The Good Friday Agreement (1998) stated: “All participants recognise the importance of respect, understanding and tolerance in relation to linguistic diversity, including in Northern Ireland, the Irish language, Ulster-Scots and the languages of the various ethnic communities, all of which are part of the cultural wealth of the island of Ireland.” However, since that time the development of the Irish language, Ulster-Scots and the languages of the various ethnic communities has often been fraught. Despite much good will, investment and initiatives much work remains to be done to generate the state of linguistic and cultural respect, understanding and tolerance that the Belfast Agreement  envisaged.

In this article I shall explore the history and development of the Ulster-Scots language and writing from the time of the Good Friday Agreement to the present day. I will examine the various models of literary and linguistic development that have occurred since. I will argue that the focus on developing Ulster-Scots predominately as a lesser used language has at times led to an impasse in generating widespread acceptance and created barriers to the mainstreaming of Ulster-Scots. The article will suggest that as a major component of Ulster English dialect, Ulster-Scots is a major element of the vernacular and literary tradition and experience of the great majority of individuals in Northern Ireland. Indeed, given the significance of Ulster-Scots dialect in the work of Seamus Heaney, I will suggest that opportunities have been lost in the promotion of Ulster-Scots to audiences in Ireland and abroad. By the adoption of new, inclusive approaches to the comprehension and propagation of Ulster-Scots, I will suggest a methodology through which accommodation and understanding might be effected for the dissemination of Ulster-Scots language, culture and literature for the various linguistic and cultural communities in Northern Ireland and beyond. 

Christina Reid was a Northern Irish playwright whose plays maintained a distinctly socially-oriented perspective. In her works from 1980s and 1990s, she penetrated spaces of Belfast city inhabited by marginalized, Protestant working-class communities. Her writing stands in conspicuous contrast to stereotypical plays written in the South of the island. If the South playwriting could be associated with imaginative, poetic, unrealistic representation of rural life on the one hand, and traditional, Gaelic heritage on the other, the Belfast scenery is that of working-class, post-industrial depression. Here, political violence equals social injustice, contributing to the realistic presentation of characters on the verge of survival in socially, economically, and politically troubled environment.

Reid’s writing can also be deconstructed as a specific example of vision stimulated by marginalised location in the north—the north understood not as an affluent, middle-class, Eurocentric geography of continental capitals but as a province of Western world torn with political and economic problems. This article argues that knowledge is located in particular material circumstances and that it is to some extent produced by the geographic conditions of its existence. Many literary works conceived in Northern Ireland, Reid’s drama included, develop their own language of analysis and description, their own discourse of survival in which their peculiar conditions are uniquely phrased and in which an intriguing perspective from the margins of Western culture is coined. The aim of the article is to analyse how Christina Reid and her plays produce a characteristic language, dialogue, diction of the north and how these forms of communication, both linguistic and theatrical, reflect back on the dominating knowledge of  Irish as well as central European cultures.

2018 sees the 20^th anniversary of the signing of a Peace Agreement that brought with it a promise of ‘lasting peace’ in Northern Ireland. However, the past has continued to haunt large sections of the population whose lives have been scarred by the violence they experienced. The article examines how contemporary photographers have attempted to come to terms with the effects of political violence over the years. It does so in relation to how they approach the question of ‘showing’ that violence. Some, like Paul Seawright or David Farrell, for example, prefer an allusive, lateral approach that focuses on the sometimes invisible traces of violence. In contrast, the Belfast-based photographer, Malcolm Craig Gilbert takes a more frontal approach that insists on presenting the viewer with images of trauma, sometimes at the risk of appearing over-explicit. Whatever strategy is adopted—hiding or revealing—the onlooker requires a grounding in the visual codes that Northern Ireland society has developed to communicate with itself. The article will look at some of the work that emerged before and during the Peace Process so as to assess its contribution to a broader understanding of the ways the traces of political violence continue to impact on society in Northern Ireland.  

Belfast murals are one of the landmarks of the city. They constitute a peculiar medium of communication, mixing word and image in a powerful ideological message. They express highly emotional content, and have been addressed to original target audiences of republicans and loyalists. In this respect they have served to reflect and influence sentiments of the communities involved in the conflict, and as a communal memoir commemorating crucial events, thereby contributing to their ethnic identity formations. However, as Northern Ireland has been undergoing the peace process, the murals are becoming one of the city’s tourist attractions. As such, they are encountered by audiences unaware of intricacies and nuances of local history. This paper examines how their complex verbovisual rhetoric affects this type of audience, and how, in a reciprocal process, political tourism may have an impact on the murals’ style and content.  

This article deals with the life and philosophy of Captain Jack White (1879-1946). He was from a family of Ulster Presbyterians, a son of a Field Marshal and member of the upper echelons of British society. He abandoned his privileged background to become a founder of the socialist militia, the Irish Citizen Army, military advisor to the nationalist Irish Volunteers, comrade to the revolutionary Countess Markievicz, an anarchist and participant in the Spanish Civil War. His career transcended the political, social and religious divisions that shaped Irish and British politics in the 20th century. 

His  remarkable life included military honours in the Boer War, a mystical experience on the Rock of Gibraltar, correspondence with Leo Tolstoy and participation in a commune in EdwardianEngland. He was at home in Bohemian artistic circles and once punched D.H. Lawrence (fictionalised in Lawrence’s novel Aaron’s Rod) in an argument over love. Towards the end of his life he corresponded with the writer and philosopher, John Cowper Powys.

In Ireland his questing spirit alienated many former allies and he became a marginal political figure. After his death his political legacy was relegated to a footnote until recent times when he has emerged as a striking figure in  Irish history, a distinguished inheritor of the Ulster tradition of scepticism and dissent. The article will trace the relevance of his libertarian life and outlook to the current Irish political situation in the shadow of Brexit.  

This article addresses avenues for reconciliation and the persistence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the interconnected contexts of politics, remembrance culture and public discourse during the peace process, with particular attention focused on the operations of transitional justice and restorative memory (a category I derive from restorative justice and restorative truth). I argue that the peace process realities in Northern Ireland actively invite a mode of social and political evasion of the past by consigning recent history to cultural discourses, to be explored and chronicled mostly by works of fiction, rather than weighed on the scales of justice in the first place. Post-Troubles fiction offers carefully selected patterns, scripts and templates of the past (preserved in ‘restorative memory’) which, rather unsurprisingly, tend to promote a mood of reconciliation over the idea of reckoning and retribution. Thereby fiction as such (exemplified here by David Park’s The TruthCommissioner, Five Minutes of Heaven directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel and Lucy Caldwell’s All the Beggars Riding) becomes a key player in the contemporary politics of memory.  

Review:  Sandra Frydrysiak, Taniec w sprzężeniu nauk i technologii. Nowe perspektywy w badaniach tańca, Wydawnictwo Przypis, Łódź 2017, ss. 422.

Review: Grzegorz Marzec, Metafory pamięci, Wyd. IBL PAN, Warszawa 2017. Seria Nowa Biblioteka Romantyczna pod red. Marty Zielińskiej

Review: Patrycja Włodek, Kres niewinności. Obraz i upamiętnienie ery Eisenhowera w amerykańskich filmach i serialach – pomiędzy reprezentacją, nostalgią a krytycznym retro, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego, Kraków 2018.