Furlong, as ‘an incredible achievement’.

None of this would matter if North-South cooperation remained high on the agenda of the responsible governments. But it doesn’t. I have to say that in recent months in particular it has seemed to me to be lower than ever. With the Northern system wrapped up in its interminable and risk-averse processes (and the G8) and the Southern system totally distracted by its presidency of the EU, necessary ‘North-Southery’ has almost disappeared off the map. The less pragmatic wing of unionism must be delighted.

All this is worrying. Without the active interest and involvement of both the British and Irish governments, the two main parties in Northern Ireland will go back into the tribal silos where they feel most comfortable, the world will forget about this insignificant and awkward province, and in another generation the malign cycle of sectarianism and violence which has been the pattern here for the past 160 years and more will be in danger of raising its ugly head again. And that active involvement can still pay off. Witness Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness’s recent package of measures aimed at a more shared society, which appeared to cynics to be a product of pressure from London along the lines of ‘share more and get more money from us’ (and we’ll announce it before the G8 comes to Fermanagh!).

Maybe this will change for the better in the autumn. I will be more an observer than a participant then (although I will continue to manage the Centre’s ‘Towards a Border Development Zone’ project). I plan to start writing a book about North-South cooperation and the Northern Ireland peace process, and to put up the occasional blog on this new site, http://www.2irelands2gether.wordpress.com. If any of the readers of ‘A Note from the Next Door Neighbours’ would like to subscribe to this new blog, perhaps you could let me know on andyjpollak@gmail.com. I’m also available to do anything that will further the noble cause of cross-border cooperation for peace, reconciliation and mutual benefit in Ireland (occasionally for a small charge). I will be, in short, a cross-border gun for hire.

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