 |
Press to get a copy in hqx format for Word 4.0 . Dont't forget to set the page numbers in your software before printing. |
|
"Ní liom é ní leat é, ní le héinne ar leith é. 'S é an rud é, cultúr, ná an méid a dhéannan sé." (Culture is not the preserve of any one set of people or of any one class. Culture is what culture does.)
Tradition and Identity It is often said that there are two traditions, or two cultures in Ireland. There are not. There are scores of traditions, maybe hundreds, all making up a diverse and rich culture. All equally valid. All part of what we are. Urban and rural. Small town and hill village. Fishing port and island. Inner city and farming community. Gaeltacht1 and Gallteacht.2 Labourer and artisan. Visual, literary and oral. Feminist. Song and dance. Orange and green. Hurling and rugby. Football and handball. Pagan and Christian. Protestant and Catholic. North and south. East and west. The midlands. These traditions and all that they represent do not conflict. They are part of the diversity of Irishness. Culture involves every aspect of our lives, and is not restricted to the artistic expressions which humankind has developed. Culture is the ideas and attitudes of people; it is an indication of how we view things, and it is our response to the environment in which we live. National culture is the reflection of the politics, economics, values, attitudes, aspirations and thoughts of a nation. It is the totality of our response to the world we live in. Precisely because this is so, cultural colonalism formed and forms a major part of the conquests by some nations over other nations. This is certainly the case in Ireland. I have no doubt that this is true also of other colonised cultures. Cultural colonialism demands the lowering of national spirit, the revision of history and the destruction of separate identity. It seeks to substitute men and women for mere objects. Objects have no allegiance-- they are for sale. As Padraig Pearse, the Irish poet, teacher and leader of the 1916 Easter Rising wrote of the English education system in Ireland: The English have established the simulacrum of an educational system but its object is the precise contrary of the object of an educational system. Education should foster; this education is meant to repress. Education should inspire; this education is meant to tame. Education should harden; this education is meant to enervate.3 Hundreds of years of such 'education' had its effect. In Ireland today a culture of dependency has been created. This reflects the ethos of survivalism engendered by centuries of British colonialist and imperialist oppression. In other words, it reflects the politics, economics, values, attitudes and thoughts of our rulers. The Siege of Derry,4 like the Battle of the Boyne,5 is as much an influence and a part of Irish history as the Siege of Limerick,6 the Famine or the Easter Rising of 1916. It reminds us also of the need to stress that 'Brits Out' is not a call, as is often mischievously suggested, for the banishment of Unionists. On the contrary, a peaceful, just and united society in Ireland must offer equal rights to everyone, Loyalist and Nationalist alike. But this term 'two traditions' or 'two cultures' is a term which is incorrectly and often deliberately misused to describe what are in fact two different and conflicting political allegiances. They conflict because one expresses a notion of allegiance to the union with Britain while the other expresses a notion of allegiance to Ireland, to all the people of the island. There is not a clash of traditions or culture in Ireland. There is a division of allegiance created and sustained by British interference in our affairs. The civil rights struggle was the beginning of the end of all this. The civil rights demands put the British state to a test. The state failed this test and reacted with terrorism. The demands were both moderate and modest: the right to vote at local government level, an end to discrimination in employment and the scrapping of repressive legislation. Almost thirty years later, Catholics are still twice as likely to be unemployed, and repressive legislation continues to deny citizens their basic democratic rights. In 1969 the state died. It was revived by the British government, and since then has been kept alive on a life-support unit of British military forces. In the intervening twenty-five years, all of the institutions of Irish life have been affected, none have escaped. While the North has borne the brunt of the conflict, the impact has been felt all over Ireland, and few of the institutions have risen to the challenge to the need for change which a democratic settlement demands. As the present situation continues to evolve, and as the old certainties of the past give way, we are all challenged to reassess our relationships with each other, and in turn, the British government is moved to deal with the causes of conflict in Ireland. While there are signs of this happening at a grass roots level, to reach such an accommodation provokes for many an acute crisis of identity.
Community and Resistance In Belfast now, and throughout the North, many nationalist communities have established their own people's festivals. Thrown back on our own resources (particularly in the most war-ravaged areas), there has been an exciting and myriad range of cultural happenings. The Ardoyne Fleadh and the West Belfast Festival, Feile an Phobail, are two such events. The Fleadh is a musical weekend. The Feile is a week-long celebration of song, music, dance, sport, drama, drink, art exhibitions, poetry readings and debate. A winter school, Eigse an Phobail, has also been created, not an ivory tower or an elitist junket, but an open-to-all place for the exchange of ideas of hopes and visions. Feile an Phobail grew out of a particularly vile period of our recent history when the people of West Belfast were attacked as savage subhumans. This reached new depths in 1988 when the community became victim of a particularly vicious campaign, which followed a series of incidents in which two British soldiers were killed at a funeral for one of the victims of a British and Loyalist gun and bomb attack on an earlier funeral. The festival was a response to the British media's attack on our community, and an expression of the people themselves: their creativity, humour, dignity and forgiveness. A similar parallel would be the development of wall murals7 over the last fifteen years, which express an equally inclusive assertiveness. They began to appear in Derry and Belfast as part of community resistance during the hunger strikes of 1980-81, reflecting whole communities' solidarity with the prisoners. As an artform, the work of the muralists has continued to evolve. While none of them has received formal art training, their enthusiasm and vision has created a panorama of wondrous gable-high works of popular and resistance art. These murals are constantly attacked and damaged by British armed forces with paint bombs at night, only to be re-painted and repaired by the young community-artists in daylight. Culture is our response to the world we live in. So it is with popular expressions like those I touch upon above. All of this tells us, among other things, that culture is not and cannot be the preserve of any one set of people or any one class.
Irish Language v. English Language: It is to the credit of the Irish people that the Anglicisation process has never been totally successful. Even when the people were dispossessed, the hidden Ireland lived on as the culture of an oppressed people. Its decline can be dated to the modernisation of the relationship between England and Ireland, the Act of Union,8 after which the emerging middle class strongly rejected the Irish language and customs. They embraced the 'new order' and rejected the 'old values'. To succeed meant speaking English. To be Irish was to be ignorant. Social and economic advancement became synonymous with the use of English language, mannerisms and culture. This process has been refined in modern Ireland, and successive Dublin governments stand indicted on this score. In the late 1960s, the civil rights struggle provided a broad enough appeal to bring out a substantial proportion of the anti-imperialist population. As the struggle against British dominance has continued, it has been accompanied by an increasing awareness in the ideology of the nationalist people and a re-invigoration of our culture in all its forms. This has been markedly so since the prison hunger-strikes of 1980 and 1981, when the men in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh and the women in Armagh Prison were stripped of all their rights. In the H-Blocks, with no books, no paper, no pen and no professional teachers, young men lived for almost a decade in filthy conditions. Frequently beaten, stripped naked but unbowed, they taught each other Irish by shouting lessons from one cell to the next. And as one hunger strike was followed by the other, the people outside the prisons learned these lessons also, and they determined to carry on the cultural struggle, each one from where she or he was. The Irish language became a means of resistance, of asserting both their dignity and identity. There is no such thing as a neutral language, for language is the means by which culture, the totality of our response to the world we live in, is communicated. When a people has spoken a common language for thousands of years, that language reflects their history, sentiments, outlook and philosophy. Culture is filtered through it, and when the language is lost, much of what it represents is also lost. The Irish language has more than 2,000 years of unbroken history. Apart from Greek, Irish has the oldest literature of any living European language. It is the badge of a civilisation whose values were vastly different from the one which seeks to subjugate us. It is a badge of our identity and part of what we are. If the conquest was to be successful, that badge had to be removed, that culture destroyed and that civilisation replaced by an order which accommodated and acquiesced to the interests of our rulers. There is nothing trivial or 'folksy' in the present interest in the Irish language. These positive attitudes toward the language and culture today extend beyond the occupied areas of the North. In Belfast, there has been a considerable revival in the use of Irish, and the particular significance of this is that it is the first time it has ever happened within a working-class community. In practice, this revival is expressed in small ways, with language classes in social clubs, with the Gaelicisation of street names and the growth of Irish language schools. The British government continues to outlaw Irish-language street names and refuses to fund Irish language schools like Meanscoil Feirste. The effort to colonise our minds continues on many levels, from censorship within the mass media (television and radio) as well as in small and trivial ways. Inevitably, the Irish language holds different values and meanings to different people throughout the island, and is spoken for a myriad of different reasons. It is a remarkable, indeed an historic achievement, that the language survives. It can therefore be said with some certainty that the Irish language would prosper in a new Ireland, and that in my estimation a bilingual Ireland is an achievable objective. We must strive to strengthen not weaken our culture and our identity. A language, like any aspect of culture, is not static; it changes and continues constantly to reinvent itself. Without our language, our culture cannot continue to develop its own unique and specific identity. Irish people who express hostility to the Irish language are denying their own past. The language is the property of all our people. It is our common heritage. Prior to partition, Irish Protestants and Catholics alike played leading roles in Irish music, literature, language and theatre. Those who do not wish to learn or use Irish cannot and should not be compelled to do so, but those who wish to speak the language must be encouraged and empowered to do so. A bilingual Ireland, culturally diverse and reflecting the totality of all our people and all our diversity, must be our aim. What is crucial for progressive forces is an understanding that the Irish language is the reconquest of Ireland, and the reconquest of Ireland is the Irish language. A failure to grasp this, apart from a legitimate patriotic desire to restore our own language and to maintain an Irish cultural identity, means that, if we only function unquestioningly as a dustbin of Anglo-American culture, we will remain morally, psychologically, intellectually and materially worse off. Beirigi bua/Adalenté
Notes: 1 Gaeltacht: an Irish- speaking area. 2 Gallteacht: an English- speaking area. 3 Padraig Pearse, The Murder Machine, pamphlet published in February 1916, weeks before the Easter Rising. 4 Siege of Derry, 1689. Apprentice boys (Irish and Protestant) successfully defended Derry against James II (English and Catholic). 5 Battle of Boyne, 1690. 6 Siege of Limerick, 1690-91. Limerick was defended by Patrick Sarsfield, when the city surrendered to the English. Afterwards, Sarsfield left for France with his followers, who became known as "The Wild Geese." 7 For further reading on the wall murals, see "Culture, Conflict and Murals: The Irish Case," by Bill Rolston, p. 191. 8 The Act of Union, 1801: English parliament imposes the union between Britain and Ireland.
|