C105 article

Ireland complex

It's been a rollercoaster ride, but where has it landed us? Brian Kennedy reports on a recent conference in Virginia which sought to get a fix on modern Ireland.

The Re-imagining Ireland conference took place over four days in May. It was hosted by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, VFH. VFH had previously hosted Mirror Up to Society, an event that brought together forty Irish film makers, writers and scholars in Charlottesville, to discuss the renaissance in Irish film. That event had been opened by the then minister for Arts and Culture, Michael D. Higgins. Re-imagining Ireland was opened by President Mary MacAleese, who gave the key-note speech.

That speech has since become famous, because of her reference to Ireland's drink culture. The speech was a good, courageous one. It would have been so easy for her to have simply rattled off a bit of political speak that would have offended no one and would instantly have been forgotten. For this reason it was surprising that some of the media back home were so critical.. Thankfully, the Irish people, when asked in a poll, also thought it was a good thing for her to speak out. This willingness to look at the bad as well as the good, shows a growing maturity in our way of thinking. We no longer need to consume a 'rake' of pints, then slap each other on the shoulder and tell each other how wonderful we are, how we alone saved scholarship in the dark ages or how we single-handedly built America. The President's realistic speech was a good foundation for the conference.

Charlottesville may at first seem a strange choice for an event like this. Why not New York or Boston? It actually turned out to be a very apt choice. The town is dominated by its university, which was started by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson enlisted Irish master builders, veterans of the 1798 Uprising, to construct the buildings which would house his new university. The Scots Irish came to the Valley of Virginia to build new lives. Against this background one could expect a wide-ranging discussion.

It was interesting then to find the consultants, particularly in the promotional material, confining themselves to a historical view of the twenty-six counties rather than the thirty-two counties. The consultants wrote about "Eamon de Valera's newly formed independent state" of "Gaelic-Catholic Irishness" and "debilitating anti-colonial" attitudes. For a significant number of people on the island of Ireland there is a colonial present. Some people in Northern Ireland want it, others do not. Those veterans of 1798 left behind families in Ireland, and some of their descendants in the North changed their allegiances. What is certain is that the North's history is inextricably linked to the history of Ireland. It was left to Declan McGonagle to observe that artists are now confronting the old dualities, "of male and female, of urban and rural, of past and present, of North and South, of Protestant and Catholic, which correspond to increasingly visible tensions in cultural and social processes elsewhere in the world." To find just how the North's history entwines itself into the overall history of Ireland is a question for the future. To some extent, how this history will be read will depend on what happens in the future.

Declan McGonagle at Re-imagining Ireland; photo/courtesy the author

The conference lasted four days. The first day was a kind of social get-together followed by a meal and the Presidential speech. The following three days focused on three interrelated themes.

Day Two, The Celtic Tiger, looked at economics and culture. It considered "the transforming effects of global economics on traditional cultures." Topics covered included Celtic myth and spirituality; Silicon Ireland; Family in Ireland; Multi-racialism; Poverty amidst prosperity and Celtic music and dance. The conference had been in planning from before 9/11 and the death of the Tiger. This meant that some of the topics listed were, if not superceded, certainly changed. It brought into focus how much Ireland's vision of itself had changed. There was an awareness of a need to re-evaluate ourselves in the light of a depressed economy, and many would say that this was no bad thing, particularly if the divide between rich and poor were to stop expanding. There is the beginnings of a new humility and an awareness that globalization means immigration as well as emigration.

Day Three, Home and away, looked at transnational identity. The programme featured sessions on Memory, identity and the diaspora; Between Europe and America; Ireland and Britain; The Irish in America; St. Patrick, leprechauns and shamrocks; Irish Empires; The Gaeltacht and Living with Hollywood. It was a day with a strong visual content. Declan McGonagle and Catherine Marshall gave a gallery talk, and Michael Hannigan and Martin McLoone introduced a programme of short films. It was also a day that questioned Ireland's relationship with Europe as well as America - a delicate question in America as it seems clear to me that Ireland's new-found prosperity is due to its place in the EU. Money from America is no longer used to put bread on the table. It is more likely to be used to develop cultural projects, bring together Catholics and Protestants in the North, or allow Americans to explore their Irish heritage.

Day Four, Peace, the North, and beyond, looked at efforts at peace. It focused on Unionism and Nationalism; Religion and identity; Finding identities in a global community; Postcolonialism and Ireland and The Irish & Scots Irish in Virginia. At such a large conference as this it is often difficult to decide which of the many offerings to choose.

In the morning I chose Unionism, where the speakers were David Ervine, Edna Longley and Chris McGimpsey. The room was small and packed, allowing some only half-joking comments about discrimination. Ervine showed that his feet were firmly planted on the ground. Referring to a comment made by the moderator of the key panel discussion earlier, he said, "I think Joe Lee's boiler's burst." I think what he meant was that he did not agree that West Belfast was the same as Dublin 4. Perhaps I would also add that I do not think that the North's place in Irish history started so comfortably with the Good Friday Agreement. The North's input to Irish history at the conference always seemed at best to run parallel to a perceived 'mainstream' of Irish history. This is not a criticism of the conference, as I think it was only mirroring the situation back home. In fact, it is the neutral-ground, open-ended nature of the conference that made this type of observation possible. The complexities of a history of the whole island might be addressed at a future date.

The need to address the issue was highlighted for me when I read VFH Board member Preston Bryant's report on the conference in the VFH newsletter. He said,

But when Ireland's president, Mary McAleese, showed up in Charlottesville last week, it is not her republic's ongoing conflict with Northern Ireland that she wanted to discuss so much as how the once sleepy island has awakened, progressed...

I think that this shows that the complexities of the situation in Ireland are still not fully understood. For many Irish-passport-holding citizens from the North, McAleese, who also comes from the North, is their president. For others she most certainly is not.

As well as organizing the conference, the VFH, in conjunction with the University of Virginia Art Museum, put together an exhibition called Irish Art Today and in the name of transparency I would say that I was a participant. The exhibition was curated by the museum's director, Jill Hartz, and local artist and curator Susan Bacik. Declan McGonagle, who was a Re-Imagining Ireland consultant, wrote a catalogue essay. In it he argued "that artists are products of their context." He feels that the Irish electorate were making a shift "toward a conservatism always present in Irishness as an emphasis on narrow tradition, but now dominant in this society in the form of rampant consumerism." These issues came up during the conference itself but often they were seen in a historical context. What McGonagle observed was how artists could be involved in these issues in the future. He wrote,

Culture, in the broadest sense, and the visual arts in particular, can provide the sort of arena for dissent and discourse, where non-colonial dialogues take place. Consumerism is incapable of a non-colonial relationship with place..

The conference was lively, well attended and raised many complex questions about different aspects of Ireland. The visual arts stood out for their ability to deal with a wide range of topics. More than some academics, artists appeared to be able to deal with the complexities of a modern Ireland. Perhaps this is because we do not have to find answers. To ask the question and then leave it in the public domain where others can discuss it is enough.

Brian Kennedy is an artist and a CIRCA Contributing Editor.

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