PROFESSIONAL politicians have dominated negotiations on the future of Northern Ireland. As a result, the centrality of cultural issues to an understanding of both fundamental causes and future possibilities remains unarticulated at the political level. On the one hand, culture in Northern Ireland has been a malign form of expression, an outward sign of sealed identities, a system of shibboleths, an expression of what we are not as much as of what we are, yet it is also through culture that we must seek to find the boundaries essential to constructive and uncontrived relationships between communities.
Catholic housing estates in Northern Ireland, however deprived, are often distinguished, from their working class equivalents in Britain and the Republic by the extent to which sport, music, language, community arts and adult education have given them the ability to speak to and for themselves. This has been an achievement of the highest significance and is for many Catholic areas the only obvious attainment to set against twenty five years of loss.
Protestant cultural accomplishment at community level has been more modest, with self confidence diminished not only by the "Troubles", historical factors, economic decline and a paucity of local leaders, but also by the contrast between the international standing of Catholic writers and the indifference of audiences, particularly in the United States, towards artists drawn from a people wrongly stereotyped as being synonymous with bigotry and philistinism. The result has been a tendency to cede the cultural realm to Catholics - how else could an arts festival in West Belfast exclude from its programme some of the largest Protestant estates in Northern Ireland while still calling itself the West Belfast Festival?
The cultural blindness of politicians cannot be attributed to an absence of debate, although it may be partly attributable to a failure of dissemination among the debaters. The Irish Review, as well as journals such as Caiseway and Fortnight and events such as the John Hewitt International Summer School, have consistently interrogated Irish cultural assumptions and as a result some initial understanding has been reached of the extent to which Conor Cruise O'Brien's untant, essays on "Memory and Forgetting", a more mixed series of healthy intersection" of literature and politics has affected the arthritic body politic.
The current issue of the Irish Review deals primarily with how understandings of the past when set in the present make commemoration the site of a contested politics. Michael Longley and John Banville contribute imporessays deal with the 150th anniversary of the Queen's Colleges, and there are essays on the Famine and on Science in Ireland, as well as poetry and book reviews.
Banville's essay, "The Ireland of de Valera and O Faolain", attributes the stagnation in Irish life from the Thirties to the Sixties not nly to "a failure of will among liberal intellectuals" but to "the triumph of will among reactionary intellectuals, led by the redoubtable corporatist politician and amateur mathematician Eamon de Valera". He characterises Dev's republic as "a demilitarised totalitarian state in which the lives of its citizens were to be controlled not by a system of coercive force, and secret policing, but by a kind of applied spiritual paralysis maintained by an unofficial federation between the Catholic clergy, the judiciary and the civil service". Isolation and, consequently, censorship were essential to this achievement, and Banville depicts a censorship of films and books which was not simply whimsical or ignorant but which had a real grasp of what constituted the hegemonic forces in Ireland; and it knew what was needed to maintain their sway.
Michael Longley's essay, "Memory and Acknowledgment", deals directly with issues of commemoration and points out that the current highly politicised commemoration of the Famine has devalued both the Famine and the Holocaust by making them equivalent. In an essay built around three of his own powers, he points to two real and significant occasions of reconciliation: the Tullamore service for the dead of the Troubles, and the presence of Sinn Fein's Tom Hartley at the Islandbridge commemoration for the dead of the World Wars.