Following Thursday night’s deal in Northern Ireland, five contemporary writers give their views on the political events of recent times
"The groundswell of public anger over the Hillsborough delays was telling"
MICHAEL LONGLEY
“Have we just avoided a crisis for the peace process and the institutions? Or have we witnessed what political commentators call ‘choreography’? That is, tribal dances designed to reassure members of the Northern Irish tribes that neither has sacrificed anything; all is still to play for. I believe that some tribal dances continue to the point of exhaustion or even death.
“Depressingly, it has been Groundhog Day. Every re-run of previous crises saps the political energies needed for creating ‘a shared future’. Let us hope we have now reached the end of the beginning. If policing and justice are successfully devolved, the Executive will have run out of excuses for under-performing on education, on the environment, on the economy. The interminable talks again cast doubt on a system that fossilises the sectarian-political divide, and so has little incentive to dismantle it. Sectarian division wastes resources as well as the spirit. It puts a huge brake on talent and energy. No wonder bright youngsters leave. Both parties at the talks (although DUP politicians were the worst offenders) seemed primarily concerned to make a deal that would satisfy ‘our people’. They exposed how little work they have done on the collective language of ‘a shared future’, although Gerry Adams talking about ‘a new spirit’ is a start. In fact, for years many people have been working on a new spirit and a new language. The groundswell of public anger over the Hillsborough delays was telling, and a hopeful sign.
"Perhaps we keep coming back to square one because the Belfast Agreement enshrines two incompatible aspirations: aspirations that are also incompatible with making 'a shared North' the priority. Neglect of that project – a shared North – could allow violence to creep back. At the time of the Agreement I happened to be in the Burren in Co Clare. I wrote a tentatively optimistic poem called At Poll Salach:
While I was looking for Easter snow on the hills
You showed me, like a concentration of violets
Or a fragment from some future unimagined sky,
A single spring gentian shivering at our feet.
Twelve years on, I sometimes fear that my symbolic gentian is still shivering.”
** Michael Longley is Ireland Professor of Poetry
"I never really believed that Stormont would collapse"
STUART NEVILLE
"My first novel uses the stability of Stormont as one of the main stakes, but it only gets away with it because it's set in a specific moment in time (spring 2007) when things were pretty solid. It would be simply too risky to start a novel now, hoping that the Assembly would still be up and running by the time it was published two years down the line. I think Colin Bateman got it right in Divorcing Jackwhen he created an entirely fictitious government with a member of the Alliance Party as prime minister in waiting. That's close to science fiction, of course, but it's a safer bet than pinning your plot on anything we have in the real world.
“Having a go at our politicians, whether in satire or thriller genres, is like shooting fish in a barrel, to be honest. I know it’s a cliche, but what’s been going on lately, you couldn’t make it up. Incompetence and corruption seem to be rife on all sides. Some ministers have proven themselves to be simply unable to carry out the jobs they were nominated for, while others have lost the public’s trust through dodgy dealings. But we’ll keep voting for them all the same. Until we mature beyond the sectarian head count, we’ll be stuck with what we’ve got.
“Would that make good fodder for a thriller? Possibly, but I think it lends itself better to satirists such as Garbhan Downey who can cut through the pomposity and hypocrisy of it all. As a crime and thriller writer, I’m more interested in whatever dirt fills the cracks between the politicians, what goes on beneath the surface, and how that reaches down to street level.
“I never really believed that Stormont would collapse in the recent impasse. The politicians had just got their feet under the table, they were not going to throw away their salaries and expense claims now. Besides, I don’t think the voting public would have forgiven them for packing it in over issues that, quite frankly, don’t matter a great deal to most ordinary people. The resulting election would still have been a sectarian head count, but it’d be a different set of politicians taking the seats.”
** Stuart Neville is a thriller writer, whose latest novel is The Twelve
"The term 'political leadership' was dangerously close to an oxymoron"
BRIAN McGILLOWAY
"While researching my first novel, Borderlands, I had concerns about the credibility of a plot point involving the protagonist, Garda Inspector Devlin, crossing over the Border while investigating a murder. Warily, I broached the issue of cross-Border co-operation with police officers from both sides. The image of two forces working closely together with common purpose would encapsulate, I hoped, the newly devolved Northern Ireland.
“I was pleasantly surprised to learn that such co-operation had been going on for years, even if it did make my image a little redundant. I was told one particularly striking story. When members of the RUC recovered poachers’ nets from the northern side of the River Foyle, they were unable, professionally, to claim a finder’s fee from Foyle Fisheries. Instead they gathered up the nets found each month and brought them over the Border to gardaí who could take the nets to the fisheries and claim the reward. Then the two sides would meet for a steak dinner in a local hotel, paid for with the finder’s fee.
“This was 30 years ago, at a time when the various factions in Northern Ireland were at their most extreme. Yet what was happening on the ground in this way was the antithesis of the behaviour of our political leaders. It would be some time before they followed so commonsensical an approach to dealing with their counterparts.
“The public excitement surrounding the Belfast Agreement negotiations and the grim determination and hope for success during the St Andrews talks has given way to public anger and embarrassment at the almost farcical goings-on in Hillsborough. The once-silent majority having found their collective voice, the radio chat-shows and newspaper letter pages of the past few weeks have been filled with their expressions of anger.
“We voted for devolution more than a decade ago, yet our leaders continued to engage in partisan politics, electioneering, petty point-scoring and secret talks. For many in the North during these past weeks, ‘political leadership’ was dangerously close to being an oxymoron. The eventual deal is welcome, if belated, evidence that under public pressure the two sides can work together. I just wonder if attendance at the steak dinner will prove optional.”
** Brian McGilloway is a thriller writer, and author of the Inspector Devlin series
"Listening to the public exasperation I ask myself who voted these people in"
DAVID PARK
“Our politicians come from outer space or, in the Ulster vernacular, up the Lagan in a bubble. They should be grateful that they live in this bubble because otherwise they would surely wither in the face of the universal scorn pouring upon their heads. The radio phone-ins, the television vox-pops, letters in the paper – a rising flood-tide of exasperation washes round the interminable negotiations that expose our political life to ridicule. The jokes abound: the last one I heard asked for the difference between the Taliban and the DUP, with the punchline: ‘You can negotiate with the Taliban.’ (Thankfully it’s been at least a week since someone told me a new joke about Iris.)
“And yet, as I listen to this rip-tide of public exasperation I ask myself who voted these people in, before coming to the conclusion that it’s probably the same people who rush to vent their disgust and who, because this is the North, will probably repeat their folly at the next electoral opportunity.
“However, the most truly disturbing realisation that has emerged from the recent deadlock, even for someone who has lived all his life here and whose father wore a sash, is how indelibly fundamentalist unionist DNA is stained in Orange. Perhaps it was naive of me, but I believed that the political processes so painfully established had moved us all to a better, more reasonable place. So to find that this week that we had political representatives willing to surrender everything that has been achieved, rather than surrender the right to have Orange feet on the Garvaghy Road, is almost too incredible for me to believe.
“But it seemed to be the truth and so we risked damning the future because we are still led by people who think the power of the past can only be ensured by marching where you’re not wanted. We’ve also had the unedifying sight of the Ulster Unionist Party – which claims to be embracing the future by teaming up with Cameron’s Conservatives – engaging with the DUP about the possibility of some form of unity, talks apparently sponsored and instigated by the Orange Order.”
David Park's latest novel is The Truth Commissioner
"All this will be forgotten now the 'historic' agreement has been reached"
GLENN PATTERSON
“Time was, I heard the governments announce a talks deadline and I took my suit to the dry-cleaner’s. Three days later – suit cleaned, deadline broken and all the politicians and political commentators exhausted – one or other of the English news channels would phone and ask could I come and stand outside Stormont to talk about the mood on the street. The fact that no one has phoned me in the last 12 days (except The Irish Times) suggests that the media have either not bought into the current ‘crisis’ in the same way or have simply cottoned on to the fact that novelists spend precious little time on the street.
“My morning routine sees me walk my youngest daughter down the alleyway opposite our house, round the front of the odd-shaped redbrick building on the corner, across the road to her nursery, then back to my study and the Belfast of 1831, where, for reasons which seemed compelling when I started it, my new novel is set. Since the turn of the year this routine has seemed more than usually perverse. Because that building at the end of the alleyway is the east Belfast headquarters of the DUP.
“At the same time I remind myself that novels are not newspapers and that the proper moment to write the 2010 novel may well be 2189. Or maybe it will appear the year after next. I hope that when it does it will not make the mistake of imagining its characters were endlessly discussing the devolution of policing and justice or the future of the parades commission. I hope too, though, that with the benefit of hindsight it will be able to record that the preening politicians who have been travelling the globe to lecture others on the ‘Most Successful Peace Process in the History of the World’ had the humility to cancel all engagements until further notice.
“Writing at the tail-end of the Paisley-McGuinness love-in, I said that we in Northern Ireland were living not at the End of History, but of Surprise. Embarrassment is another matter. Our elected representatives (including the ones who would have you think their negotiating shit don’t stink) have proved, day by day, hour by hour, how far we have to go to reach the end of that.
“All this will be forgotten, of course, now the ‘historic’ agreement (we don’t do any other kind) has been reached. It shouldn’t be. They didn’t need to dig the hole they have managed, finally, to climb out of.”
** Glenn Patterson's memoir is Once Upon a Hill; Love in Troubled Times
Compiled by Rosita Boland
