THE ability of the arts to provide an alternative, more open arena to that provided by politics for the discussion of identity will be tested again in the coming weeks when the painter George Fleming's paintings of Orange marches go up in the People's Museum in Fernhill House, near the Shankill Road. Sadly, this arena will not stretch South on this occasion because, although the exhibition went up at the National University at Maynooth for a week a couple of years ago, efforts to tour it to a library in the South have failed, due to the difficulty of getting insurance. The exhibition has been praised by our critic Ian Hill for its evocative but unatavistic depiction of the Twelfth.
In the North, the paintings have generated furious debate and some ownership battles. When they went on display with Cultural Traditions/ Duchas support, Ian Paisley Jnr wrote a fascinating accompanying pamphlet, in which he set down the markers of Protestant identity. It makes sad reading, in some ways, because there is a gap between its complexity and the often stupid simplicity of Northern Unionist political speeches.
He describes Northern Protestant identity as being a dual "British/Irish" one, "which is unique to the planter inheritance". He also makes a very telling - but of course, highly debatable - distinction between the nature of Irishness and the nature of Britishness: "Irishness is an all in one package providing both national identity and cultural fulfilment. Britishness, as an epithet or organising principle, has a more nebulous quality. It is difficult to define. It forms the basis of allegiance but is amenable to numerous definitions, permitting the develop Detail from The Batonment of a heterogeneous Swinger by George culture unencumbered with time specific definitions of Fleming identity and place."
Fleming says that Ian Paisley Jnr's support of the exhibition in fact discouraged the Orange Order from taking an interest:
"They all have their wee internal fights," he explains. The People's Museum exhibition catalogue will feature, at Fleming's insistence, a catalogue essay produced by William J. Smyth, Master of the National University of Ireland at Maynooth, for the Maynooth exhibition, but also another chosen by the museum, perhaps by an Orangeman, because so far "they have not been allowed to have an opinion for themselves". Fleming is leaving all that to the museum. He doesn't support either Orangeism or the Democratic Unionist Party. "Me?" he says. "I'm a Bah'ai."
