Inventing the Myth - Political Passions and the Ulster Protestant Imagination by Connal Parr is enjoyable and readable. It is an academic book, published by a major university press. It includes a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, as well as informative, non-intrusive footnotes and a useful index. Don’t be put off: you don’t have to be an academic to read it. It’s for anyone with an interest in Northern Ireland and/or in cultural formation and expression.
It aims to show that
Ulster Protestants have historically and continually demonstrated a vigorous creative pulse as well as a tendency towards class politics.
It seeks to re-establish a forgotten history and to engage with contemporary debates, with fascinating chapters on specific writers, illustrating the tensions, the divisions and the legacies of Ulster Protestant cultural manifestations, particularly in drama and literature.
There is a ‘two tribes’ approach running through the piece, leaving, as happens in such cases, the ‘colonial master’ largely off the hook. A colonial impress is widespread, deep and often strident in Northern Ireland. The passing of time barely dilutes it. Historical anniversaries and cultural manifestations that celebrate them serve to re-ignite the actuality of the impress and make it live in today’s society. In so far as cultural practices make expressions of identity more complex, they may contribute to peaceful intra- and inter-tribe developments. There is a role for the artist in offering complexity, sometimes through dissent, sometimes through bridge-building, though this is a difficult position for the artist to embrace within a society riven by settled colonial divisions.
Dramatist Sam Thompson is quoted in Chapter 3.
A writer is not accepted as part of the community. If you are a writer and you speak your mind, you’re a danger here.
The bedevilling phrase here is the community.
Schools in Northern Ireland (NI) follow a UK/NI national curriculum. History and culture largely happen elsewhere, mainly in England - monarchs, The Battle of Hastings, WW1, BBC/ITV/C4/Sky. Individual schools do their best to give children information on and exposure to local history and culture. Here again a ‘two tribes’ sensibility often applies, though inter-school projects and programmes occur.
Parents are implicitly pressurised to get their children into the grammar school sector, despite the best efforts of many schools in the secondary and integrated sectors to ‘prove’ they can compete for academic honours. A class schism is introduced to the school population at age 11. In the context of massive de-industrialisation, allied to the slow crawl to a data-based economy, this is chilling.
Both ‘tribes’ are badly served by an educational system that values elsewhere (‘the mainland’) over the home place. What impact this has on the possibilities of stories emerging from those ‘tribes’ is a matter for educationalists to consider, noting that schooling isn’t the only route into literature and art. But it is a good one.
The striking voices of Andy Tyrie and Glen Barr appear across the book. They straddle loyalist militancy and unionist politics. Their dissenting positions echo a strand of Labour activism that was well dampened down in late 20th century politics with the decline of the Northern Ireland Labour Party. The Social Democratic and Labour Party attempts to keep both red and green flags flying. It is not attractive to unionists and loyalists. How Trades Councils, and trades unionism generally, might re-invent the myths spancilling the macro-politics of the day is something of a ‘two-tribes’ conundrum at present.
Writers Danny Morrison and Ronan Bennett, both Irish republicans, come across as bête noirs. Parr labels a 1984 article by Bennett in The Guardian (London) as ‘infamous’. Though it is outside the remit of Parr’s book, note should be taken of Bennett’s anti-colonialist novel The Catastrophist (Simon and Schuster, 2001). Keener gazes through a post-colonialist lens might mitigate against the narrowness of a ‘two tribes’ view.
The question is begged: how much do contingency and context form the writer? Could Danny Morrison be any other sort of writer? Could Gary Mitchell, writer of successful plays largely set in the loyalist Rathcoole Estate, where he lived before being intimidated out by local paramilitaries, be any other than the writer he is?
He is quoted in Chapter 6.
If I was a Muslim writer whose work upset my community so much that some members were threatening to kill me I’d be a cause célèbre.… But because this is Northern Ireland what’s happening to my family isn’t part of the peace process narrative.
And if his work excites such vehemence from unionist militants, who, perhaps, have never considered themselves part of this narrative, and validation from the Irish National Theatre (The Abbey), is it because these two reactions are echoes of one another?
It is a commonplace of general usage in a post-colonial setting, where religion, politics, culture and national identity remain contested, to coalesce and conflate the terms Protestant with Unionist and Catholic with Nationalist/Republican. Parr is not alone in this usage and practice. It is unsatisfactory, nonetheless.
The term ‘Protestant imagination’ is fascinating. Can any and all religious adjectives be put in front of the word ‘imagination’? And what do such schismatic descriptions mean for human communality, when all those religious imaginings are ‘right’ - and contesting – in the eyes of their Gods?
Multiplicities of cultural expression are covered, emanating from the ‘Protestant imagination’. The famous verbal selfie coined and voiced throughout his life by poet and self-described utopian socialist, John Hewitt, is included in Chapter 3.
I belong to the north of Ireland and all the complexities of its occupation. I was born before partition when Ireland was a complete unit, so I’m an Irishman in that way. But I was born in the British Isles and I speak English and I know no other tongue, so I’m British. And because we’re an archipelago to the west of Europe, I’m European. So that’s my hierarchy. I’m an Ulsterman, an Irishman, British and a European.
What John Hewitt would make of Brexit would be worth knowing.
Chapter 7 is entitled Loyal Women?.The doubt is not as bad as the Field Day’s near-omission of women from its anthology. Chapter 7 of Parr’s book features dramatists Christina Reid and Marie Jones. One of Reid’s characters opens the chapter, with a line from The Belle of Belfast City
There are no women in Ireland. Only mothers and sisters.
The gender-role note and the geo-political note are both striking. Parr suggests that if Reid’s work is influenced by Sean O’Casey, then Marie Jones’ is influenced by Arthur Miler. Jones is concerned with
the survival of the ordinary individual against the odds.
Jones’ and others’ work with Charabanc Theatre Company is well covered by Parr. He describes its origins in the difficulty women experienced in getting work in established theatres. The theatre scene in Belfast suffered from an inferiority complex, aptly named, in Maurice Leitch’s telling phrase, as ‘colonial cringe’. Charabanc’s Lay up your Ends brought a fresh approach to theatre in Northern Ireland, infusing it with local stories told with engaging style, that offered resistance to that cringe.
Christina Reid’s work and her self-description often wrestled with the national identity challenges faced by an artist in Northern Ireland. She said she would always call herself an Irish writer
from this Protestant background of being proud to be Irish, but more English than the English all at the same time.
She often wrote about a strong grandfather figure, an echo perhaps of her own grandfather, who was a proud Orangeman. When she asked him questions about iconic moments in Ulster Protestant cultural history, such as The Battle of the Somme, seen perhaps as horrific slaughter rather than stirring victory, he replied
Your problem is you don’t know what you are.
Orange Culture asserts itself as a secure location of identity, but it is not the only manifestation of Protestant Culture. It is, nonetheless, the dominant one, as experienced, albeit differently, by people who live in different parts of Northern Ireland and who could be said to come from ‘two tribes’. The Maoist line about power coming from the barrel of a gun applies. Boots on the ground and the threat therein are very forceful, both for the in-group and the out-group of the ‘tribes’ concerned.
Currently, a form of Pax-Brexitannia pertains in Northern Ireland. Post-conflict gangsterism and corruption by militants and politicians feature. Indolence, hubris, neglect and incompetence feature in the consuls sent to the province from London.
Will writers emerge in the coming years who will cultivate and elaborate their desires, instincts and volitions into purposeful actions – plays, poems, novels, songs and films – that lean us all into new imaginings?
Connal Parr’s book can make the reader feel and think. Who could ask for more?
Inventing the Myth ; Connal Parr; Oxford University Press; Oxford, 2017
The Collected Poems of John Hewitt; ed. Frank Ormsby; The Blackstaff Press; Belfast, 1991
The Catastrophist; Ronan Bennett; Simon and Schuster; London, 2001
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