Reference material 3: BLACKTHORN & BONSAI by Michael Longley

or, A Little Brief Authority

man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority

July 1992

(Note: during exchanges of letters as to whether or not he could come to the 5th Seminar, Michael Longley was kind enough to send this article and thereby made his presence felt).

______________________________________________________________

I am a founder member of the Cultural Traditions Group which came together nearly four years ago with the aim of encouraging acceptance and understanding of cultural diversity in Northern Ireland. We went public the following year by holding a conference called Varieties of Irishness. The distinguished Irish historian Roy Foster gave the keynote lecture at the end of which he referred to a poetry reading tour undertaken by John Hewitt and John Montague away back in November 1970. Foster talked of Hewitt "...who articulated that quintessential combination of Protestant scepticism and commitment, linked with a sense of place that was absolutely Irish." He went on to say that "Hewitt's poetry tour with John Montague in 1970, The Planter and the Gael, was a landmark affirmation of creative cultural diversity. " The Planter and the Gael was the first event which I organised for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In the booklet which accompanied the tour I wrote: "In the selection of his poems each poet explores his experience of Ulster, the background in which he grew up and the tradition which has shaped his work...The two bodies of work complement each other and provide illuminating insight into the cultural complexities of the Province."

In this talk I shall tell the story of my twenty-one years as an arts administrator and bureaucrat - from 1970 and The Planter and the Gael to the late eighties / early nineties and my involvement with the Cultural Traditions movement - two decades in which momentous and often terrible things have happened in Ulster, in Ireland. As I picked my way through the mine-field, I operated intuitively rather than intellectually. So I shall be talking about what happened. Events brought my beliefs to the surface, and confirmed or changed my ideas.

It was often a struggle to secure modest budgets for disciplines which were not represented by powerful lobbies, a struggle against vested interests. The "blackthorn" of my title represents indigenous talent (the writers and traditional musicians who - along with some painters - are the main reason why we enjoy a cultural reputation abroad. They are also of course sources of energy at home.) The "bonsai" stands for money-devouring activities such as orchestral music and opera which in their Irish manifestations make comparatively little impact on the world stage. The analogy crumbles a bit when we realise that the Japanese, unlike our own cultural panjandrums, intend their little trees to remain little. I was never opposed to orchestral music or opera. How could anyone be? My criticisms were directed at the quality of decision-making. I argued for a sense of proportion and fair play.

At a joint meeting of the two Irish Arts Councils at the Ulster Folk Museum in 1983 I imagined the ghosts of present administrators being interrogated by their great-great-grandchildren: "Well, thank you for buttressing the reputations of Mozart and Beethoven, but what did you do to promote the great singing of Eddie Butcher and Sarah Makem, the virtuoso fiddling of Johnny Doherty? In the 1980s there was an important dramatic movement in Belfast that produced many interesting urban working-class plays. What did you do to make it possible for those talents to work in and illuminate the back streets from which they emerged?"

I went on to suggest that the imbalance between support for the performing arts and support for the creators pointed to other imbalances. In the sphere of arts administration there was a danger of administration outweighing the arts. For instance, every year the Council organises a Regional Conference for local arts committee members and town councillors. Why, I asked, should there not take place every five years or so a conference for artists? There was also a class imbalance. In relation to the size of its middle class Belfast has the largest working class in Europe. The price alone of many Council events puts them out of reach. The people ideally suited to bring the arts to what we termed "deprived areas" where the local artists. These ideas suggested a third imbalance - that between "mail-order culture" and the nurturing of indigenous talent. There were, for example, financial reasons why the Grand Opera House in Belfast should import tinsel; but it seemed short-sighted to import so much tinsel when we were sitting on a goldmine which was still relatively under-exploited. Ulster no longer merited the playwright Sam Thompson's dismissal - "a cultural Siberia". Because the creative imaginations could now get by there, the province had become less provincial. Releasing original talents into the community should be the Council's profoundest involvement.

Over the years I kept asking two simple questions. How much of our programme will posterity thank us for? How much of what we are doing differentiates us from Bolton or Woeverhampton? In short, "where there is no vision, the people perish." I was pleased to find a spiritual ally in the great geographer Estyn Evans who had written in Ulster: The Common Ground: "Certain cultural traits persist and can be related in one way or another to a pastoral heritage." He went on to suggest that "in the arts for instance, the natural thing for the Irish is not the communal effort of expensive orchestral music but the lone fiddler."

My job was often fulfilling, and sometimes funny. The Planter and Gael poetry-reading tour provided me with a lasting image. My old friend and colleague the late Paul Clarke was then the Council's Promotions Officer. At the last moment he decided on some nifty presentational improvements - among them throne-like seats for our two bards. The varnish had not dried out in time for the opening night, so that when the always dignified John Hewitt rose to recite his first poem, there was a loud ripping noise. In the Arts Council I occasionally sensed a similar backwards tug as I prepared to rise.

There are five Arts Councils on the archipelago: one in Belfast, one in Dublin; and, across the water, the Scottish and Welsh Arts Councils which are funded by the fifth and largest body, the Arts Council of Great Britain. This began its days after the last war as a morale-booster with the unbalanced title of Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA). A Northern Irish model followed several years later. It was beginning to make up for lost time, when the eruption of civic violence in the late sixties and early seventies caused what Kenneth Jamison, the Council's Director for twenty-five years, has rather euphemistically called "a protracted spasm of social paralysis". From this paralysis there are - as audience statistics demonstrate - remissions. The Council is funded by the Northern Ireland Office through the Department of Education, and the sum allocated to it this year is in the region of £ 6,000,000. Its objects are to improve the practice and appreciation of the arts and to increase their accessibility to the people of Northern Ireland.

I joined the Council in 1970 as a temporary Exhibitions Officer. (I had been reviewing local art exhibitions for the Irish Times.) A few years before my arrival the Board had decreed that because it was practised by amateurs literature did not come within its remit (so much for part-time scribblers like T.S. Eliot, bank clerk and publisher, and for those in insurance or medicine like Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams!). In my first year, as well as hanging pictures and lecturing about them, I edited Causeway, a comprehensive survey of the arts in Ulster, and an anthology of poetry written by children called Under the Moon, Over the Stars; and I initiated the programme for literature with a budget of £3000. Those earliest grants included £143 for the Honest Ulsterman magazine: £50 each for poetry pamphlets by Frank Ormsby and Cianran Carson; £150 for Soundings, a magazine edited by Seamus Heaney; £1000 for the Blackstaff Press and six titles by, among others, Sam Hanna Bell, James Simmons and Stewart Parker; and £800 for the Dublin publishing house of Gill and Macmillan to bring out pioneering critical studies by two academics from Northern Ireland who were already registering the new creative buzz: Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction by John Wilson Foster and Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster by Terence Brown.

Despite my ignorance, I initiated in 1972/73, with a small but not ineffectual budget, a programme for what we eventually christened the traditional arts. One of the first people I contacted was Estyn Evans. I invited him to select the images and prepare a commentary for a book of R.J. Welch's photographs of Ireland and Irish life at the end of the last century. Published some time later by Blackstaff Press, Ireland's Eye heralded the revival of interest in our pioneer photographers as readily assimilable interpreters of our common past. In his introduction Evans writes about the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club of which Welch was a leading member: "The Field Club was non-sectarian, and it seems to have attracted men of goodwill who deplored the political and sectarian fragmentation that disfigured the face of Belfast."

In 1972 John Hewitt retired from his job as Director of the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, and returned after a fifteen year exile to Belfast and his remarkably productive indian summer. In his introduction to Ireland's Eye Estyn Evans speculates: "It would be interesting to trace the relationship between the field club movement and another phenomenon which was more directly a cultural by-product of the textile industry in Ulster. Throughout the province, as John Hewitt has shown in his book Rhyming Weavers, the weaving areas produced many poets, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, some of them showing considerable talent." Like a kestrel hovering above a tiny field, Evans wonders about "the links between the work involved in handling different kinds of natural fibres and regional patterns of cultural expression."

The mutual awareness of Evans and Hewitt dated from the 1940s when the philosophy of regionalism has been vigorously debated. They inspired my thinking, and gave me a sense of continuity. Thanks to them, the programmes for literature and the traditional arts began to overlap and provide shelter for modest but timely explorations. Hewitt had already written my script: "Out of that loyalty to our own place, rooted in honest history, in familiar folk-ways and knowledge, phrased in our own dialect, there should emerge a culture and an attitude individual and distinctive, a fine contribution to the European inheritance and no mere echo of the thought and imagination of another land."

The first traditional arts committee included real experts like Sean O Baoill the collector of songs; the singer David Hammond; Brendan Adams from the Folk Museum who poured over dialect maps during meetings; Maurice Hayes who much later was to become our Ombudsman and the Chairman of the Cultural Traditions Group. On the literature committee John Hewitt spoke infrequently but always with such weight few would contradict him! My education was proceeding apace.

Hierarchies are obsessed with titles. For my last nine years I was designated the Combined Arts Director. Although I oversaw Traditional Arts, Young Arts and Community Arts, colleagues now ran these programmes, and my own specially remained Literature. The central plan of this programme is of course publication, the printed word. Much of any arts organisation's activity resembles a tidal wave which leaves behind little or not residue. One of the pleasures of a literary post is the accumulation over the years of desirable objects with an indefinite shelf-life. The objectives define themselves: to provide publishing outlets for local authors; to facilitate the continuing existence of local publishing houses; to make available to the local community and to readers elsewhere the best of contemporary Ulster writing; to keep in print distinguished literature from the recent past; and to represent our generation to itself, the world at large, and to posterity.

Magazines and journals which publish Irish writers and reflect the cultural life of the Province (and island) are also helped along financially. The idea is to provide an outlet for young, up-and-coming authors as well as established talents; to keep the bibliographical tally up to date; and to encourage good criticism and a lively critical climate. T.S. Eliot remarked that the cultural health of a community could be judged by the liveliness or otherwise of its magazine tradition. I find some reassurance in the continuing vigour of established magazines and the emergence of new ones. An old warhorse like the Honest Ulsterman is known far beyond Northern Ireland. Newcomers like Rhinoceros provide an alternative platform, especially for young mavericks. Local writers and writing are welcomed by the political journal Fortnight, the back part - the cultural pages - of which I subsidised, despite official pressures.

It is also a good idea to introduce writers to their public, to provide opportunities for the community to meet and listen to "living writers". An author's physical voice does influence the way he or she writes. Despite Cacton and Derrida literature still takes shape in the mouth and finds it resting place in the ear. Visitors such as Robert Lowell, Hugh Mac Diarmid, Angela Carter, Miroslav Holub, Liz Lochhead, Ian McEwan, Marin Soescu, Tony Harrison, Joseph Brodsky have helped us to avoid literary inbreeding and cultural insularity. Most of the generals and field marshals of what Patrick Kavanagh humorously referred to as Ireland's "standing army" of writers have performed for us. The Planter and the Gael wasn't the only poetry-reading tour. Out of the Blue featured James Simmons and Paul Muldoon; In their Element Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney.

I didn't see such tours as a priority, and preferred to use limited funds to engage the community in more lasting ways. Two writer-in-residence posts at Queen's University and the University of Ulster have allowed the embryo writer to discuss his or her work with established practitioners, who, in turn, have enjoyed more time in which to create. Recently the Council established a third post - that of Writer-in-Residence in the Irish language. So far as I know, there is no equivalent position elsewhere on the archipelago.

I often expressed the hope that the principles of these residencies might be extended into the community. This dream came true towards the end of my bureaucratic career when four young artists - a novelist, a painter, a traditional flute-player and a photographer - were employed by the Council to work through schools and colleges, community centres, museums, libraries, local history groups and so on. I gave this scheme the extrovert title Outlook, and in the explanatory brochure wrote: "The Arts Council believes that the regular interaction between artist and community will provide points of growth, new sources of creative energy, opportunities for communal self-examination, self-definition and self-expression."

This rubric and the three snatches of poetry which I slipped into the brochure suggest not only what I hoped the literature and traditional arts programmes might achieve, but also obstacles and disappointments. The first snippet comes from Louis MacNeice's 'Autumn Journal' - Canto xvi which is about Ireland:

....one feels that here at least one can

Do local work which is not at the world's mercy

And that on this tiny stage with luck a man

Might see the end of one particular action.

The second is the ending of Patrick Kavanagh's 'Epic' which measures the Munich crisis against the local territorial squabble:

I inclined

To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin

Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.

He said: I made the Iliad from such

A local row. Gods make their own importance.

Yeat's 'The Fisherman' provides the third quotation:

All day I'd looked in the face

What I had hoped 'twould be

To write for my own race

And the reality.

There was a literary tinge and, in retrospect, a symbolic symmetry to the very first grants which I made in 1972 from the new traditional arts budget - one for Rhyming Weavers, John Hewitt's study of the Ulster-Scots vernacular poets of Down and Antrim; and another for a study by Tomas O Fiach - later the Cardinal - of the 18th century South Armagh Gaelic poet Art MacCooey. The experience of starting up the literature programme provided templates for the traditional arts. The same principles evolved in much the same way - except that arts administration was to become a much bumpier ride.

I knew very little about Irish music. The "wise and simple man" who opened doors and helped me to organise the first concerts and tours was a hard-drinking carpenter called Brian O'Donnell who hailed from Killybegs in Deonegal but lived in the Markets area of Belfast. He knew everyone there to know in the world of Irish music. I revered his deep love of the tradition, and learned a lot - even from his erratic, often wild behaviour. We put on our first concert in Belfast's Civic Arts Theatre. This was seen by many as an event of symbolic importance: an organisation like the Arts Council was at last taking traditional music seriously! One of the most exciting moments of my life came when I saw the customers queuing around the block to get in. The evening acquired further symbolism. Brian, the soul of the entertainment, got so under the weather that the proprietor of the theatre would not let him in! I Had to decide between hearing the concert or attending to Brian's dignity. I chose the latter.

In the early seventies the North was contorted by spiralling sequences of tit-for-tat murders. These were bleak, anxious times to be touring with traditional Irish musicians. But it was crucial to challenge those who would appropriate the music for political ends and those who would excoriate it as alien and even threatening. Nor did we see the point of preaching - playing - to the converted all of the time. There had recently been an IRA atrocity in one of the country towns - mainly Protestant - where we were to play. I took the musicians into the function room of the pub which had been booked for the night. The owner of the pub said: "My bar will be blown up unless you begin or end the concert with 'The Queen'." I replied: "I have never heard 'The Queen' played on the Irish pipes!" But it was a serious impasse; and I considered calling the whole thing off. The bully boys were out and about; and there was menace in the air. A brain-wave. "Is there a Jimmy-Shand-type accordion-player in the town?" I asked, because I had a vague memory that there was such a musician in the vicinity. He might end our concert with some Scottish dance music - and then 'The Queen'. Our musical saviour turned up, and I offered him a fee. The concert proceeded with the audience talking loudly and insultingly all the way through. The gents' toilet was at the side of the small stage. Large tattooed figures lumbered backwards and forwards glaring at the musicians. David Hammond was MC for the night, and he sang every Scottish song in his repertoire. The audience at last quietened for the local box-player who performed several Scottish melodies. By the time he got round to 'The Queen' we had skedaddled. The fingers and thumbs - the lives even - of the musicians had been in danger. This wasn't running away.

On another occasion, at the request of the UDA, we put on a small concert of Irish music in their headquarters in east Belfast. More than a polite interest was shown in the performances, and questions were asked. Our hosts really wanted to find out why one side seemed to have most of the good tunes. We told them about great Protestant interpreters of Irish music like the singers Joe Holmes and Len Graham, the dulcimer-player John Rea of Glenarm. There was more to their tradition than Orange ballads, just as Nationalist ballads were only a small part of Irish music. A witty colleague who was present remarked that the faces of the musicians as they entered the UDA building put him in mind of "Egyptologists descending into a tomb"! Perhaps there should be more ventures of this kind which are bold and hare-brained enough to be - literally - disarming. I was later to get involved with Royal Scottish Pipe Band Association and gave support to their educational programme for over a decade, up to the point where they have now started classes in Piobaireachd. Among young pipers it is now fashionable to play Irish music. Last year at the championships in Inverness the top prize was won by an Ulster piper playing an Irish tune on the Scottish pipes.

Because Brian was fond of her, I booked for the second tour Maggie Barry who billed herself as 'The Singing Gypsy Woman'. I ended up loving her vast, untameable personality. Even when Maggie was singing an old chestnut like 'When Irish Eyes are Smiling', there was something authentic about her. In Armagh I realised that the Protestant Primate, George Simms, was sitting in the front row. I said to Maggie who had been getting raunchier as the week proceeded: "Maggie, you'll never guess who's in the front row: George Simms the Protestant Primate of All Ireland!" That's all I said. I wasn't going to control her. I couldn't if I tried. Maggie came out and started to tune her banjo. Although she played only the one string, she liked to make a fuss about tuning it. "I can't get this damned thing tuned at all," she exclaimed; and then, with an enormous wink in the direction of the Protestant Primate: "The frets are wet sticky, but sure isn't that me all over!" Afterwards George Simms came up to me and said, "I enjoyed the evening so much. Irish music so reminds me of the intricacies of the Book of Kells."

For me these are parables rather than anecdotes - ways of explaining conversion and spiritual growth. Once I trailed around Donegal with Brian O'Donnell in search of the great Johnny Doherty who, although he was well into his seventies, was still on the road. Even in old age he preferred the life of the itinerant musician. He was a fiddler of consummate artistry, a genius. After a couple of days we tracked him down to a little pub where he was playing for balls of malt. Most of the small gathering chattered through his soaring music. Brian and I sat down quietly behind him. He must have registered us as an oasis of silence and concentration. When he had finished his first set he turned around slowly and nodded towards us in a dignified fashion. As a bureaucrat I tried to make sure that the least we gave to traditional musicians was an oasis of this kind of respect. As an aspiring artist myself I have dedicated my Poems 1963-1983 to the memory of Brian O'Donnell.

Ciaran Carson is now the custodian of literature and the traditional arts whose interconnection his own poetry - attentive to the rhythms of musician and seanachie - proclaims; He "looks into the future through the eyes of the past". As readers of his brilliant Pocket Guide to Irish Music will appreciate, his authoritative voice rings out most clearly in the dialogue between authenticity and renovation. There is an Irish proverb that "tradition is stronger than learning". Carlson believes that in many cases tradition has to be recovered by learning - by personal contact, by a sensitive use of the comparatively new technology of the video and tape-recorder. He emphasises the mutual agreement of traditional music-making and its social context. "Even the most apparently informal session," he says, "is governed by a complex set of implicit rules in which conversation, singing, playing and dancing are an expression of a wider community." It has been a relief to hand over to someone so profound and gifted.

Here are two statistics. Over nearly twenty-one years neither the Director nor any of the four Chairman of the Arts Council attended even one event I had funded or organised in the areas of literature and traditional music. It took me eighteen years to hoist the budget for literature up to £100,000. The budget for dance got there in eighteen months, or thereabouts.

III

About a year ago I was invited to read my poems to a group of civil servants who were being prepared for top jobs. They had been through several taxing days in what appeared to be a series of initiation rites for the early middle-aged. I was to provide the light relief. Half way through dessert I looked around at the grey suits and decided that an after-dinner session of undiluted poetry might interfere with digestion. So, since the theme of the course was leadership, I opened up by talking about good leadership, and gave them the best example I could think of from the world of the arts.

Lawrence Gilliam was head of the BBC's Features Department. He employed formidable talents like Dylan Thomas, W.R. Rodgers, Henry Reed and Louis MacNeice. When the BBC needs to celebrate some anniversary or other by opening its archive, programmes from the Gilliam stable are among the few that do not date. He know his own limitations and rejoiced in the strengths of others. Lawrence Gilliam led a brilliant department by not leading it. Gifted in his own way, he also had the moral sense and qualities of imagination to realise that he could hardly be Louis MacNeice's leader! No. He was Louis MacNeice's minder, protecting him from bureaucracy, providing him with budgets, sending him to places like India (where MacNeice covered Independence), turning a blind eye to the poet's trips to Ireland which were ostensibly reconnoitres but which almost invariable coincided with rugby internationals at Ravenhill or Landsdown Road.

1945 MacNeice was exhausted. He had written and produced seventy programmes in four years. He came to Ireland to recuperate and to decide whether or not he would return to his job. "Tell them I'll take three months off - without pay," he wrote to Gilliam. "Tell them I'm an artist." Gilliam covered up for him so successfully that MacNeive enjoyed a full year's leave of absence - with pay. But his "one year off" affected broadcasting in Northern Ireland for the next twenty years and more. MacNeice made contact with W.R. Rodgers, Sam Hanna Bell and John Boyd, and brought them into broadcasting. And he returned himself - with, in his pocket, The Dark Tower, the finest feature ever put out over the airwaves by the Third Programme. Lawrence Gilliam lived and worked according to Albert Camus' principle - "If you lead I shall not follow; if you follow I shall not lead". His career demonstrates that it is possible for an arts organisation to be arts-led.

When I proposed a modest increase for artists' bursaries, I was invited to write a paper on awards and present it to the Board. Which I did. I was then asked to present my paper to each of the advisory committees and re-submit it to the Board along with a summary of their responses. Which I did. All of this took an age. Eventually nothing whatsoever happened. I secured no extra money for artists. Indeed, the system of pooled awards for all the disciplines which I had administered for several years was dismantled while I was away on sabbatical. At the time - with little nor no debate at all - large deficits were being incurred for glamorous imported productions in the Grand Opera House, and then transformed retrospectively into "Special Grants". For four nights of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel the deficit was £80.000 - that is £20.000 per night. The annual budget for the traditional arts was then £20.000. The epitaph on the headstone of still-born or aborted projects might well read: "Would you write a paper on that, please."

A few years ago I was anxious that I was going to be overspent in my literature budget. So I heard with relief that since the writer-in-residence at the University of Ulster happened to be a playwright - Martin Lynch - the post would be financed out of the budget for drama and dance. Later I learned of plans to transform the writer-in-residence into a dancer-in-residence. This crazy logic. I cared deeply about the writer-in-residence posts, and feared that my little tapestry might unravel without this strand. When I objected I was told that the deliberations of the Drama Committee were none of my business. It took energy-sapping arguments and a sheaf of memos to win back this position for writers.

In a letter to John Quinn W.B. Yeats writes: "It is wonderful the amount of toil and intrigue ones goes through to accomplish anything in Ireland. Intelligence has no organisation whilst stupidity always has." Manipulators are the blight of bureaucracy. Governed by short-term political advantage, time-servers, they do not concern themselves with - in Yeats's phrase - gradual time's gifts. If you take them on, you tangle with a tar-baby and end up as besmirched as what you are fighting. Institutions like individuals can go off the rails, and when they do a huge effort is required to take even a few small rational steps.

The dislikable aspects of bureaucratic life combined spectacularly just over a year ago. I know what happened, but not precisely how and why. What am I about to describe? vindictiveness? the limitations and complacency's of the provincial mind? unconscious sectarianism? the freemasonry of the mediocre? simple ineptitude? All or some or none or one of these? Was this an eerie repetition of the cause celebre of 1953 when after twenty-three years working in the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery John Hewitt was cruelly denied the directorship through backroom manoeuvring and for no reason other than his political unsuitability? This removed from the centre of things the most distinguished living Ulsterman. Hewitt has described his emotions as he crossed the Irish Sea on the Liverpool boat: "Round and round the deck I marched, fighting over every known thread of intrigue. And when the last clumping sailor had pointedly called goodnight and gone below, I still marched on, round and round the deck mechanically. Once I stopped at the rail and looked down at the troubled waters, sliding, folding over, and turning past and, for a minute or more, I was nearer suicide than I shall ever be again." His detailed account of the affair is called "From Chairmen and Committee Men, Good Lord Deliver Us".

The Arts Council in January 1991 appointed Michael Haynes to succeed Kenneth Jamison as Director. The "Sidelines" column of the February edition of the magazine Fortnight noted: "Surprise and controversy have surrounded the appointment of a new director of the Arts Council in Northern Ireland. It had been widely expected that the visual arts director, Brian Ferran, would get the job. Mr. Ferran, who is also deputy director, has a distinguished record as a vigorous promoter of Northern Irish artists. But the post has gone to an outsider - Michael Haynes, currently head of arts and entertainment with Hackney Council...On the face of it his c.v. does not appear notable more impressive than Mr. Ferran's. And critics reckon it will take him ages to 'learn the language' of the north, given the intricate relations between arts and society. A local appointment would have made more sense at a time when the region's 'cultural cringe' is receding. If the Arts Council board is - with a few exceptions - the usual undistinguished quango, in one sense it has shown commendable liberalism. The good news is that it has appointed a black Englishman - the bad news is that it has not appointed a Derry Catholic."

Surprisingly, the job description had stated: "Practical experience in the arts and recent knowledge of Northern Ireland, though desirable, are not essential." Equivalent Northern Irish posts advertised by bodies like the BBC insist that extensive knowledge of Northern Ireland is essential.

Later, Mary Holland wrote in her Irish Times column: "While his background is not immediately relevant to his job application, it would do no harm in the broader political context if a Derry Catholic were to be appointed to a job with such a high public profile." She went on to point out that recent surveys conducted by the Fair Employment Commission into employment patterns at the universities showed the under-representation of Catholics in senior posts. She ended her article thus: "I must emphasise that I don't want to question the talents of the new director of the Northern Arts Council. However, one senior academic put the situation to me like this: 'At that level it's always possible to defend the individuals appointment. When you get to a choice between two candidates, both of them are likely to be well-qualified. The problem in Northern Ireland is that the decision always goes the same way. The job never goes to the person we can describe as 'the Derry Catholic'."

The Arts Council had issued a press release stating that the new Director had been educated "at the Princeton University of New Jersey before coming to England to undertake his Masters degree at Sussex University." The new Director came to Belfast to meet his future colleagues. I took a small rational step and phoned friends in Princeton and Sussex. I did so for three reasons: I had met the new Director; I was well-acquainted with his most enthusiastic supporters; and, given past experience, a debacle of some magnitude had been on the cards.

In late April the Council issued a second press release stating that "for personal reasons" Mr. Michael Haynes "did not intend to take up the post of Director"; and that the Broad had met "and agreed to appoint Mr. Brian Ferran as Director." In the Irish Times the following day Anne Maguire (so tragically killed in a road accident two weeks ago and a great loss to journalism and the arts) wrote: "Mr. Haynes is understood to have withdrawn after his stated qualifications were questioned...It is understood that the council was informed a fortnight ago that he had not obtained these qualifications and subsequent to this, Mr. Haynes withdrew." In London The Guardian and the BBC's arts programme Kaleidoscope carried the same story. The Belfast newspapers investigated nothing.

In the June issue of Fortnight Ja& Ashdown asked: "Is everyone just sitting tight and hoping the buck will pass? Why have there not been any resignations on foot of such incompetence?...Desire for secrecy and anger about disclosure are surely the marks of those more concerned to keep power grasped in tight wee fists than with the discovery of truth. Loyalty is no one's right, any more than is respect - both have to be earned, and one can only be a traitor to an honourable cause...The arts are generally thought to be concerned with enlightenment, with the inculcation of civilised values and the development of imaginative moral understanding; artists are 'seekers after truth'. Is it too much to ask the institution that looks after the arts to remember these fundament principles?"

Six months prior to this fiasco I had applied unsuccessfully for early retirement. I was told in a letter that "since a number of major issues of principle came into consideration, no action should be taken pending the appointment of (the new Director) whose views on long-term staffing development should clearly not be anticipated." Out of the blue, in March and a month before the new Director withdrew, I was offered a reasonable deal and immediately accepted it. The internal memo announcing my retirement informed colleagues that I would be leaving at the end of the month, in all of ten days' time. My sense of being given the bum's rush was mitigated by what my academic researches had revealed - facts which, for legal reasons, were still unknown to my employers - and by my knowledge that I was considered a trouble-maker, a likely thorn in the side of the new regime - and better out of the way.

Democracies are controlled by bureaucracies, networks of civil servants, vistas of decent people taking orders and saying Yes. In a bureaucracy it is difficult to remain true to yourself. Facing the "dark tower", refusing to desert to the system, may help you to confirm your identity, but at some cost. By more than a coincidence, my first day of freedom saw the publication of Gorse Fires, my first collection in twelve years.

As an arts administrator who tried to champion the individual creator and indigenous talent, I was pleased to accept an invitation to join the Cultural Traditions Group at its inception in 1988. Its aims, as I have said, are to encourage in Northern Ireland the acceptance and understanding of cultural diversity; to replace political belligerence with cultural pride. It has been rewarding to watch policy and action proceed hand in hand; to find management lines less rigidly drawn, bureaucracy kept under control; and to work with creative civil servants - life-enhancers within the system.

In the Cultural Traditions Group we expect no quick returns. This is a waiting game. To plan for it in a disrupted social context like our own should not be beyond us. I think of when the British Labour Party came to power in 1945 - many schools bombed out of existence: others needing renovation; half a million extra places required; a massive teacher-training programme to be organised; a radical Education Act to be implemented: and all to be financed out of a war-torn economy. This was achieved through the energy, optimism and experimentation of the new government's policy-making procedures. The education officers and teachers were not kept in hermetically sealed administrative compartments.

With an initial budget from the government of £3,000,000 over three years, the Cultural Traditions Group has helped to steer grants to local publishers for good books (which would not otherwise be commercially viable) about history, politics, topography, folklore, local history; and has made down-payments, as it were, to independent producers for television and radio programmes of similar concern. The Ultach Trust has been established to help fund Irish language activities, thus grasping a political nettle. The Local History Trust Fund supports the work of the many groups which make Northern Ireland probably the most vibrant corner of Europe when it comes to local history studies. A survey of place-names and the compilation of an Ulster-English Dialect dictionary are underway. There are awards for those who have contributed to the cultural self-awareness of the society; and fellowships for young scholars. These are some of the projects which intertwine with the Education for Mutual Understanding and the Cultural Heritage strands now statutory in Northern schools.

One of the founders of my old school, Belfast's Academical Institution, was the United Irishman William Drennan. He might have been writing a charter for the Cultural Traditions Group when nearly two hundred years ago he proposed "the establishment of societies of liberal and ingenious men, uniting their labours, without regard to nation, sect or party in one grand pursuit, alike interesting to all, by which mental prejudice may be worn off, a humane and truly philosophic spirit may be cherished in the heart as well as the head, in practice as well as theory." The Group not only supports but has learned from enterprises like the John Hewitt Summer School which over the past five years has made a start by bringing together literature, local history, social and anthropological studies, language, archaeology, the visual arts, topography, music and so on in a spirit of interdisciplinary cross-pollination and under an economical "regionalist" umbrella.

The tragedy of Ulster brought the Group into being and continues to shape its deliberations. At a recent meeting I suggested that our aim should be to lift the community into consciousness and self-consciousness - the forming of a new intelligentsia, if you like - since it is the intellectual (and, indeed, the emotional) vacuum that makes room for the violence. We are involved in cultural preparation, a constellation of conversions, gradual processes which short-term thinking by Government could easily abort.

Sadly, this happened in the case of Conway Mill. The Conway Education Centre in West Belfast offers academic and recreational courses, social events and a wide-ranging cultural programme - including literary readings and debates. Its location means that supporters of Sinn Fein are inevitably involved in the enterprise. It was thus on allegedly security grounds that I was ordered to discontinue Arts Council funding of the Conway Mill cultural programme. I wrote a memorandum to the Chairman and the Director and subsequently read it out at a meeting of the Board in December 1989. I argued that espousal of plurality could not be selective in this way; that withholding funds on the stated grounds strengthened the hand of the paramilitary against moderating influences inside and outside the community; and that the ban not only damaged the trust which the Council's officers had built up on the Falls Road, but also tarnished their reputation for neutrality and thereby made it less safe for them to work in the area. A thoughtful debate ensued, but the Board did not follow my suggestion that they disobey Government. There was similar short-sightedness with reference to the Glor-na-nGael language-group in West Belfast. Their funding has been restored, but its withdrawal threatened the work of Ultach Trust and the very idea of Cultural Traditions.

I find offensive the notion that what we inadequately call "the Troubles" might provide inspiration for artists; and that in some weird quid pro quo the arts might provide solace for grief and anguish. Twenty years ago I wrote in Causeway: "Too many critics seem to expect a harvest of paintings, poems, plays and novels to drop from the twisted branches of civil discord. They fail to realise that the artist needs time in which to allow the raw material of experience to settle to an imaginative depth where he can transform it...He is not some sort of super-journalist commenting with unfaltering spontaneity on events immediately after they have happened. Rather, as Wilfred Owen stated over fifty years ago, it is the artist's duty to warn, to be tuned in before anyone else to the implications of the situation."

Ten years later I wrote for the Poetry Book Society about what I was trying to do in my fourth collection, The Echo Gate: "As an Ulsterman I realise that this may sound like fiddling while Rome burns. So I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity, its proper concern all of the things that happen to people. Though the poet's first duty must be to his imagination, he has other obligations - and not just as a citizen. He would be inhuman if he did not respond to tragic events in his own community, and a poor artist if he did not seek to endorse that response imaginatively. But if his imagination fails him, the result will be dangerous impertinence. In the context of political violence the deployment of words at their most precise and most suggestive remains one of the few antidotes to death-dealing dishonesty."

Patrick Kavanagh's famous distinction between the provincial cast of mind - abstract, imitative, sterile - and the parochial - close, familiar, teeming with life - applies to Northern Ireland in a particular and urgent sense. Terrified of Irishness - the cultural ideology of the Free State and then of the Republic - Unionists have clung to what after 1968 has increasingly become known as The Mainland, and to cultural importation. Those who depend on imports run the risk of themselves becoming exports. In his essay "Crossing the Border" Hubert Butler describes "the more formidable of Ulster's enemies" as "those who keep quiet. 'Time is on our side', they are saying...'The Province has the artificial vitality of the garrison town and no organic life. If ever the pipeline were cut, it would perish.'" He ends his essay by suggesting that "Ulster would no longer be of value to Ireland if she were robbed of her rich history, her varied traditions."

Butler thought that reconciliation would not be complete in the South till it had happened in the North; and that it might develop out of regional loyalties. Meanwhile John Hewitt had begun his work of focusing our attention on Ulster's indigenous cultural resources. "Ulster," he wrote in 1947, "considered as a region and not as the symbol of any particular creed, can, I believe, command the loyalty of everyone one of its inhabitants. For regional identity does not preclude, rather it requires, membership of a larger association." Hewitt did not seem too bothered as to whether that association might be a federated British Isles or a federal Ireland.

Maurice Hayes used to tell a story which regained its currency after Down's victory over Meath in the Gaelic football all-Ireland final last year. Down's first major trophy was the National League in 1960, when they beat Cavan in the final. The captain, Kevin Mussen, brought the cup home to Hilltown in the Mournes - where it rested on the family sideboard. A few days later, the local postman, a Unionist, an Orangeman and a 'B' Special, saw the trophy on his rounds and could not restrain his enthusiasm: "Jesus", he shouted "we took it off the friggers!"

Here are the ambiguities latent in a sport played by only one section of a divided community and organised by a body which, because of its ideological overtones, is regarded with suspicion by another section. The story also illustrates the problems faced by those who reject the ideological message, but wish to recognise courage, effort, excellence or good performance - or who, in a close community, simply wish to share in the joy of their neighbours' success.

In Ulster cultural apartheid is sustained to their mutual impoverishment by both communities. W. R. Rodgers referred to the "creative wave of self-consciousness" which can result from a confluence of cultures. In Ulster this confluence pools historical contributions from the Irish, the Scots, the English and the Anglo-Irish. Reconciliation does not mean all the colours of the spectrum running so wetly together that they blur into muddy uniformity. Nor does it mean denying political differences. As William Faulkner said: "The past isn't dead and gone. It isn't even past yet." But reconstructing the past or constructing identities has too frequently been a purely propagandist activity in Northern Ireland. The Cultural Traditions approach involves a mixture of affirmation, self-interrogation and mutual curiosity. To bring to light all that has been repressed can be a painful process; but, to quote the American theologian Don Shriver: "The cure and the remembrance are co-terminus".

We are beginning to find in our own parishes the painful, liberating truths.

July 1992

^ Top

« Participants of Workshop 10 | Myth of Europe: poetic and philosophical refutations »

Ποιειν Και Πραττειν - create and do

Navigation

Reference material 3: BLACKTHORN & BONSAI by Michael Longley