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Speeches

Speech at the John Hewitt Summer School

Market Place Theatre, Armagh, 28th July 2014

Thank you Lord Rana for your kind introduction and I want to wish you well in your new role as Patron of the John Hewitt Society. In fact I would like to pay tribute to everyone associated with the Society, and in particular to Tony Kennedy, its director. It was he who suggested that I should speak here today, and, thus far, I am most happy that he proved so persuasive. I also wish to acknowledge the distinguished guests in the audience – the Deputy Lord Lieutenant, the Lord Mayor, Cardinal Seán Brady, Archbishop Richard Clark, US Consul General Gregory Burton, the Councillors from Armagh District Council and from those other Councils who will be joining Armagh next year.

Is í seo an chéad deis a bhí agam teacht go hArd Mhacha mar Uachtarán na hÉireann. Táim, dar ndóigh, ar an eolas maidir leis an mbreithiúnas machnamhach a thug Aodh de Blácam, iriseoir Éireannach sna 1930idí, ar Ard Mhacha, nuair a thug sé cathair gheanúil air agus a dúirt: “fair in its site, its sacred buildings and homes of learning, its air of quietude, culture and ease”

[This is my first opportunity to come to Armagh as President of Ireland. I am of course very aware of the reflective assessment given to it in the 1930s by Aodh de Blácam, an Irish journalist who called Armagh a lovable city, “fair in its site, its sacred buildings and homes of learning, its air of quietude, culture and ease.”[1]]

I approach the subject of John Hewitt, his life, work and legacy with some trepidation in a ‘region’, as he would put it, that is so leavened by the poetic instinct, that humility from such as myself is more of a necessity than a suggestion.

As I am about to speak in tribute to one who was so well aware of the appalling waste of life that is war, and a writer of conscience who kept returning to the ethics of his internationalism, I am also conscious that the circumstances of violent loss of life in which I am speaking are ones that would not only break his heart, as they are breaking the heart of many as I speak, but also force his pen.

Allow me then just a few words on those present circumstances. I believe that the enormous increase in unsettled conflicts at the present time represents a great challenge to the international community. It also represents a great failure. It surely must be a matter of profound concern to citizens across the globe and their heads of state and leaders that so many conflicts – in Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine and elsewhere – have endured to the point where loss of life is now increasing on a daily basis, security is decreasing, and refugee numbers are escalating as displacement drives on relentlessly with horrific consequences on the most vulnerable. It is a time when we are challenged to innovate in the search for peace, realising that a status quo of unacknowledged failure within a diplomacy of narrow interests, and compounded by the consequences of diplomatic failure, is threatening all of our human achievements.

The appalling and escalating loss of life in Gaza is a tragic example of the failure of diplomacy. There is an awareness among our citizens of the importance of building and securing peaceful resolution to such conflicts which challenge us all. In recent weeks, I have received a great volume of correspondence from members of the public expressing their horror at what is happening in Gaza and I share their horror at the perceived failure of language itself as I know you do. In celebrating the life and work of John Hewitt – one who cared so deeply about peace and the relations between peoples – it is wholly appropriate that we reflect on the relevance and resonance of Hewitt’s work in the atmosphere of today’s conflicts; and I could not speak with authenticity here today, Lord Rana, without making reference to these events.

In preparation for my speech today I read, inter alia, Peter McDonald’s assessment of John Hewitt in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry[2], in which he remarks that, in a way, John Hewitt dead has been far more influential than John Hewitt the living writer. This view is no doubt influenced by the fact that he is now a subject of that most potent form of Irish commemoration – the literary and academic summer school –, and I wish to acknowledge my debt, in presenting these remarks, to Frank Ormbsy’s magnificent introduction to the Collected Poems of John Hewitt, and to such fine memoir pieces as that of Patricia Craig in a recent edition of the incomparable Irish Pages.

What an excellent programme you have for this week, with one of Ireland’s leading poets, a dazzling prose writer and memoirist, John Montague, as one of the speakers at this Summer School. I will be reflecting briefly on some of the connections John Hewitt made with John Montague and how these connections has given us greater insight into the meaning of Hewitt’s work.

When I visited Coventry as part of my State Visit to the United Kingdom earlier this year, I met many Irish emigrants who were amongst the half a million Irish men and women who travelled to England in the 1950s to work on the construction sites, in the hospitals and schools, and in so many other sectors of economy and society. I found it a joy to be able to celebrate the fact that there is virtually no aspect of British civic or political life that has not been enriched by the Irish community. I was pleased to bear witness to their contribution to the culture and life of Britain, and, in turn, to their continuing contribution, as migrants and people of new shores, to the renewal of our own Irish identity.

Of course, Coventry received a very special emigrant from these shores in the 1950s when John Hewitt left Northern Ireland to take up the position of director of the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. It was while there, from what was a bittersweet exile, that he wrote many of his most thoughtful and resonant poems, including “An Irishman in Coventry” [3] which he composed the year after he moved to that city.

It ends with the words:

Yet like Lir’s children, banished to the waters,

          Our hearts still listen for the landward bells.

It is interesting to reflect on how Hewitt’s sense of identity seems to have changed on his move to Coventry. He was an Ulsterman in Northern Ireland but an Irishman in England. Hewitt of course gave the issues of identity and memory a great deal of reflection. In an article in the Belfast Telegraph[4] in 1958 he wrote:

“In the heart of the English midlands looking back from the fulcrum of middle age on my personal adventures among those books which were a significant part of my Irish past, I sometimes wonder if time and distance have given me a perspective and objectivity or if sentiment and the ordinary wear and tear of memory may not have distorted details and proportion.”

Hewitt’s vision of Ulster included a multitude of identities competing for space.

His “Ulsterman” [5] was part:

Kelt, Briton, Saxon, Dane, and Scot,

Time and this island tied a crazy knot.

But categories and their naming should not obscure from us the gift of a father’s egalitarian thought that would endure for life as a legacy, one that might, as Frank Ormsby tells us, have led to his youthful borrowing of ten shillings from his mother to buy a second-hand five volume set of William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise.

Hewitt said of his poem “The Colony” [6] that it was the definitive statement of his realisation that he was an Ulsterman[7]. In this poem, Hewitt conjured the point of view of a Roman coloniser in England in the historic period when the Roman Empire itself was in decline. Edna Longley declared this poem a “sophisticated poetic model of Ulster politics[8]”.

The Irish Times[9] used its closing line, “we shall not be outcast on the world”, for the title of an editorial responding to an initiative of British Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1972 that would result in the Sunningdale Agreement later that year. The editor argued that the majority in Northern Ireland now had a chance to prove that they are in their right place and wrote, “In the words of their own poet, John Hewitt, the Northern majority will be able to say: `We would be strangers in the Capitol; This is our country also, no-where else; And we shall not be outcast on the world’.”

Hewitt was very forthright in invoking and declaring his Planter identity and heritage. Indeed as part of a literary tour in 1970, he jointly published with John Montague the poetry collection The Planter and the Gael[10] with each poet contributing work from their respective viewpoints and both being very aware of their representative status.

In his introduction to this collection, Michael Longley wrote that, “each poet explores his experience of Ulster, the background in which he grew up and the tradition which has shaped his work. John Montague defines the culture of the Gael, John Hewitt that of the Planter. The two bodies of work complement each other and provide illuminating insight into the cultural complexities of the Province”. The integrity of both poets, Hewitt and Montague, and Longley too, is reflected in their rejection of any accommodating amnesia as to the complex past.

A study from the 1970s[11] of the use of landscape in The Planter and the Gael by Professor John Wilson Foster of the University of British Columbia pointed clearly to how the land and landscape are called up through the different backgrounds of Montague and Hewitt. The poems of Montague reflect loss, decay, absence and exile, whereas Hewitt views the land through a Planter’s sensibility, one of invoking the human labour expended on it, the memory of harnessing its fertility, husbanding it and taming it for productive use. This legacy constitutes an invocation of Irishness. For Hewitt, his identity was bound up in place and landscape. Another such example of Hewitt’s connection to the landscape can be seen in his poem “Townland of Peace”[12] in which he traces his sense of himself, of his family and of the landscape from his grandfather’s time to the present. There is here, I believe, a claim for a sovereignty of sensory intimacy, an intimacy not appropriately mediated by either the ideological abuse of memory, or a limiting pursuit of respectability.

Perhaps the most resonant example of Hewitt’s understanding of the complex identity faced by those in Northern Ireland is contained in his essay “Planter’s Gothic: An Essay in Discursive Autobiography”[13]. In this work, Hewitt discussed his reaction to a Planter’s Gothic tower built on the remains of a round tower. Discussing its impact on him[14], he said:

“It is the best symbol I have found for the strange textures of my response to this island of which I am a native. It may appear Planter’s Gothic, but there is a round tower somewhere inside, and needled through every sentence I utter.”

As well as this multifaceted understanding of identity that he recognised as existing in Northern Ireland, Hewitt was also very aware of the wider connection of the region which he regarded as home, and about which he wrote, to Europe. In an introduction to a catalogue for an art exhibition taking place in Belfast, he wrote,

“At the beginning of the last century Belfast was in full contact with the flow of European events. But in the intervening period, mainly for political-economic reasons, the scope of wit and culture suffered a time-lag of increasing proportions. Our province became provincial. However, since the Great War and partly consequent upon it, the acceleration of social change has narrowed the gap between Ulster and Europe. Once again our best aesthetic thought is coloured by contemporary tendencies.”[15]

Hewitt himself spent time in Europe. The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland[16] holds his notebooks which contain detailed accounts of his educational holidays in Europe. As they wryly note, because of his egalitarian sympathies he was naturally attracted to Russia and countries such as Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia. Consideration of how the materialist and statist excesses, which would change a utopian vision into a dystopia in terms of the communal response to the abuses of empire in such places, and how this affected John Hewitt, has to wait for another day.

Hewitt was always very insistent that the placement of his home region into the wider context was vital and that missing out any element of the broader picture would lead to profound misunderstandings. In a letter to John Montague he stated:

“I always maintained that our loyalties had an order: to Ulster, to Ireland, to the British Archipelago, to Europe; and that anyone who skipped a step or missed a link falsified the total. The Unionists missed out Ireland: the Northern Nationalists (The Green Tories) couldn’t see the Ulster under their feet; the Republicans missed out both Ulster and the Archipelago; and none gave any heed to Europe at all. Now, perhaps, willy nilly bundled in the European rump of the Common Market, clearer ideas of our regional and national allegiances and responsibilities may emerge, or our whole sad stubborn conglomeration of nations may founder and disappear for ever”. [17]

Hewitt’s views on the opportunity that Europe presented to Northern Ireland was very close to the thinking of the Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougemont. Rougemont, a member of the Personalist movement, was a committed European who saw that Europe, post the Second World War, needed a new concept of unity. He looked to the regional model, to the principle of subsidiarity, and also to the origins of the continent and its founding myths.[18] For him, Homer’s stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey were more relevant than the nation state for understanding the future of Europe. Indeed, for Rougemont, the ultimate foundation of our European identity is not the national state at all, but the European unity represented by our shared cultural roots. The ancient myths that we, along with the other peoples of Europe, have as the foundations of our literatures provide us with a shared vision but also a respect for cultural diversity. Invocation of myths and their influence on the progress of Europe, however is not to make a hegemonic claim, or much worse, create an undertone assertion as to origins. Our founding myths are universal and their traces are in the diverse locations of the wisdoms in the world, in all of our faith systems.

I think that Rougemont was very perceptive in his insights that a shared influence of myths and cultural memory intangibly links us all together in Europe. Yet it is neither the exclusive, nor the sufficient, reflection of the intellectual roots of our sensibility.

The categories of both memory and imagination must always remain open.

A further example of such sensibility is seen in a poet who was a contemporary of Hewitt in the Belfast Group – Michael Longley.[19] On the eve of the IRA’s ceasefire in 1994, Longley had been working on a poem based on the Iliad[20]. He sent a copy of the finished work to John Banville, then literary editor of the Irish Times. Recognising the quality and meaning of the work, Banville “stopped the presses” and ensured its inclusion in the paper in the same week as the ceasefire was declared. The poem is based on the episode in the Iliad which tells the story of Priam, the King of Troy and Achilles, the Greek warrior who killed his son Hector. I have quoted the words Michael Longley gave Priam more than once:

“I get down on my knees and do what must be done

And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.”

One cannot but be struck by the generosity, empathy and remorse that are reflected in these words by Longley, rooted as they are in a poem that has its origins 3,000 years ago. Longley’s words echo back through the millenia to Homer, and forward to today with immediacy and power. Troy was not saved by the gesture. The moral intention in the action and the words, however, has its own sustaining power beyond succeeding circumstances. It is appropriate for us to remember Hannah Arendt’s suggestion that to have authentic meaning, forgiveness must be aimed at either preventing or enabling future events, events over which all must have influence.

Denis de Rougemont coined the phrase “a Europe of the regions”[21]. He suggested that it was necessary to leave behind arid concepts of territorial divisions and instead consider the interdependent relationships that all communities experience. For him, the key thing was to allow human communities to cooperate in very practical ways and he was particularly interested in trans-boundary regions which, he felt, would be in the vanguard in teaching the rest of Europe how to order itself. He considered that it was only by overcoming divisions that we would preserve our diversity.

For Hewitt, concepts of the region and regionalism were themes that he engaged with through his prose work and his poetry. His vision of regionalism began with a revival of the poetry of peace and feeling and its language. He worked throughout his life to promote the regional culture of Ulster as a distinct identity. In his poem “Townland of Peace” he wrote:

But these small rights require a smaller stage

than the vast forum of the nations’ rage

for they imply a well-compacted space

where every voice recalls its nation’s place,

townland, townquarter, county at its most…

Hewitt was of the view that:

“Ulster considered as a Region and not as a symbol of any particular creed, can command the loyalty of every one of its inhabitants. For regional identity does not preclude, rather it requires, membership of a larger association. And whatever that association may be … there should emerge a culture and an attitude individual and distinctive … and no mere echo of the thought and imagination of another people or another land.”[22]

This is both a suggestion and a recognition of the importance of a rooted imagination – a multi rooted, uninhibited, generous imagination.

Culture can play an enormous role in reinvigorating the wider society. I had the opportunity when I was Minister for Culture during Ireland’s Presidency of the EU in 1996 to oversee a key piece of legislation that focussed on the integration of cultural aspects into community actions[23].

It affirmed that access to culture and the expression of cultural identity were essential conditions for the full participation of citizens in society. In this current period of high unemployment, with its related insecurities and poverty, as we pursue a sustainable economic recovery, we must not lose sight of the key path that culture offers in helping us reclaim a flourishing and ethical role in the wider global community.

Hewitt’s views on regionalism also bring to mind the ideas of the French theorist and philosopher Paul Ricoeur. In his work, Ricoeur posed the question as how one might be modern and yet continue tradition, how we might revive an old dormant civilisation as part of universal civilisation.[24]

He understood that it was not easy to remain radically and authentically personal, and at the same time practice tolerance towards other civilisations. As he saw it, the discovery of the plurality of cultures is never a harmless experience. So how is an encounter with different cultures possible when understanding the other can seem such a dangerous venture as could result in the loss of your own cultural heritage?  Paul Ricoeur’s own answer to this question was that a culture had to engage with what had preceded it, what is occurring around it, and what flows from it.

In this consideration of regionalism and of what Ulster means, Seamus Heaney too had a perceptive insight[25]:

Each person in Ulster lives first in the Ulster of the actual present,

and then in one or other Ulster of the mind.

Hewitt saw the different traditions as interrelated and he felt the best way to recognise the reconciling implications of this was at the regional level. For Hewitt, the region was small enough to garner the kind of loyalty which is needed to transcend differences.

The region could also act as a counter-weight to what he saw as the prevailing forces of over-centralisation. He based this view on his conviction that we must, as social beings, facing the enormously complicated structure that is the modern nation state, find some smaller unit to which to give our loyalty. He saw this as a necessary precondition which could then lead on to economic invigoration of regional agriculture and industry.

John Hewitt’s views on the importance of developing a regional outlook can also be seen as his reaction to the impact of partition on Northern Ireland. His hopes of the development of a regional loyalty were, of course, stymied by the Troubles. But now that we have emerged from that dark period, there is an opportunity to revisit and draw inspiration from Hewitt’s ideas of regionalism.

I am struck particularly by the recent analysis of the 2011 census results by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency[26]. For the first time, the census has started to ask questions about national identity. Particularly striking was that, when asked for the first time how they viewed their own national identity, 29% of the people included Northern Irish as a part of that identity: something new is emerging here.

Hewitt’s reflections and understanding of these complex questions – regionalism and identity – are relevant in grasping the situation that currently exists in Northern Ireland, and how people see themselves in the context of their wider allegiances to Ireland and the UK. People are perhaps now more comfortable in endorsing multiple identities that suit the shifting way in which we, as individuals, relate to a world that is increasingly fluid and porous, one that we must struggle beyond boundaries and states to make accountable and sustainable.

We must take into consideration, too, the new community of immigrants in Northern Ireland with more than 120,000 arriving between 2000 and 2010. To quote an Assembly paper, “there is little doubt that the inflow of new residents from countries as far apart as Poland, Brazil and East Timor, has enriched the culture and society of Northern Ireland”[27]. It will be fascinating to hear from those migrant how they view their own identity changing as they respond to what they are making their new home region, and also to see what their responses will be to the national identity question at the next census in 2021 and beyond.

May I, to conclude, repeat how Hewitt was a man who understood that we all are the carriers of multiple allegiances, multiple identities, empowered by hopes and ideas yet to be realised. John Hewitt understood that to find peace, he needed to know his own place in the world. His lifelong work was to understand himself and his place – his identity, his culture, his region –, to achieve an understanding of the self and the world; and he informed it all with an inherited respect for the power and potential of an emancipatory egalitarianism. These existential reflections rooted a moral utopian instinct that remain as valid and as valuable now as they did when Hewitt first considered them.

It is with great gratitude and respect that I grant him the final word from his powerful poem of personal memory and the intimacy of peace: “Townland of Peace”:

Now and for ever through the change-rocked years,

I know my corner in the universe;

My corner, this small region limited

in space by sea, in the time by my own dead…

 

[1] Aodh de Blácam. 1938. “The Black North”, in Craig, Patricia (editor). 2006. The Ulster Anthology, p. 379

[2] Edited by Brearton, Fran. 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, Oxford University Press, pp 479-480.

[3] “An Irishman in Coventry”, 1958.

[4] Hewitt, John, Belfast Telegraph, edition of 24th, November, 1958.

[5] “An Ulsterman”, 1938.

[6] “The Colony”, 1953

[7] Quoted by Ormsby, Frank. 1991. Introduction to the Collected Poems of John Hewitt, Blackstaff Press.

[8] Longley, Edna, 1994, The Living Stream: literature and revisionism in Ireland, Bloodaxe Books, p 126

[9] Editorial, 25 March 1972, Irish Times

[10] Hewitt, John and John Montague. 1970. The Planter and the Gael: An Anthology of Poems.

[11] Foster, John Wilson. 1975. “The Landscape of Planter and Gael.” In Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2.

[12] “Townland of Peace”, 1944.

[13] Hewitt, John. 1953. “Planter’s Gothic: An Essay in Discursive Autobiography”, published in The Bell.

[14] Quoted by Ormsby, Frank. 1991. Introduction to the Collected Poems of John Hewitt, Blackstaff Press.

[15] Hewitt, John. 1934. Preface to Ulster Unit, exhibition catalogue, as quoted by Riann Coulter. 2013. “John Hewitt: Creating a Canon of Ulster Art”, Journal of Art Historiography.

[16] “Introduction to Hewitt Papers” (2007), Public Record Office of Northern Ireland – Ref D3838.

[17] Hewitt, John. 1964. Extract from a letter to John Montague, John Hewitt Collection, University of Ulster, Coleraine.

[18] de Rougemont, Denis. 1966. The Idea of Europe. Macmillan.

[19] Carruthers, Mark. 2013. Alternative Ulsters. Liberties Press, pp. 195-205.

[20] Longley, Michael. 1994. “Ceasefire”.

[21] de Rougemont, Denis, 1966, The Idea of Europe, Macmillan

[22] Hewitt, John, Essay on Regionalism: The Last Chance, published in The Northman, 1947.

[23] Meeting of the Council AUDIOVISUAL/CULTURAL AFFAIRS, Brussels, 16th December 1996 – European Council – PRES/96/381   16/12/1996.

[24] Ricoeur, Paul. 1965. History and Truth. Northwestern University Press, pp 271-284.

[25] Heaney, Seamus, 1985, Place and Displacement.

[26] Census 2011: Key statistics for Northern Ireland, December 2012, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency

[27] Russell, Raymond, 2012, Migration in Northern Ireland, Research and Information Service of the Northern Ireland Assembly (Paper 31/12)