PROBLEMS OF LEGACY ARE PROBLEMS OF NOW

Radio talk shows are full of speakers who default to the intractability of ‘Problems of Legacy’, when discussing social and political difficulties that bedevil citizens in Northern Ireland today. 

The war between state forces, their allies and anti-state paramilitaries left great wounds. Grieving families, mutilated bodies, devastated infrastructure and social schisms in the aftermath of grim violence perpetrated by a range of combatants did not lead to formal resolution of the underlying causes. They produced a cessation of violence and a precarious peace process that was very welcome, but inherently fragile, despite agreements in 1998 and 2006.

One key source of conflict was the manner in which the state enacted policing on its citizens. Policing is the iron fist of state power delivered at citizen level. It presumes the consent of the citizenry, a challenging presumption all over the world.

In Northern Ireland intense debate produced proposals to create a service from the existing force, in 2001. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was stood down and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) was formed. It has new powers, badges, protocols and a whole new recruitment process known as 50-50, a form of positive action seen in different jurisdictions. It sought to draw people from the Nationalist/Irish/Roman Catholic elements of the community in the face of the preponderance of members from Unionist/British/Protestant members of the community.

This was an understandable, but crude and contested response to the need for change. As society changes, it has proven inept in tilting the recruitment balance to an even keel. 50-50 was dropped in 2011. Calls for its return are made at present, because recruitment into the PSNI remains stubbornly below the desired figures. 

Various reasons for the recruitment problem are cited by politicians and others on the radio talk shows. They are invariably bundled as ‘Problems of Legacy’, notably the threat from anti-state para-militaries, which, though reduced, is still very real. 

These ‘Problems of Legacy’ are de facto intractable. When the term is used, no speaker names or lists them. No definitions are rolled out. Chambers Dictionary says that a legacy can be money or property received from someone who has died. Or, more relevantly, legacy can be situations that developed as a result of past actions and decisions. Such problems are presented as beyond the realm of the human. It is as if they are ‘outside of time’. And yet they are as current as the weather.

With regard to policing and its recruitment difficulties, no one mentions that the PSNI is an organisation trammelled with failure. It failed to protect the private details of its staff at least twice in August 2003, publishing them on an external website and losing them in a laptop left in a car. leading to a threat to life, followed by a compensation bill that cannot be met within current budgets. Officers were put under investigation for sharing inappropriate images of incarcerated people. Officers are cited for misogyny. A disturbing case of a once-serving PSNI officer being investigated for multiple incidents of sexual crimes, including rape, has just been made public.

Radio reports of a recent inquest into the disappearance and death of a boy include details of officers not following up on calls, not keeping hand-written notes and not reacting readily enough to developments and threats.

These are not ‘Problems of Legacy’. They are not historical. They are current.

Terming them thus allows them to be dodged. It allows senior officials and the political board of governance to raise their arms in the air in an appeal for understanding, while being ineffectual. Educated young women and men, regardless of social and political background, are understandably wary of committing to a hapless organisation that struggles to deliver on its basic aims. And that is currently a compromised bedfellow of the spooks. Vincent Kearney, Trevor McBirney and Barry McCaffrey are just three journalists enduring court processes for intrusions into their personal information. 

When flags of violent British/Unionist/Protestant proscribed organisations were hoisted on lamp-posts beside the police training college, the PSNI were unable to remove them, though a public outcry demanded it. They fluttered to flitters, leaving the organisation looking impotent. 

More flaggery accompanies the release of new public and private housing blocks, with the purpose of intimidating prospective buyers by crude sectarian territorial marking. Again the PSNI is inept, then engages in hand-wringing when families are bricked and petrol bombed. 

While individual officers performed well in dangerous circumstances, people facing racist attacks across towns and villages last summer were not served and protected as well as they should be. The burning of a replica boat of immigrants at a 12^th July event in Moygashel, without any police intervention amidst political bleating about legislation, would not encourage publicly-minded young women and men to join the service.

These are not ‘Problems of Legacy’. They are ‘Problems of Now’, in an organisation living by Brendan Behan’s observation that he knew of no situation that could not be made worse by the arrival of the police. 

These problems and others are easier to blog and comment about rather than to solve.

Long, over-running public inquiries? Check out Muckamore Hospital. The worst polluted lake in the land? Check out Lough Neagh. Connect that with the ‘cash for ash’ farrago. Or the singular over-production of chicken fillets and the mis-management of effluent by a legally immune water authority.

Many people are genuinely attempting to respond practically to these and other problems, at street level, by surmounting the barricade of ‘Problems of Legacy’ in order to act now. This is the single biggest challenge facing peace-building today. It challenges the peace-building desire for ‘moving on’, which cannot be achieved without attention to social and economic justice and the emotional impact of conflict and injustice. Now.

There is a role for artistic and imaginative work in this.

And now history and time have stopped, as if they were cogs in a great engine turning the century and I stuck my little finger in there. So they’re stopped. And I’m waiting.

Opportunities to create and implement programmes of works of non-violent social change in the direction of peace and justice can be taken. Public and philanthropic financial support for this work presents its own difficulties of co-option, distortion and power. How can state funds be used when the state is itself a continuing protagonist? And when terms like ‘change’, ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ are contested and unsettling to people?

Perhaps they provide a place to start, when working with adults. Working with children is worthy, but the challenges are present now, not in the future and lying under ‘Problems of Legacy’ or yearning for the future take from actions necessary in the present world.

Word games, writing activities, action games, movement and spatial treatments are among a range of imaginative activities and programmes with adults that can help to build peace. 

Three words – change, peace, justice. Press PLAY.

Other arts practices can also be called upon also.

This helps to ensure the availability of non-violent tools for resolving our conflicts, and will be a significant part of the process of making our society more integrated and more just.

Good luck to us all.

Waiting… by Dave Duggan, Sole Purpose Productions, 2000

Published in Plays in a Peace Process, Guildhall Press, 2008

Arts Approaches to the Conflict in Northern Ireland by Dave Duggan

Published in Arts Approaches to Conflict, ed. Marian Liebmann, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London 1996

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

© Dave Duggan

WATCHING HAMNET

There are now three exceptional pieces of dramatic and literary art centring on the father-son relationships in the life and work of English dramatist William Shakepeare.

Historians of England anchor epochs in the country’s history to the names of monarchs. Shakespeare worked as an actor and dramatist in London, entertaining the court of Elizabeth 1. His most widely known tragedy, and perhaps the most famous play in English, is Hamlet (1602), a revenge drama notable for the high body count in the final scene, comparable to the ultra-kill last scene of L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997).

The play’s the thing that excites a novel and a film into existence.

A novel focusses on the earth-mother character of Agnes, who marries Shakespeare and with whom she has children, including a son called Hamnet (novel, Maggie O’ Farrell, Tinder Press, 2020). This boy is the character that O’Farrell uses to drive the plot towards a final sequence where the ‘play within the novel’ device is used to tantalise the reader with an earnest of opposition to death.

A film Hamnet (Chloe Zhao, 2025) takes the novel and creates a visual and aural wonder, on a semi-dark palette of autumn and forest colours, with intimate speech sounds, whisperings and murmurings, birthing roars and screeches, in forest and bedroom, and the whistling calls of falcons, as they hunt. 

The boy walks into darkness at the end. The mother laughs. 

Tragedy is defeated, in the only way it can be. By laughing, full-throated, in its heartless face.

Shakespeare worked in a time of torrid upheaval, in a country where adventurers and war-makers plundered great wealth and brought it to the Court and the city in London. Much like America today. Hollywood now, London then: that’s where money accumulated and circulated.

Shakespeare yearned to be among it.

Frustrated by his brutal father and his fruitful marriage, he did what many men have done since, right up to today: he protested the importance of his work and abandoned home for London, with the line, present in both the novel and the film, 

my company needs me.

These were occluded times. Agnes will not take her children to London, for fear of pestilence. But it finds her and the young ones. She says of Shakespeare that he has more in his head than any man she knows. Agnes is a sorcerer of herbs from garden and forest for conjuring medicines, with much in her head and in her heart. 

Riches flow from the contents of Shakespeare’s head, conjured into dramas that delight the Court and the public so much that he can buy a big house and land in Stratford, but cannot move back there. 

There is tragedy enough in this, but death, the ultimate tragedy, stalks them. It kills the boy at home and forces a formidable play from his father. Shakespeare writes and produces Hamlet, wherein the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, he told Agnes earlier, is overturned, when the boy does looks back to his mother, who smiles and lets him go.

In Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, Chloe Zhao directs two physically strong and charismatic young Irish actors in exhilarating roles. They are present and convincing. Buckley has received both the Critics’ Choice and Golden Globes awards. Oscar nominations are likely. Supporting actors are strong, especially Emily Watson, re-united with Mescal after their stirring work together in God’s Creatures.

A play within a play; a play within a novel; a play and a novel within a film.

A child within a womb; a child within a grave.

We may not cheat death, but we may salve life and its pains. By art.

Hamlet, play: recommended

Hamnet, novel: recommended.

Hamnet, film: recommended.

See also READING HAMNET (2022)

https://breathingwithalimp.blogspot.com/2022/10/reading-hamnet-thats-n-not-l.html

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

END OF 2025 REPORTS ON HMOs FROM A NEIGHBOURLY ASSESSOR ARE IN

                            

A series of ‘end of year assessments’ on progress with HMOs in the neighbourhood of University of Ulster Magee campus (UU Magee) are now available. Summaries follow.

•⁠  ⁠Residents, as members of CRAM (Concerned Residents Around Magee) and individually, received a positive assessment for their diligence in responding to the glut of HMOs. Without their hard work, the drift to Holyland 2 in Derry would have accelerated even more in 2025. Further diligence is required in 2026 to avoid a relapse. ‘Keep up the good work’ is advised.

•⁠  ⁠Councillors and MLAS, notably those who were active on the Planning Committee and elsewhere, made a late surge in December that improved their assessment. This follows the successful delivery of the new Local Development Plan. Formal adoption of the 10% cap in the UU Magee neighbourhood must be an early target for 2026 in order to deliver on this late promise.

•⁠  ⁠Council officials and Planners are praised for effort, while remaining vulnerable to ruses such as CLEUD (Certificate of Lawful Existing Use or Development) and the regulations of PAC (Planning Appeals Commission). Two public meetings by planning officers were useful. Planners insistence on balance is welcomed, though balance remains some way off. All parties are not operating on a level playing field. Assisting councillors with their commitment to a 10% cap will strengthen future assessments.

•⁠  ⁠University of Ulster (UU) is marked ‘must do better’. Their current laissez-fair approach to accommodating students negates their duty of care to them and to their neighbours. Reliance on the Task Force’s Report re: the private sector left UU short, though recent moves at the Desmond’s Strand Road site gives its assessment a late boost. Securing money for a Sports’ facility and teaching facilities highlights the neglect of living accommodation. UU’s neglect of the parking congestion caused by staff and students remains a problem. ‘Must do better’ is the overall assessement.

•⁠  ⁠A number of developers, landlords and their agents failed, not helped by absenteeism and the blatant disregard of local needs by advertising the use of CLEUD (a form of ‘get out of jail free’ card). Planning Purpose Built Student Accommodations (PBSA) without considering car-parking further exacerbates congestion. They need a total re-orientation in the direction of balance, as noted by Planners above, to achieve a better assessment. A re-sit may be on the cards.

•⁠  ⁠Department for Infrastructure (DfI) responded to MLAs and residents’ concerns, but the congestion caused by University expansion led to a lower assessment. Traffic wardens are welcome, though their presence is intermittent, leading to a sense of ‘an accident waiting to happen’. Pressure on services such as fire and rescue, ambulance, buses and refuse collection leaves the end of year assessment for DfI as ‘less than satisfactory’.

A mixed bag in general, with hope for optimism resting with Councillors commitment to a 10% cap on HMOs in the UU Magee neighbourhood, coupled with a focus on balance by Planners and some recent evidence that Purpose Built Student Accommodation may be on the horizon.

© Dave Duggan 2025

The Neighbourly Assessor is Dave Duggan, a writer who lives around the corner from UU Magee.