The opening of the new Northern Ireland Assembly highlighted once more the fractious nature of cultural politics in the North. A few words in Irish from Sinn Fein were greeted with a fit of ill-mannered coughs from some unionists while supporters of Scots spoken in Ulster ("UlsterScots") distributed leaflets.
It is not surprising that things have developed in such a way. Sinn Fein has long been vocally proud of its attempts to push the Irish language. Like all political parties, however, it has been less keen to admit its failings in this regard. The old policy of equating words of Irish with "bullets" in the fight for "national liberation" seems to have been quietly decommissioned as the party has sought to emphasis the cross-community importance of the language in recent times.
Partly, perhaps mainly, as a response to the republican cultural agenda, Ulster-Scots has emerged as a counter-balance from unionist quarters. The argument put forward for it is, in many ways, a mirror image of the republican argument: "They have their language, we have our language" - and never the twain shall meet. Ulster-Scots was an anchor forged to stop Orange Ulster from drifting away in a sea of Gaelic green.
Cultural fabric
It would be a mistake, however, to let any political party or pressure group in the North set the cultural agenda. Writers and artists are the ones who should be doing that. It is through their work that the wilfully constructed stereotypes of "our" culture and "their" culture are most effectively challenged.
Take, for example, the work of the Scottish poet Robbie Burns. His verses were part and parcel of the cutural fabric of the Donegal Gaeltacht since the beginning of this century. The novelist Seamus O Grianna (or "Maire", to use his pen-name) spent his summers, as did many from that region, as an economic migrant in Scotland harvesting and navvying. (The Romanians of their time?) What drove him and his contemporaries was economic necessity, a necessity, it must be said, which did not die with the foundation of the Irish Free State.
In the first part of his autobiography, Nuair a bhi me Og, O Grianna is introduced to the poetry and locale of Robbie Burns. It is an Odyssey of discovery and education for the young man and one which leaves an indelible mark on him. He litters one chapter of his autobiography with verses from Burns:
What's a' the jargon o' your schools,
Your Latin names for horns and stools?
If honest nature made you fools,
What sairs your grammars?
Ye'd better ta'en up spades and shools
Or knappin' hammers.
Costly investment
Without question, Burns's anti-authoritian tone appealed to O Grianna. Tellingly, O Grianna is later asked: "Do you read often?" He replies: "Often enough . . . But I have only one book, Burns. One that I bought last year . . ." One book and that bought. An investment in literature that was undoubtedly costly for someone forced to work like a mule for every penny he could collect.
What fascinates most is that this cultural exchange occurred almost unnoticed. The gaudy to-ing and fro-ing of contemporary literature has none of the lyrical honesty and heartbreaking poetry of O Grianna's encounter.
Here was a man, like many of his generation, with pride in himself and his people, with an ear for the music of the spoken word, learning from a neglected tradition. This cross-pollination and whispered discourse was to last well into this century. The Donegal poet Cathal O Searcaigh, a man only in his 40s, remembers his own father returning from work in Scotland and reciting Burns.
Burns spoke to the native speakers of Donegal in a way which was often magical. It is difficult to see Burns or the language he spoke as being "ours" or "theirs". It lived among the predominately Catholic, predominately monoglot Irish speakers on Ulster's western seaboard long before unionism decided it needed a counterbalance to a republican cultural agenda.
Michael Longley
An added twist is provided by the poem Phemios and Medon by Michael Longley. Longley takes the story from the Odyssey and rewrites the Greek into as near a living Ulster-Scots vernacular as you're likely to get:
Still looking for a scoot-hole, Phemios the poet
In swithers, fiddling with his harp, jukes to the hatch,
lays the bruckle yoke betwen porringer and armchair,
Makes a ram-stam for Odysseus, grammels his knees,
Then bannies and bams we this highfalutin blether . . .
[Still looking for a rat-hole, Phemios the poet
In hesitation, fiddling with his harp, ducks to the hatch,
lays the brittle implement between porringer and armchair,
Makes recklessly for Odysseus, grabs his knees,
Then cajoles and bums with this high-falutin' blether. . .]
No navvy, Longley - educated in the classics at Trinity, born and raised in Belfast, on Ulster's eastern seaboard. His poem is further proof of the power of Scots on the imagination. It is the words that matter; the images they evoke in the mind that count. The use that "them" and "us" make out of language seems petty in the light and O Grianna's and O Searcaigh's and Longley's epiphanies.
That, I believe, is how it should be and that is the challenge faced by all artists in the North, more so now then ever: to send the needle on the cultural compass spinning between east and west while all the time searching for true North.