The Arts: It's on only its fourth issue, but 'Irish Pages' is establishing itself as a journal with an international outlook. Belinda McKeon reports

Mogetse Kaboikanyo, a Kgalagadi man, lived alongside the Gana and Gwe Bushmen in Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Hubert Butler, the 20th-century Irish essayist, scandalised the nuncio by pointing to the Croatian Church's role in the murders of almost a million Orthodox Serbs in 1941. Ivo Zanic teaches at the University of Zagreb and knows that in Ireland, as in the Balkans, "the dead have their uses". Andrew Furlong is dean of Clonmacnoise. Vojka Djikiæ, a Bosnian poet, lived and wrote in Sarajevo throughout the siege. The poet Samuel Menashe is haunted by the memory of a fellow soldier's death in the Ardennes. Askold Melnyczuk is writing a novel "choreographed to the music of George Bush's New Imperial Symphony". Maxine Sheets-Johnstone is a former dancer. Sir Martin Rees is Britain's astronomer royal. Simon Fairlie runs part of The Land Is Ours network. Susan Sontag lives in New York. Seamus Heaney treasures "nonce" words, words coined for the moment.

On a single desk in Linen Hall Library, in Belfast, all these voices, all their words, convene and collide. They have been among the contributors, since 2001, to Irish Pages, the twice-yearly journal of contemporary writing that is edited from the library, which will next month publish its fourth issue. Along with the Dublin Review - now on its 14th issue - Irish Pages represents a new maturity in the life of the Irish periodical. Both are polished, poised, serious; both carry work strong enough to brand the mind of the reader. In the Dublin Review, most of the work stems from relatively familiar names, identifiable scenes, much of it Irish or with a firm Irish connection; the outlook and identity pursued by Irish Pages, however, are intensely international, its themes increasingly diverse. Genres are sometimes self-evident - poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction on matters of politics, history, ecology - sometimes less so.

Three issues in, a certain formula is discernible; in its 200-odd pages there will always be an essay, always an article rooted in the journal's native Belfast, always work in translation and always a substantial chunk in Irish. There will always, too, be a theme for the issue; so far there has been Belfast in Europe, justice and, most recently, empire, but those themes have seemed to grow out of the intermingling of each issue's articles, to be pushed out by the writing rather than being editorially imposed in advance.

The journal's editor, Chris Agee - a US poet and essayist who pieces together its mix with Cathal Ó Searcaigh, its Irish-language editor, and Seán Mac Aindreasa, its managing editor - is deliberate about its difference. "I look at us as a little bit of a Western dissident journal," he says. "It's good to be a little bit at a remove from whatever the pale of 'the received' may be."

Bound up with the journal's identity, for Agee, is its policy of giving room to writers of what he calls the ethical imagination: writers such as Butler, in whom he has been passionately interested since coming to Ireland, in the 1970s, an interest that spurred him, too, to spend long periods in the Balkans. Writers such as Orwell, Camus and the late W. G. Sebald, final poems by whom appeared in the first and second issues of the journal. "We're not agenda driven: it's not a newsletter for Amnesty, but we want that ethical dimension; you might call it the NGO readership. All those people for whom ethical issues - of nature, of science, of politics - really matter. That is to say, writing of high artistic consciousness but in the world, in the thick of all its dilemmas."

So you get Helen Lewis, coming to Belfast after Auschwitz, Wendell Berry writing on the US national-security strategy, Sontag connecting literature and freedom. It's a kind of writing that Agee describes as morally tough. What you don't get, he says, are reviews, "narrowly academic, theory-crunching" articles or long biographical notes that reinforce the phenomenon that Sontag has described as the literary aura. "Each piece of work has to jostle with the others on the strength of the writing alone," he says. "Otherwise these tags begin to mediate between the reader and the work."

This manifesto, the credo of dissidence, and Agee's own editorials - lengthy, solemn engagements with the events and ideologies that form nations and hurl them into crisis - suggest a certain pedigree for the journal. Fifty years after the demise of the Bell, after the frustration of its editors' dream of a journal rendered outward-looking and inclusive by the Irish people's ownership, and shaping, of that journal, are Agee and Ó Searcaigh providing something of a response to all that was demanded by the trenchant editorials of Sean O'Faolain and Peadar O'Donnell? Agee consciously places Irish Pages in this line of descent, believing that the current era, just like the 1950s, represents "an arid period of Irish cultural life" and admitting that the format of the journal, and its pattern of juxtaposing diverse genres and subjects, were influenced by the time he spent at Queen's University Belfast, absorbed in its archive of the Bell, as he researched the work of Butler, at one time its review editor.

In his policy of inviting, and reading, manuscripts from professional and amateur writers alike, Agee echoes the openness by which O'Faolain made years of "heartburn" for himself, calling in the first Bell for expressions of every corner of life. "This is your magazine," he would instruct readers for the next 14 years, until O'Donnell took over as editor. "Do not write on abstract subjects." It was a note of hope, if a wary one; part of Ireland's responsibility to face up to its new identity was its responsibility to give voice to the reality - the gates, the wells, the farms and the shops - of its existence.

And

O'Faolain was partly satisfied. Early issues featured writing of superb richness: Flann O'Brien on the change in the "décor of boozing in Dublin"; Edward Fahy, the Reid professor of law, on the prison system; a first-hand account of life in a slum; a secondary teacher on the deficit in Irish-language eduction; a series of investigations, by Michael Farrell, into "country theatre"; Lennox Robinson on the county libraries; Norah McGuinness on window-dressing.

The "country people" were shy at first, but the work came in: on rabbiting, on pawnshops, on "myself and some ducks". But something was missing; while a war raged in Europe, those qualified to write on social and political issues, O'Faolain wrote in 1941, those thinkers and students, were lazy, sluggish, silent. The Bell, he warned, would reveal its character, that of real Irish life, only "when everybody has co-operated". Otherwise the periodical would close for lack of appropriate material, for lack of discussion.

Five years later, soon after he wrote a scathing editorial on Ireland's neutrality during the war, its unwillingness to look "beyond the seas" to a "wider range of interests", to "interdependence" rather than simply to its own "formal independence", O'Faolain stepped down, and the journal's strongest period was over.

The sense was that Ireland had ignored a precious opportunity to think, to argue, to articulate itself. In the late 1970s another version of that opportunity would appear, with the establishment of the Crane Bag by Richard Kearney and Mark Patrick Hederman, a cultural journal that immediately assumed an identity of confident cosmopolitanism, folding mythography, anthropology, sociology and continental philosophy into a sophisticated mix.

That very sophistication, however, placed the Crane Bag at a remove from O'Faolain's vision of inclusiveness; for all its talk of a "fifth province" of the imagination as an alternative to fixed and frustrated social and political positions, the roll-call was largely academic. Cogent as its articles were, their gaze was largely theoretical.

The journal's eager engagement with mythology, meanwhile, placed it at a further remove.

In his first editorial, discussing the choice of the Bell as a title, O'Faolain had dismissed "the old symbolic words", settling instead on a word "with a minimum of associations". In a new Ireland all symbols had to be created afresh.

But the first editorial of the Crane Bag traced the journal's lineage to Manannan, god of the sea, whose crane-skin bag possessed his most precious things, and set its identity out in precisely the abstract terms that O'Faolain had rejected - as "a metaphor or symbol".

In 1945 O'Faolain had compared Ireland's stance on the war to that of "the Greek communists"; the Greece with which the Crane Bag concerned itself, however incisively, was that of Socrates.

Ultimately, all the two journals seemed to share was a deep concern with Belfast and the North. The Bell's take was largely positive, with O'Faolain enthusing about the quality of Ulster writing, the "immediacy" and internationalism of Belfast; that of the Crane Bag, in its 1980 Northern issue, unsurprisingly, was cloaked in darker hues. Beyond these views, or perhaps between them, Irish Pages - "Irish" was another word O'Faolain rejected when devising his title - steps in. "I think journals relate to cities," says Agee, "like the Bell was a Dublin journal and the New Yorker is a New York journal. Ultimately, it always has that root."

But beyond that root the journal has, too, a longer reach, one that recalls O'Faolain's warning of the perils of insularity, in his angry 1945 editorial "The Price of Peace", when he pointed out that the troubled Middle East was "no more isolated from the world situation than Northern Ireland is". The internationalism of Irish Pages tends towards the East, from Poland and Croatia to Russia and Czechoslovakia, and that's no accident; his time in Eastern Europe was what brought Agee closer to an understanding of Belfast. "That mix of incredible fascination and extreme psychic oppression in 1980s Belfast was very similar, in a way, to that in Eastern Europe," he says, "in the sense that politics lay like a slab on daily life."

That slab has not yet been fully prised away; as O'Faolain would no doubt remind him, there's work yet to be done. But it has begun.

• Irish Pages is available from select bookshops