Part 1: The maturation cultural projects requires wise decisions

In the early 1990s, I worked on an Education for Mutual Understanding project which took pupils from two different schools through a range of curated experiences. Most of the students from the Quaker grammar school where I taught came from a pro-Union political background. The other institution in the duo was a neighbouring Catholic grammar school and its pupils invariably came from a Nationalist background.

Friendships may have been formed and mutual respect achieved: the critique that follows is not an accusation of malign intent levelled at students or teachers. However, by the time I had completed my period of involvement, I had come to the opinion that this well-meaning endeavour was in danger of giving Unionist students a sense of inadequacy.

This opinion is based on observing discussions which took place at late-night venues such as the Corrymeela community. Whether chaired or informal, these conversations would often turn to ‘culture’. The Nationalist young people would speak of their pride in distinctive Irish traditional music and dance, the ancient riches of the Irish language and the joys of Gaelic sports. For many there was real pride in the distinctive Irish Catholic practice and iconography that sat close to the heart of their curriculum and the school’s geographical layout.

Although in subsequent years there has been a growing recognition that Irish language, dance and music are not necessarily a ‘Nationalist thing’, there was little knowledge of these subjects back then among my students. For many of them, global pop and rock were the musical touchstones, and not only did they feel little affinity with the Irish language, very few had any interest in what was then a nascent project to recognise and promote Ulster Scots.

My students had never been to a Gaelic football match, but they played games such as soccer, rugby, hockey and cricket, sporting activities no different from those practised in an array of cultures across the world and thus deemed non-significant as markers of identity. As for the Quakerism that lay at the heart of my school’s heritage, it was always a low-key minority faith that abjured religious imagery and rites. It confined its influence on my pupils to an emphasis on community involvement and the practice of silence as a mode of worship.  

I perceived a danger that they could end up feeling culturally void – that they would feel rootless when faced with these distinctive, indigenous cultural products which were on enthusiastic offer from the other side of ‘the divide’. I feared that the students in my group might sense themselves floating on the tide of global culture without a sense of native place, native tongue, native tune, native sport or native faith.

Of course, history tells us that in the face of the sustained colonial project that Britain undertook in on the island of Ireland, those who attempted to rebuild Irish identity well over a century ago sought to create cultural dignity and to repair a severed native inheritance. They did so through revival of the Irish language, through invoking traditional storytelling and music, and through reimagining Irish sport as a set of codified games to trump the ‘imported’ sports of football, cricket and rugby.

In some cases, though not all, the leaders of that renaissance invoked Catholic spirituality at the heart of Irishness. But now it was my students, whose allegiance was pro-British, who were in danger of feeling rootless and ‘uncultured’, lacking in the vibrancy of their new Irish Nationalist acquaintances.

While a sense of revenge may be sweet in any reader of this essay who exults in the irony of such a changeover, in truth such swopping of historic roles was unnecessary and dangerous.

It was unnecessary because my students had absolutely no reason to cringe. If a ‘pro-Union’ allegiance signifies anything then it means that the individual who grows up in that environment has no need to define his or herself over against Britishness. For instance, the young people in my care could have expressed delight in the fact that the cricket and rugby they played each week had unique British origins and an exhilarating global reach, from Bangladesh to Barbados, as well as a vibrant if under-recognised history in Ireland.

The works by Shakespeare, Dickens, Wordsworth, Willam Blake and Wilfred Owen, which they studied at school (as no doubt the Nationalist students may also have done) were samples of the very best of British cultural heritage, emanating from writers who challenged privilege, rejoiced in the natural world, decried armed conflict and took pleasure in the power of imagination.

And ever since the 1960s, the British popular music my students loved had been at the innovative heart of youth culture on several continents, whether in the Merseyside that spawned the Beatles, the London of Punk Rock or indeed the Dublin from which sprang U2.

As for the Quaker traditions of their school, these offered a rich but under-articulated array of religious tolerance, scepticism about religious hierarchies, pacifism, philanthropy, a long history of co-education for boys and girls, deep opposition to slavery and a commitment to prison reform and famine relief across several centuries, including in Ireland.

Quite simply, my students never felt that the elements of Britishness which I have just noted could be deployed as an identity narrative in this discussion. It is true that most of my students came from a middle-class background and this may have played a role in their uncertainty about referencing the local pro-Union array of marching bands, Lambeg drums, Orange banners and Eleventh Night bonfires, which by the 1980s constituted a dominantly working-class suite of cultural practices in the part of Uster where my students lived.   

But there was also a grave danger that Nationalist students saw my pupils as devoid of identity because they couldn’t match them in adherence to some local kind of cultural richness. It should be remembered with sobriety that the leaders of all history’s colonial projects regarded those they conquered and tried to rule as lacking in a ‘proper’ culture and thus uncivilised. The de-personalisation of ‘the un-cultured other’ enabled the coloniser to salve his or her conscience, justify his or her gains and at times to wield a great deal of brute force. If any of their opposite numbers in that Catholic grammar school had ended up seeing my pupils as ‘lacking an identity’ then it would be ironic. The myth of ‘the un-cultured other’ surely shouldn’t be found in the repertoire of an Irish Nationalism that came to consciousness through recognising that pernicious trope.

I must conclude by re-emphasising that my essay is written to illustrate the danger in a template of cultural comparison that is skewed or inadequate. The young people in the sessions I attended were sincere and kind and their teachers were dedicated to reconciliation but if a harmful model of cultural exchange was present in those late-night chats, then that is dangerous.