Here

After decades of conflict, and a few years carrying on like new lovers coy about the names for the bits that give them pleasure, after negotiations lasting, as negotiations are bound to last, long, long into the night, politicians of all parties have agreed that the name of this place shall henceforward be … ‘Here’. Citizens shall be ‘people here’, the remainder of the island ‘down there’ and the island to the east of us ‘over there’. The United States becomes ‘way over there’.

Please note, though, people down there, over there, and especially way over there may entertain some very strange notions about people here.

Anna Lo, Northern Ireland’s first representative of Chinese extraction, tells a story. She was at a reception in Washington.

‘I think you must have wandered into the wrong place,’ a man said.

‘No, I’m in the right place.’

‘But this is a reception for …’

‘I know what it’s a reception for,’ she said. ‘I was handpicked to come.’

‘Handpicked?’

‘Picked, by hand.’

‘You?’

‘Me. But what about you?’

‘Oh, my family left during the Great Hunger, eighteen-and-forty …’

‘No, I meant where do you pay your taxes?’

‘Well, here, of course.’

He meant ‘there’ of course, way over there, where they were. She said to him, ‘Well, I pay mine back there.’ She meant here.

Because that’s where she’s from.

Here.

Short Cuts, Radio 4, January 2012

Found in France

I have never subscribed to the view that you have to go away to find yourself. I have never even been able to write the phrase without thinking of something my father-in-law said about a feckless relative, how he had found himself all right, with both hands. Then again I have never been all that good at going away.

(I lived in England for a few years, but – sorry to disappoint anyone for whom it is an article of political faith – England isn’t ‘away’, it’s over the fence.)

Holidays in our household are haphazard, last minute, and not in a bargain-online-deal sort of way. In fact budget airlines can afford to offer their rock-bottom fares precisely because there are people like my wife and me sitting in the middle of July looking for a flight to just about anywhere and resigned to paying just about anything.

This year we made sure we wouldn’t be caught out and started making plans in the early New Year to go away with friends. Well-organised friends. Friends who within three days of us floating the idea came back to us with the perfect gîte in Brittany, only to trump it a couple of days later with a perfect-gîte-with-Jacuzzi combo. (And the world, I realize, has shrunk to such a degree that ‘gîte in Brittany’ looks to most people’s eyes how ‘caravan in Tyrella’ did to mine growing up. ‘Jacuzzi’ looks plain B&Q-y.) Friends who even sent us details of the car-hire options at Rennes–Saint-Jacques Airport. Sent us everything in the end bar the luggage labels to tie to our lapels: ‘If found looking disoriented please direct to …’

So anyway, August came and we went. One whole week. (Our friends had booked an extra week camping with some other well-organised people they knew.) And do you know what? I did find myself. Or at least found out some things about myself that had not been apparent up till then. That I am skinny was not one of them, although it was pointed out to me several times on the beach, by people who I imagine would never dream of saying to someone, ‘Man but you are fat.’ (Anyone ever asks me how I stay so thin, I tell them the truth: drugs. Lots and lots of drugs.)

Principally I found out this: if the child is father of the man, as Wordsworth has it, then I must have been adopted by the eleven-year-old with my name who used to run around Finaghy in the early 1970s, writing ‘FTP’ on lampposts, bus stops, park benches and other street furniture.

It was our last night in the gîte. The camping friends had already arrived and pitched their tent in a field out back in preparation for the next week’s adventures. There were children everywhere, adoptive fathers and mothers of as yet unimaginable men and women. There was an approximate half-tonne of sardines, washed and gutted (boy, were they gutted), on the kitchen draining board. There was a brick-built barbecue to be lit. I took the kitchen matches and walked round the side of the house, because, another thing I discovered, for all my garrulousness, my first to the bar and what’s everybody having, I am not that sociable a person. It suited me to be outside on my own for a while, building my elaborate sardine pyre. Which of course (and, yes, apologies, you really have read this far only to find yourself in a man-fails-to-light-barbecue tale) failed to ignite. And I thought there was just no way this should be happening. Not because I fancy myself as an alpha male (see beach comments above), but because I am a bred-in-the-bone Northern Irish Protestant male, whose adolescence, in between scribbling ‘FTP’ and playing football, was largely taken up with burning things. Time was I could have set a wet stick on fire just by looking at it.

Maybe I wasn’t drunk enough. Maybe the gift of fire always left me and my mates at the end of July – crossed Finaghy Bridge for the Internment Night bonfires – and we just never knew it.

In the end I got on my hands and knees and blew. And blew; blew until pretty much everything that had been in me was in there among the charcoal and paper spills, proving some third-form chemistry experiment and producing, at what felt as though it must be the end of my life, a flame.

By the time the sardines came I had rolled off my knees on to my hunkers, and was taking a pull on my beer.

‘No problems getting it going then?’ said well-organised friend #1.

To which of course I replied:

‘…’

You need breath to tell a barefaced lie. And just a little more neck maybe than the man that child-me fathered ever grew. (Though he grew just enough, thank you, to write one.)

News Letter, 8 September 2007

Here We Are

Where do you turn at times like these?

The answer for most people is probably not to novels. More’s the pity. I would say that, being a novelist myself, but bear with me. A novel, my contemporary Robert McLiam Wilson once wrote, is ‘shoe-swapping on the grand scale’. To read one is to engage in repeated acts of empathy, to accept the invitation to see the world as it appears to people other than oneself.

Imagine, the novel says, line by line, page after page. Keep imagining.

China Miéville in The City and the City imagines two cities – Beszel and Ul Qoma – inhabiting the same geographical space. Some streets are ‘total’ – wholly in one city or the other – some are ‘alter’ – now in this city, now in that – and the remainder are ‘crosshatched’ – in both cities at once. Citizens of Beszel and their Ul Qoman counterparts are trained from birth, on pain of punishment, not to see the ‘aliens’ in their midst. But still, on occasion, ‘breaches’ occur, often violently.

Miéville doesn’t say whether Beszel or Ul Qoma has a Christmas market, but he might otherwise have been describing the cities of Belfast in recent days.

Time and again the words come over the airwaves: ‘no one sees us, no one is listening to us.’ The will of the ‘majority’ is variously – often contradictorily – invoked.

Of course, we have a system here whereby the actual will of the majority can be periodically measured. It involves citizens going to a polling station and making a mark on a ballot paper. If the candidate beside whose name they make their mark does not do what he or she promised, they have the opportunity next time around to put their mark elsewhere.

In most democracies this leaves open the possibility that at regular intervals another party will form a government. In Northern Ireland for the foreseeable future the likelihood is that the exercise will return the same mandatory coalition of DUP and Sinn Féin that has – I hesitate to say served us – since 2006. ‘Hesitate to say’ because much blame for the current mess must be laid at the door of the DUP, along with individual members of the Unionist Party, for the distribution of those inflammatory leaflets in the run-up to the Belfast City Council ‘flag’ vote at the start of this month, blaming the Alliance Party for the Union flag’s being ‘ripped down’ from City Hall.

Peter Robinson’s response to the riots and the death threat to Alliance MP Naomi Long, as he stood beside Hillary Clinton in Parliament Buildings, was as egregious an example of political hand-washing as you could wish (make that ‘hope never again’) to see. ‘Our journey is irreversible,’ he said. ‘We are determined to go on and while from time to time we will have setbacks there is no linear progression to a stable and peaceful society.’

Never mind linear progression, there is no sense at all in his words of agency: no recognition that the ‘setbacks’ might have been at least in part engineered by the party that Mr Robinson leads.

To this extent his words were perfectly in keeping with political rhetoric here in recent years. Our politicians may not have mastered the art of speaking out of both sides of their mouths at once, but a good many of them a good deal of the time are adept at saying one thing out of one side and very quickly after something entirely different out of the other, goading political opponents – or sometimes the ‘other lot’ generally – then taking cover in the platitudes of the Peace Process.

The playground equivalent is hitting someone a dig then hiding behind the teacher.

In part this is a problem with the Process itself. The open-endedness coded into the word has long since ceased to be enabling and become destabilising: ‘we’, or ‘they’ (depending on your politics), it seems to say, are not finished yet.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I thought that what I was voting for back in 1998 was an agreement. Yes, peace has to be worked at, but – guess what? – peace always has to be worked at, everywhere. It’s called respect for your fellow human beings, and, dare I say it, empathy.

We need to demand the same standards of ourselves as we expect of others. (Try this for instance: if it does not dilute anyone’s Britishness to have the Union Flag flown on designated days neither should it dilute anyone’s Irishness to call this place Northern Ireland?)

We need to make sure we do not take pleasure in the discomfort of others.

We need to take responsibility for the rights of others.

We need to imagine not a future but a present for us all beyond endless Process.

Politicians – voters – here is where we are. Now, deal with it.

Belfast Telegraph, 18 December 2012