We may be too engrossed in our smartphones to talk to each other at dinner, but at festivals, summer schools and parades we’re certainly getting our point across
We have a banjaxed political system in Northern Ireland, but we still have a growing public space in which ideas are being aired, says Malachi O’Doherty
We are, allegedly, living in an age in which we are losing touch with each other. Social media is said to be separating us, allowing us to mix with strangers, exposing us to their wrath and their mad ideas.
And we see the evidence of this in couples sitting at restaurant tables, each with a smartphone beside the plate, neither able to leave it alone for long, as if the musings and rages of strangers had become more important to us than the soft voices of those we love, those who love us.
And that’s all true. We do see this.
But there is something else going on.
Any social scientist coming this year to observe life in Northern Ireland would be remiss not to observe radical social change of another kind, the new prevalence of the festival. Combine it with its near relation, public protest, and you would have to conclude that a lot of us are getting out there, joining big discussions.
Whether it is tens of thousands of people on the street for Pride or a few dozen at a summer school poetry reading, the common factor is that people care about something and they get together with others of shared interest.
And this is true across the
political and social and cultural spectra.
Thousands flock to Feile in west Belfast or stand in front of the City Hall every week asserting their right to fly the Union flag.
I was invited last week to sit on the panel of West Belfast Talks Back, chaired by Noel Thompson. I had remarked in the media before that I saw Feile as closed to people like me, people who had grown up in west Belfast but did not share the reverence for the Provisional IRA. I said that Feile was open to unionists but not to disagreeable neighbours.
This year I was made warmly welcome and I then used the platform they gave me to scoff at the IRA campaign as misguided and unwarranted. And about half the audience applauded.
Two nights earlier Danny Morrison, speaking from the floor at a debate on the civil rights movement, accused the British Army of having “gassed ten thousand people” in the Lower Falls in 1970, and Brid Rodgers came back at him, cutting the legs out from under him and his rationalisation of the IRA campaign on the grounds that the first killing was by loyalists, the first bomb by loyalists and a lot of other firsts that added up to, in Danny’s mind, an absolution of what followed. She didn’t agree.
This was all good, hearty debate.
Then later in the same week I was speaking at Ten By Nine.
This is a storytelling event organised by Padraig O Tuama, leader of the Corrymeela community, and Paul Doran, a BBC producer.
I only discovered it last year. It meets every month in the Black Box and allows nine speakers 10 minutes each to tell a true story related to a designated theme, often very liberally interpreted. Ten By Nine — or tenx9, if you are Googling it — gets huge audiences, though it is a free event and is now spreading to other towns. Last week it was staged at the EastSide Arts Festival and at the Open House Festival in Bangor.
And some of the regulars like Richard O’Leary, Helen McClements and Claire Mitchell are gaining a kind of local stardom through it.
A Ten By Nine story can be hilarious, like Richard O’Leary’s account of his time teaching in China, and getting a Chinese name phonetically based on his original.
It can also be heart-rending, including stories of loss and bereavement.
Some make you laugh, some make you cry.
The strength of Ten By Nine is that it is serious, not just light entertainment.
The John Hewitt Summer School has been meeting in Armagh every July for a dozen or more years and has managed to regenerate itself in recent years with new, younger audiences getting involved.
The fear of festival organisers anywhere is that their reliable regulars will eventually just die off and that they will have difficulty replacing them.
But that is not happen- ing, and this year, during a heatwave, a couple of hundred people passed their days indoors listening to poetry and lectures on politics and culture and taking classes from experienced writers, then airing their own work.
This is not what popular prejudice tells us young people want to be doing.
And the Hewitt is not a rarity. There are many other summer schools, and now winter schools, like the John O’Connor, also in Armagh.
The MacGill Summer School in Glenties got into bother this year after being accused of not making enough effort to get the gender balance right on panels, but it continues to host political debates that frequently generate strong news stories.
The former leader of the DUP, Peter Robinson, used the MacGill as a platform to develop his ideas of why unionists should be preparing to respond to a growing demand for a united Ireland.
Not only had the MacGill organisers planned a brilliant event, but Robinson, a canny operator, had seen it as the appropriate forum for a tweaking of the unionist agenda.
Of course, summer schools and many festival events thrive today against the pressure of cuts in funding, and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland has to take some credit for funding a revival like this.
So, something is in the air. We have a banjaxed political system but we also have a growing public space in which ideas are being aired and old forms of entertainment — such as storytelling — are being revived.
We have an education system which is stretched for funds and focusing less on creativity and yet we also have a clear demand for creative opportunities and arts events.
We have a growing scepticism about politics and a fear that the brashest and most ill-conceived ideas will predominate and yet we have people giving up the chance to tan themselves in the park to hear political lectures.
We have a media which assumes that we all have short attention spans, a social media which runs on the same principle, and yet we have summer schools in which people sit and listen for hours to an academic explain another theory about the Troubles.
And we have a cynical presumption that no one really cares anymore, and yet they come to protests for same-sex marriage, abortion law reform, flag rights, legacy rights, language rights, parading rights.
On the 50th anniversary of the civil rights movement we actually have more public parading, and a more festive spirit around it than we had then.
I don’t know what has created this change, but something has.
And it is a good thing.
This year I was made warmly welcome at Feile and used the platform to scoff at the IRA campaign
We are sceptical about politics yet give up the chance of a tan in the park to hear political lectures