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PREFACE

A very different set of essays would be included in The Sound of the Shuttle if the writer was starting off today, rather than as the 31-year-old of 1983 when the first of these essays was written. Ireland, north and south, has in so many ways changed greatly for the better and in the process issues other than the focal points covered here would be front and centre in this book. Yet there remain fault lines under the surface and a default position, deeply set within the social mindset of both parts of the island, that there is always someone else to blame for our problems. The sense I have of life in Northern Ireland is of a split society, of ordinary people getting on with their lives as best they can, distanced from any faith in their political leaders. While the institutionalised divisions sketched here have been ameliorated somewhat in the time covered by these essays (1983–2019), there really is no sign of a substantial and lasting change of heart as regards, for instance, integrated education or the balanced outreach workings of what was once known as ‘parity of esteem’. The jagged edges of the violent past are still locked within ideological vices.

So selecting this work from four decades, I wanted to bring together various thoughts and responses to some of these ‘issues’ but in the specific context of Northern Protestantism and the varied and (at times) misunderstood sense of their cultural belonging. This focus can itself be viewed from different perspectives, such as the very title itself, taken from a letter of John Keats during his brief journey through the North in 1818. Think of the sound of the linen mills he heard being the sound of your every day, which would have been the case for many thousands of women and men working in that dominant industry, alongside the many other industries throughout the eastern counties, including the tobacco factories and shipyards of Belfast.

The life of all those workers seems to have been erased from the history books, political discourse and cultural knowledge. But this is not a history book. The bulk of these essays sought to think aloud about a dark time and the way in which significant moral, artistic and cultural matters were being handled in the media, in various publications and in everyday conversations, as well as bearing witness to what was actually happening on the streets of my native city.

The concluding three essays, written in the twenty-first century, take a snapshot of what has happened since the Good Friday Agreement was endorsed by a substantial majority in Ireland in 1998. From the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, the peace ‘dividend’ and the chaos of Brexit – each continues to have a material impact upon the shifting and conflicting sense of cultural identity in present-day Ireland. When Tony Blair stepped out of the Hillsborough hothouse in April 1998 and announced that ‘the hand of history’ was on the negotiators’ collective shoulder, he sounded just a little over-awed: ‘A day like today is not a day for sound bites – we can leave those at home – but I feel the hand of history upon our shoulder with respect to this, I really do.’

Now that the twentieth anniversary has come and gone in this Decade of Commemorations, looking back at the lack of progress in Northern Ireland, the hand of history seems distinctly less benign and much heavier, if not indeed frozen and gnarled. Government Buildings at Stormont remains locked in a sectarian head count between the unmoving political power bases and the needs of unionism and nationalism. In recalling the habitual trooping up and down the marbled stairs of Stormont and facing the media on the fabled steps outside – to repeat party mantras, or the progress of current ‘talks’ or, more likely, the lack of it – maybe the heavy hand of Stormont itself should be reviewed. Is the drama of being up there on the Castlereagh hills, under the unswerving reach of Lord Carson’s accusatory arm and pointing finger, informing certain attitudes of uncompromising self-importance? Is it even appropriate for such an imposing building to dominate the parliamentary landscape of a post-industrial democracy in twenty-first-century Western Europe, a society that should be caring for all its people’s welfare (health, housing, education) by looking forward much more, and not less? Is it time to rethink the physical architecture of Northern Ireland’s governing institution alongside the other legacy issues, in an effort to bring some fresh thinking into the equation? Why not think about taking all those (absent) elected representatives, their staffs and civil service and relocate them in a custom-built, fit-for-purpose modern building on the ground level with the rest of the citizens? Just think what initiating a project that could turn out to be for an up and coming generation of architects, builders and craftsmen and -women and the boost it could provide for the local economy. There has to be a suitable site within the spectacular lough shore that carries both connectivity and positive historical resonances.

And as for Stormont? For the splendid grounds, a People’s Park for music, gardens, you name it; for the building, an enterprise, digital and innovation academy. Foregrounded within those corridors of power and former party rooms, create a living archival testament to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women who worked across the province in the linen, farming, engineering, manufacturing industries and mills by which the North was globally recognised throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And also provide a portrait of Northern society for all those hundreds of thousands who had to leave to find work and a life for themselves elsewhere. Could that work? Would that not be a good way of sign-posting a really better future and even perhaps educating, away from the politically driven stereotypes addressed in part in this collection of essays, many of the present-day politicians in the social and economic history of their own place; where they actually live? Some might regard such an idea as anathema and another seditious diminution of the cultural past of unionism. But maybe, instead, such an imaginative move could secure a different kind of united future to include all the strands of Northern Irish society. For, by its very impressive physical location, Stormont and the weight that goes with it, might benefit from a new lease of creative life; of being reimagined and culturally releasing. In so doing, the carousel of ‘History’ which we have trailed behind for so long, and with such unproductive results, could be sidestepped. Who can say? A passing thought.

In recent years one striking feature of Northern Irish society has been the prominence and growing recognition of women writers from various parts of the province such as Marie Jones, Wendy Erskine, Rosemary Jenkinson, Lucy Caldwell, Jan Carson, Anna Burns and Stacy Gregg, among many others, as well as cultural commentators and analysts. Unquestionably the 33-year-old writer today would be responding to a whole range of other concerns such as the role of marginalised or migrant communities, which are merely shaded in here as a kind of analogue from an earlier time that might prove instructive (or indeed may not). The essays that follow do not cover this opening ground; nor do they pretend to hold any answers or put forward any simple solutions to the questions they raise about cultural belonging, while illustrating what it means, or has been made to mean, in the closing decades of the twentieth and the first decades of the twenty-first centuries. The intention behind The Sound of the Shuttle is to bring into critical focus the experiences, beliefs and achievements of an (at times) much maligned and often misread community generally referred to as Northern protestants but whose inner world is characterised by much difference, dispute and a healthy sense of independence; values of a stoical temperament from which we all might learn a thing or two.

Gerald Dawe

Belfast, November 2019