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Ireland: Island of Diversity

By Kelly Candaele

September/October 1995

September 3, 1995 by Leave a Comment

Seamus Heaney. Photo: Kit Defever.

The American Conference for Irish Studies held in Queen’s University, Belfast, at the end of June, covered a range of topics including religion, identity, and the role of women in today’s society.

In 1972, Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote from Belfast, where he was a lecturer at Queen’s University, that poetry had to make its way in a “world that is public and brutal.” In the midst of the violence and uncertainty of the Northern Irish “Troubles,” Heaney observed that the lights that lit up the Long Kesh prison camp were the brightest spot in Ulster. 

Heaney returned to Belfast the week of June 25 to speak at the annual convention of the American Conference for Irish Studies and the Canadian Association for Irish Studies. Heaney again spoke of light, but not the ominous glow that bathed the inmates of Long Kesh in its pervasive light. He spoke of a “bright embryo” of peace, a “brightness that had been admitted into a dark place.” 

Over six hundred literary scholars, historians, film critics and dramatists listened as Heaney spoke of the redemptive power of language and poetry — the unpredictable creative act that turns an original excitement “into a process of sustained and resourceful composition,” his artistic metaphor for the difficult and nuanced process of political peace building. 

The title of the conference was “Ireland, Island of Diversity,” a benign thematic attempt to soften the realities of division and conflict èèembed 

The program cover itself pictured a bucolic Queen’s University framed by a clear blue sky, serene wispy clouds hovering above the protected and isolated walls of the academy. Someone who had never been to Belfast would have no idea that Queen’s was in the middle of a sprawling city, the Falls and Shankill roads a couple miles away. 

If diversity was the programmatic form, the realities of Irish cultural and political division were the analytical content. In this academic levee en masse, over 300 papers were presented, ranging from “The Irish in Latin America” to the “Literary Fenianism of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist.” 

The conference was not just an Irish, American and Canadian affair. Maria Vazquez and Maria Julianello came from Buenos Aires to talk about the dominant role that the Irish played in the development and growth of Argentina. Their presentation, “Tango Shamrock,” pointed out that there are currently between 350,000 and 500,000 Argentines of Irish descent, the largest settlement of Irish emigrants in any non-English-speaking nation. 

Most of the Irish settlers arrived in the 19th century, quickly adapting to the wild and open landscape of Argentina’s plains. The Irish thrived, eventually owning some of the largest cattle farms while teaching the locals how to breed sheep, now a central part of Argentina’s economy. Other papers reflected the complex and variegated nature of the Irish literary, cultural and political experience, and the ideological currents that dominate intellectual discourse in the university.

Eavan Boland, Irish poet and writer. Photo via the Columbia Journal

All literary, film, and artistic representations are the product of a complex interaction between the artist, the writer, the historian and the culture, politics, and ideological climate of the society that surrounds them. A number of panelists pointed out that the power to represent or reflect a society is a privilege that most people do not have access to. Who is let into that sacred domain is a source of constant social struggle. 

One of the strongest movements in Irish studies in recent years has been the rise of feminism and gender studies as a central thrust of critical and scholarly work. 

Predictably, the emergence of women’s themes in the field has not been without controversy. Historian Desmond Fennell wrote in a an Irish journal prior to the conference that a “feminist slant” had been imported into Ireland and Irish studies from America and that these “ideologically defined women’s issues” threatened to leave academics out of touch with the realities of women in Ireland today. 

But historian Margaret Ward (author of a biography of Maud Gonne) who attended the Belfast conference, pointed out that “women in many ways were the backbone of Ireland’s political struggles.” Historians have generally focussed on a few well-know names, Gonne, Constance Markievicz, Eva Gore-Booth, but often to dismiss them as dilettantes or appendages to more famous men. Yeats’ relationship to Maud Gonne is only one example. 

This emphasis on a few exceptional women, mostly Anglo-Irish, ignores the much broader group of native Irish women who galvanized the nationalist struggle and also offered a radical critique of patriarchal nationalists and the new conservative state. Ward pointed out that broadly defined feminist impulses did not have to be “imported” into Ireland, they have existed there for a long time, submerged in a male-oriented historiography. “What is considered history,” Ward said, “is constantly changing.” 

There were at least four papers delivered that dealt with the poetry and person of Eavan Boland, one of the most articulate women artists who has described the dialectical interaction with history and contemporary life that has kept Irish women poets from speaking in their own voice. 

Carol Tattersoll, of King’s College, University of Ontario, pointed out that the idea of Irish womanhood was created by the Irish male poet; dark Rosaleen, a strong, silent and long suffering ideal of romanticized nationalism. Boland has written in her autobiography, Object Lessons, about the disruptive but momentous process by which women have moved from being “the objects of Irish poems, to the authors of them.” The tradition of women as national muse, a decorative ornament, “the mute object of his [male poet’s] eloquence” is, for Boland, a corruption of history and a narrowing of the sources of myth and ritual that gives rise to artistic and political expression. 

By bringing her own life into her poetry, Boland has joined the public history of Ireland with a “private and solitary perspectives” that has been èèom The dial of a washing machine, the expression of a child’s face — these things were at eye level as I bent down to them during the day.” These local sources of ritual, the “hand to mouth yarns,” of women’s sexuality and history are expanding the very idea of the Irish nation. 

The prevalence of studies that deal with women in the Irish art, history and politics is, in one sense, a sign of intellectual and artistic maturation, the idea that “just doing it” moved this issue beyond polemics about exclusion. 

But a number of panelists pointed out that those artistic representations remain a contested terrain. 

The presentations on Irish cinema were lively and well-attended, a testimony to the growth and popularity of Irish film in general and to the power of film to shape popular culture and to influence political understanding. 

Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game and Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father both attracted analytical scrutiny. Brian McIlroy, from the University of British Columbia, argued that both films engage the question of changing identities, The Crying Game asking us to reconsider our sexual and gender relationships, and In the Name of the Father suggesting that a new nationalist identity needs to be created that transcends the monochrome of the Irish Republican Army and the clutches of British colonialism. 

But in a trenchant criticism of The Crying Game, University of Indiana graduate student Sheila McDermott took Jordan to task for his filmic revisionism, de-politicizing the female member of the IRA by turning her into a caricature — a sexually charged and bloodthirsty femme fatale who was void of political analysis or social commitment. 

It is in the power of film where representation can come off its leash, divorced from the sources of its own inspiration in service to a dramatic structure that entertains but often distorts. More than one historian suggested that films may be the worst way to learn history. 

Trinity University lecturer Terrance Brown wrote in his social and cultural history of Ireland that there was a long stretch of time where, particularly in the Republic of Ireland, people thought the Northern troubles could be “isolated by a kind of mental quarantine.” That attitude has dramatically changed. Northern poets, playwrights and historians of Ulster were featured prominently throughout the week. There was also a panel on the prospects for ongoing peace where Jennifer Todd of University College Dublin pointed promisingly to the emergence of a reborn thirtytwo county nationalism in the South that is more liberal, gradual and conciliatory and will have an increasing importance in Southern politics. 

The fluid nature of Irish identity represented in all forms of art is the cultural product of a society in the midst of profound social, economic and political change. No longer is there a “distinctive national mode” that severely restricts the themes of Irish writers and artists. Poet Thomas Kinsella wrote years ago that Ireland needed to “be rid, at last, of any longing for cultural unity, in a country whose most precious contribution may be precisely its insight into the anguish of dis-unity.” 

In a departure from this focus on change, University of London historian Marianne Elliott was careful to balance the cautious optimism of many of the speakers with a colder analysis of the fixed attitudes surrounding religion and identity in the North that restrict understanding and empathy.

In her plenary talk, Elliott pointed out that fifty percent of the people in Northern Ireland live in areas that are either ninety percent Catholic or Protestant. The geographic segregation reinforces an ideological rigidity on both sides, according to Elliott: Protestants feeling that Catholic nationalists have hijacked the idea of Irishness, and regarding unity as a threat to their core religious values; and Catholics caught up in a 19th century race-based nationalism perpetuating a “victim psychology” that keeps Catholics from acting and feeling like equals. 

The plenary sessions were in many ways the highlight of the conference, allowing some of Ireland’s academic and artistic superstars to provide an analytical depth and reach that was often missing in the shorter panels where several papers were delivered. The only exception to the general excellence of the plenary speakers was Conor Cruise O’Brien. He gave a rambling the relationship between Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson. His complete avoidance of contemporary politics in the North was perhaps an indication that he realizes history has passed him by, his only alternative being to revisit the tired debate about whether Burke or his opponents were right about the French Revolution. 

One surprising absence was any discussion of Irish historical “revisionism,” given the virtual cottage industry that has developed out of the polemics of historical interpretation. Kevin Whelan, historian at the Irish Academy, suggested that the cease-fire may help move the study of history into a “post-revisionist” phase, an approach that engages the evasions of previous historiography but also moves to a point where history is removed from politics. Irish history, Whelan argued, “may actually become history for the first time.” 

In an indication of historical debates to come with the approach of the 200-year anniversary of the 1798 uprising, Whelan provided a fascinating history of how disparate political forces immediately tried to control the meaning of the 1798 rebellion by writing a past that served the political needs of the time. 

Whelan argued forcefully that reliance by previous historians on these deeply problematic texts created a misleading analysis of the meaning and context of 1798. 

Thomas Pakenham’s popular history of the period, The Year of Liberty, “de-politicized” the rebels, according to Whelan, creating a picture of “primitive,” “aimless” and “unsophisticated” peasant mobs, motivated by sectarianism and local grievances. Whelan insists on approaching ’98 on its own terms, bringing new historical methods and research to the decade of the 1790s which he believes was much more political, sophisticated and coordinated then previously thought. 

Most literary conferences are often about “representation,” rather than “reality,” about the text rather than the surrounding context. But in Belfast, the new political reality came rushing in, coloring the proceedings in a special atmosphere. It came in with Heaney’s call for a “genuine pluralism” and a diverse “language of symbols” that each community can use to mediate the distance between society and the individual. It came in Elliott’s desire for even small movements beyond ethnic supremacism and binary definitions of cultural and religious identity. And reality came rushing in when just one day after the conference ended, John Major released from prison a British soldier who had been convicted of murdering a young Catholic girl, a blatantly political move that sent Belfast into two days of riotous outrage. 

Irish studies is clearly in a robust and expansive phase. James MacKillop, president elect of the ACIS, suggested at the conference that there is nothing comparable for other ethnic groups in the United States. Irish literature has joined British and American literature as a third dominant tradition in our universities. 

If scholars of Irish studies are increasing our understanding of Irish culture, art and history in all of its richness and complexity, the events in Belfast during the week of July 25 reinforced the necessity for that understanding to extend beyond the Irish Sea.

 

 

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the September/October 1995 issue of Irish America. ♦

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