IN 1985, Glasgow based Professor of Tourism, Edward Friel, was just plain Eddie and employed as Northern Ireland Tourism's man in North America. He faced an incredulous Tourist Board back in Belfast when he suggested that their about to be released 35mm promotional film might be read as offensive in his green American marketplace. The film had been devised in conjunction with, and the commentary was written and recorded by, that most liberal and impartial of BBC Radio 4's presenters, the one time Guardian editor, Brian Redhead.
The film was called, with easy fluency, From Here To The While House, and traced genetic connections between the 18th century wave of Presbyterian emigration from the northern plantation counties and a dozen men who had become American Presidents. Redhead's script found parallels between the dissenter politics of the emigrants and the spirit of revolutionary America.
In Redhead's words, "They were the instrument and the inspiration of its independence, its expansion, its dreams." His film focused on, and - unquestioningly - reflected the ethos of the Ulster American Folk Park at Camphill near Omagh in County Tyrone.
The distance between Friel and his Board came as a surprise to both parties. Few on the Board could comprehend Friel's reservation that a promotion which focused so exclusively on 18th century Protestants, with little mention of the much larger 19th century post Famine Catholic emigration, might offend the sensibilities of his potential customers. Friel could scarcely comprehend his own Board's incomprehension of his stand.
David Brett, in a sub chapter on the Park in this timely new study of the presentation of popular history through interpretative centres, finds little to object to in "a sectarian view of history, and none at all to the celebration of the importance of Ulster Protestants in the creation of the United States".
The Park accepts the Planters' thesis that they brought order (whitewashed cottages) first to forested Ulster, then imposed purity (spare shingled houses far from rough imagined log cabins) on a newly conquered wilderness.
Brett accepts that "the intellectual lineage of Dissent leads directly towards the Constitution". What he does find distasteful is that the Park (and no doubt he would have written similarly of Redhead's film, had he seen it) does not state its premise openly. The Park, he proposes, is not Ulster American in a geographical sense, but Ulster Presbyterian in a confessional sense. The later addition of a single, pre emigration Catholic home does not alter the overall rhetoric.
This is all well reasoned and provoking stuff, and dangerous too for its author, for he adds in a footnote - this slim tome has a flurry of footnotes concomitant with its academic roots - that when he first published a not dissimilar dissertation in Circa in 1993 a "loyalist" periodical threatened him with "corrective therapy, when the facts were known".
It is surely unsatisfactory, then, that this book has little to say of the Park's specific aetiology, no discussion of the role of its founder Eric Montgomery, one time head of the Stormont government's Information Services. Detailed documents on such matters are, Brett meekly offers, not available.
Armagh's Navan Fort Centre is another northern tourist attraction which causes the author discomfort. Though he praises its architecture, its technology and its archaeological enlightenment, he finds the story of Cuchulain tendentiously appropriated into the loyalist canon. Not grasping the nettle again, he writes that it is not clear who was responsible for the script. Academia, not journalism, is his world.
The Ceide Fields Centre in Mayo loses both Brett and reader in the unending debate as to who are the Celts, and indeed it is only in Strokestown's Famine Museum that he finds the dialogue of presentation to his satisfaction. Though he makes the telling point that material on the famine inevitably comes "only from those who did not go hungry", he finds the key to his satisfaction lies in a presentation which allows participation in the creation of historical understanding
Brett's message is clear: unlike the Ulster American Folk Park, the Navan Centre and Ceide Fields, Strokestown is free from official funding.