Home pages with a global outlook

Irish Pages plays an important role in an increasingly dynamic and international cultural scene, the journal's editor tells Susan McKay

There is a hilarious and brilliant essay by Cathal Ó Searcaigh in a recent issue of the Belfast journal, Irish Pages. Called "The View from the Glen" it starts with an evocation of the past when Irish-language writers grumped and drooped and felt hopeless and marginalised. It moves swiftly to find the poet at an Altan concert in Milwaukee in the 1990s, realising in a moment of "heart-swelling ebullience" that the Irish language has become "dashingly cool and daringly hip".

He remembers his first visit as a monolingual child to a town six miles from his home in Donegal, along with his grandfather. The bus journey is "wondrous", chatting away in Irish, but in town, his grandfather speaks hesitantly and with difficulty to the people he meets "in a strange and cumbersome language". When the boy asks him what it is, the old man explains, "Here we will have to speak English because they will think we're from the bogs."

The boy replies with childish innocence, "But aren't we from the bogs, granda?", to which the old man responds, "You will have to learn English, a chroí, so that the bog can be sifted out of you." And so began the "colonic irrigation of English" meant to cleanse the gut of the Irish that had built up there.

The same issue of Irish Pages includes a piece called "A War Criminal Repents". This is an address to the judges at the Hague Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia by Biljana Plavsic, one of the architects of Serbia's murderous policy of ethnic cleansing. She admits the regime victimised thousands of innocent people and asks how it could have happened. "Blinding fear that led to an obsession, especially for those of us for whom the second World War was a living memory, " she says, "that Serbs would never again allow themselves to become victims."

In pursuit of this obsession, Serbians had "lost our own nobility of character " and "violated the most basic duty of every human being, the duty to restrain oneself and to respect the human dignity of others."

The leaders of Israel's current slaughter of the innocent could do with considering this remarkable document, salvaged by Irish Pages from the drift of history.

The mix in Irish Pages is always excitingly eclectic. The latest issue includes poems in English by, among others, Seamus Heaney, John Montague and Gerard Smyth, in Irish by Liam Ó Muirthile, translations of a Russian poem by Inna Lisnianskaya and a Dutch one by Esther Jansma, a story by William Trevor, a fascinating selection from the archives of letters to TS Eliot and WH Auden from Louis MacNeice, an essay by Tim Robinson and an oration in memory of the late Ted Hickey by Michael Longley.

There are striking colour photographs of Irish places by the French photographer, Melina Gacoin.

There is also a superb extract from a memoir by Patricia Craig, capturing with affection and good humour, all the oppressive awfulness of Belfast from the 1950s through the Troubles. (Irish Pages is particularly strong on memoir - there is a wonderful piece in another issue from Auschwitz survivor and longtime Belfast resident Helen Lewis, a welcome supplement to her great book, A Time to Dance.) Craig, the biographer of Brian Moore and editor of a fine anthology about Belfast, has praised the journal in the highest terms.

"The Bell makes a doughty precursor for Irish Pages, which, in a similar vein, goes all out for sober excellence and inspired audacity," she has written. Susan Sontag and Michael Longley have both called it "wonderful".

"It is about good contemporary writing," says the journal's editor, Chris Agee. "That is the first thing. We are reinvigorating the Yeatsian notion that culture has a part to play in society. This is the cosmopolitan versus the insular, Kavanagh's parochial versus coruscating provincialism. The old had become stagnant here, and the Troubles meant there was a lack of oxygen for creativity. There was a cultural claustrophobia. It isn't coincidental that as soon as the framework for a political settlement was in place, a series of culture wars started, including Drumcree. There are issues of Freudian displacement.

"Irish Pages is part of a general globalisation of things Irish. Things are opening up. There is a hugely dynamic cultural scene with a big input from immigrants, including tens of thousands of Poles and Latvians. This place is normally compared with Palestine and South Africa but the real parallels are with the 'small nations' of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Croatia used to call itself the Ulster of Yugoslavia."

It is hard to interview Agee, because such is his passion for his work and his determination to do it proud, that he has come armed with notes and books studded with references, and he will not stop talking. He has resigned from teaching American Studies through the Open University, and is in the process of taking voluntary redundancy from a position with a trade union in order to devote himself full time to Irish Pages and to his own poetry, which has been described by the Scottish poet, Don Paterson as having the rare ability to "hit that fine balance between allusiveness and clarity, and formal control and spontaneity".

From New England, Agee studied at Harvard when both Heaney and Robert Lowell were teaching there, though he "never mustered the courage" to take their courses. He first came to Belfast in 1977 for "summer experiences" with an Irish friend. He came back as a youth worker the following year and, with the help of the late Gerry Fitt, got his visa extended. Fitt was being vilified as "Fitt the Brit" by this stage.

"I went to talk to him in his fortified front garden on the Antrim Road," Agee recalls with a smile. "Local youths were stoning the place as we sat there. He indicated them with his arm and murmured, 'soldiers of Ireland'." Agee went on to work as a lecturer in literacy and numeracy in some of the working class parts of Belfast worst afflicted by the Troubles. He met his partner, Nóirín, in 1983. "I'll never go," he says.

Irish Pages emerged from the disaster that was Belfast's bid to be European Capital of Culture, and it has support from the Arts Councils in Belfast and Dublin.

Formerly based in that great Belfast institution, the Linenhall Library, in September it will celebrate the opening of a large, plain office in the south city centre. A volume of essays, Unfinished Ireland, on the late, and in his lifetime neglected, essayist Hubert Butler, has already been published, and there are plans to bring out up to half a dozen books a year. There is an annual lecture, to be given this year (in Dublin, in December) by Sven Birkets. "He is an extremely interesting American poet and he is going to talk about the reformation of a culture by the internet and digital technology," says Agee.

Ó Searcaigh is the journal's Irish-language editor and there is a commitment to "active bilingualism". An approach to the Ulster Scots agency was rebuffed, but work in "lallans" (a Scottish literary form of English) by, among others the excellent Scottish poet, Kathleen Jamie, has been published.

"We want to be different," says Agee. "We want to have a dissident edge and to publish work informed by the ethical imagination. We believe there is a thirst for this in our increasingly complex global life. And last, last, point. We play second fiddle to nobody."

• Irish Pages is widely available. See www.irishpages.org