Charity Shops have the twin allure of conveniently being able to get rid of your junk, unwanted books, and clothing, and while you’re at it, being able to buy someone else’s junk, unwanted books, and clothing. The only problem with trawling charity shops is that you might be overcome by a general mustiness in the air, but this aspect can be overlooked by coming across a real bargain find.
It was with these ideas in mind that I set off across town to investigate Quaker Care. There are two charity shops in Belfast run by the Northern Ireland Quaker Service, they are unique in that they are the only two Quaker Charity Shops certainly in Europe and probably the world.
The director of the Quaker Service in Northern Ireland, Mr. Vincent Bent explained that because the charity was beginning to experience a significant shortfall in expenses compared to received donations, they simply had to find a way to raise extra funds to make ends meet. The Quaker Society has certain restrictions on the way they can fundraise; no gambling or events with alcohol makes a simple raffle impossible. So, with not being able to rely solely on Coffee Morning proceeds, the Quaker Service investigated alternative funding possibilities and opened the first Quaker Care Charity Shop on the Lisburn Road in July 1998 and another premises on the Woodstock Road in November 2001.
The Quakers have historically worked with communities and those coming from a background of disadvantage and poverty. Some well-known Quakers have been Joseph Rowntree and George Cadbury, both known for their chocolate manufacturing, their contribution to social reform, and general care and consideration for their workforce. Vincent regards Elizabeth Fry (1780-1845), whose portrait features on the current Bank of England £5 note, a pioneer of prison reform for female inmates and their children at Newgate prison, as an influential figure for the work the Quaker Service does in Northern Ireland.
As well as an ongoing women’s mentoring and counseling program at Quaker Cottage Belfast, The Quaker Service was the first charity to establish a Visitor Centre at a prison in the UK; at The Maze and more recently The Monica Barritt Centre at Maghaberry Prison. The Quaker Service also liaises with prison staff and has influenced prison reform and criminal justice policy in Northern Ireland.
Vincent outlined the importance of the Visitor Centre; ‘the relatives and friends of inmates can get a cup of tea, relax, and collect their thoughts before starting their meeting session. A typical visit often begins by traveling quite long distances by bus, going through complicated security checks, and being loaded on and off minibuses, so the centre helps take a bit of the pressure off a prison visit’. The Quaker service also provides childcare for visitors, which especially helps mothers and reduces negative associations children can attach to visiting their fathers in prison.
Before opening Quaker Care, Vincent consulted the Charity Shops Handbook, a sort of Bible for people who want to start a shop, written by Hilary Bloom. One piece of useful advice she provides is that shop managers should remember that people usually give to a shop that is handy, somewhere close by but also a place where they feel their donation will be valued.
All sorts of people donate to Quaker Care, and a lot of people too; their office corridors stacked up with books, bric-a-brac, and clothing. Sometimes Vincent will sell items deemed to be more valuable on eBay, things he knows will not sell in the shop if they are too high in price.
Both shops carry leaflets and pamphlets detailing the work of the Quaker Service and having volunteers who live locally work in their shops has meant that Quaker Care has quite an informal, relaxed atmosphere, where people usually call in for a chat as well as to buy. What is striking about the Quaker Service is their non-partisan approach, and because of this, they’re able to work with people and communities often in incredibly stressful situations and are perceived only as carers and helpers. They exist in Northern Ireland without being branded one religion or another; they are simply The Quakers.
So, the next time you’re unwrapping your Dairy Milk, why not think about popping along to Quaker Care, you might just find something you’ve always been looking for.
]]>For the ancient Egyptians, who obsessively recorded their habits and rituals for posterity, body hair was considered positively bestial. However, a beard was something of a status symbol. Kings would grow large square beards which they would then braid, perfume, and dust with gold. In other words, they behaved like girls. This gender reversal (at least by modern standards) worked both ways: around 1480 BC, Queen Hatshepsut liked to strap on a long, plaited, false beard. Never one to scrimp when it came to showing who was boss, it was made from gold and silver. How long she managed to wear it for without severely damaging her posture is sadly unknown.
The first sideburns can probably be attributed to the Hittites, who around 400 BC would shave their beards, eyebrows, moustaches, and the areas above the ears, but carefully braided their long side-whiskers. Uriah, a well-known Hittite, was killed by soldiers of Hanum, King of the Ammonites. When Hebrew ambassadors were sent to meet with Hanum, he ordered half of their beards to be removed. This insult was nothing less than an act of war, and King David wasted no time in slaughtering the Ammonites in the name of all things Holy. Let that be a lesson to all you beard-haters out there.
Jews took their instructions on the wearing of beards from Leviticus, which left strict instructions not to ‘mar the corners of thy beard’. Presumably, the confusion over where the corner of a beard is found prompted men to just leave it alone. The forced removal of a Jewish beard is considered a grave insult, as Hanum found out to his cost, and in many paintings, Christ is represented with his beard defiled prior to crucifixion.
While JC lays claim to one of the all-time classics, his followers have, predictably, found it quite difficult to decide what the big man intended for them post-ascension. The number of times the Church reversed its policies on beards is astounding, especially considering it was never actually based on scripture. Still, the arbitrary exercise of power has long been a favorite pastime of holy men, and so we have the teachings of luminaries such as the Abbot of Bellevaux who reasoned that the Holy Spirit ‘moved down from the head to the beard’, which then became white in the afterlife. Since the 16th Century, priests have generally been clean-shaven; and since then, Protestants often chose not to shave, in protest.
Sikhs, Rastafarians, Orthodox Muslims, Orthodox Jews, and the Amish have always observed their religious obligations to wear beards. But outside the confines of religious life, facial fashion was usually dictated by whatever whim one’s monarch was currently indulging. In 1535 Henry VIII, famed for his unique sense of justice, decided to levy taxes on beards (even though he continued to wear one with pride). This was repealed in the 1560s, after Henry had succumbed to syphilis, and so the dilemma of choosing to pay the barber or the government was resolved. Later, beard tax was introduced in Russia by Peter the Great after a visiting noblewoman pointed out the snot dangling from his hairy face.
The French take credit for a number of pointless facial trends. The balding Louis XIII amused himself by cutting his courtiers’ beards down to a mustache and a tuft on the chin, and during the 17th Century, these became thinner in inverse proportion to the size of their ever-growing wigs. When Louis XIV went gray he shaved his off, and (presumably within hours) his court followed suit.
It wasn’t until the 19th Century that facial hair really took off as a fashion statement. The Victorian gent saw beards as natural, wholesome, and even hygienic. Sideburns (named for Colonel Burnside, a dashing if rather ineffective commander in the US Civil War) became longer and more adventurous, and by 1830 had passed the line of the chin. By 1850, shaving was considered plain weird. On the advice of a child named Grace Bedell, presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln grew a beard and promptly stormed the history books. His assassin, John Wilkes Booth, only sported a mustache. Indeed, by the end of the 1800s, the mustache was increasingly seen as the mark of Satan. Fortunately for all concerned, a man named King Camp Gillette patented the first disposable razor blade in 1895, and a new era was born.
At the beginning of the last century, the discovery of bacteria and a moralistic culture saw a period of clean-shavenness creep in, although during the First World War the mustache became a common signifier of one’s rank (and therefore class). The early Hollywood film stars such as Chaplin and Fairbanks wore distinctive furs on their upper lips, but one Chaplin imitator named Adolf Hitler soon killed that trend off.
Post-WW2 the emphasis shifted to individual style and non-conformity, and in bohemian areas like New York’s Greenwich Village a variety of ‘taches, goatees, and soul patches proliferated. As we all know, Elvis Presley landed on Earth around 1954, and across the Western hemisphere, young men spontaneously sprouted sideburns. Of course, one generation’s mark of rebellion is the next decade’s badge of conformity, and after the hirsute Sixties, the Seventies marked the decline of facial hair in mainstream culture. By the Eighties, the clipped military-style mustache had become a signifier for gay men (see Freddie Mercury or Top Gun) while the beard was something the yuppie would grow, just to prove to himself that he was still boho.
In today’s post-modern, media-saturated world it’s impossible to attach any one meaning or reason to the wearing of facial hair. Athletes and musicians now generally set the trends (see Craig David’s snail-trail: proper bo), and so gay men, yuppies, rockers, and ravers often share the same look whether they like it or not. While politicians still steer clear of the fuzz (thanks to the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Castro, bin Laden, and Alderdice) the Nineties saw the largest boom in beard-growing since the 1800s. Is it a reaction to feminism? A desperate attempt to hold on to the last thing men can do and (most) women can’t? If so, it may well be at a price, as women generally seem to prefer their mates to make the effort every morning. Of course, this is arguably subject to the dictates of fashion.
]]>Whether it was reports of skinned animals discovered, pentangles carved into trees, or cloaked figures seen cavorting in the dead of night, if it was a public green space then you could be fairly certain ‘devil worshippers’ were at work somewhere. Among a list of such locations said to be hotbeds of satanic activity were Belvoir Forest Park, The Giants Ring, Lisnabreena House (now Lagan College), and even the Mary Peter’s Track.
But how much of this was true? Were satanic rituals really taking place all around me? Could my next-door neighbor be supping with Beelzebub, and if so, did that explain his penchant for black polo-neck jumpers? It was time I picked up the phone to Jim Cairns, ‘Satanic cult expert from Ulster’ (People 29/02/2004), to find out.
‘We know there was devil-worshipping activity around the Cultra monument’, says Jim. ‘There were animals skinned, and it was widely believed that this was devil worship related. There were also recorded incidents in Antrim and Coleraine’.
As the author of ‘Disappeared Off the Face of the Earth,’ a book detailing his ‘first-hand experiences of witches covens in Northern Ireland and the Republic’, Jim Cairns should know. Originally from Ballyclare and today based in Kilkenny, he says he came to Satan, or rather Satan came to him, through his own ‘bitter experiences’. ‘It all opened up after a paramilitary incident, an abduction attempt on me which took place in 1994’ he explains. ‘A lot of things started to trouble me about the incident and how the paramilitaries were able to pinpoint where I was that night – only one person really knew where I would be and that was my ex-wife’.
Jim outlines how he later discovered his ex-wife ‘was involved with the IRA and a satanic cult which was masquerading as a pseudo-Christian sect. That is the one thing that the IRA and UVF have in common, membership of this satanic cult’. Um. Okay. ‘I get very specific information from Reverend Roy Magee who is a Belfast-based go-between, between the paramilitaries and their victims’, he continues. ‘A Presbyterian minister called Reverend Bradford was shot by the IRA and Reverend Roy Magee told me that he was shot because he found out about the activities of the rich and the powerful in Northern Ireland. He found out that the rich and the powerful were involved in satanic activity’.
According to Jim Cairns, this devotion to darkness blazes a highly organized trail through the whole of Northern Irish society. From the police service and the judiciary to the church and the wealthy – it appears Satan’s little helpers are just about everywhere. ‘It’s endemic at present’, he says. ‘These secret societies believe that we’re coming to the ‘end of times’ and they’re celebrating. It’s very likely top levels of the police force are involved. I don’t believe any of those top police commissioners get to that level unless they are connected in some way. I also wouldn’t be surprised if there were large numbers of clergy in Northern Ireland who proclaim to be Christians but are most certainly of the other persuasion, they’re Satanists’.
And so our conversation continues on this Devil Rides Out/Rosemary’s Baby style trajectory. There’s much talk of ‘the dark road’ and ‘covens that use drugs and mind control’, and how ‘it goes right to the Royal family’. Indeed, refer to any notorious incident to have taken place in this country over the last three decades, and you can be sure, that for Jim Cairns, there’s some sort of satanic link. The Kincora child abuse scandal, the Ormeau Park murder of Brian McDermott, the Shankill Butchers…
‘I can’t prove it, but they had all the symptoms of it, the dates on which they were carried out, and the way they were killed indicates that the Shankill Butcher murders were satanic murders’.
Tellingly, a cursory glance at Jim’s website reveals that prior to his abduction attempt in 1994, his ‘only knowledge of witchcraft or anything devilish would have been the Hammer Horror films of the sixties, i.e., Dracula and The Wicker Man.’ It’s also worth pointing out that this self-same website has links to another site, belonging to a certain individual known as David Icke.
In a way, though, it’s not hard not to accept some of the conclusions drawn by Jim Cairns. Devilry and devil-worship may indeed be all around us in one form or another. While it might be difficult to imagine, say, your bank manager embracing the bizarre philosophies established by Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan in the 1960s, praise for the dark side now pervades life in a far more media-friendly, insidious way.
It certainly manages to creep into our front rooms every night. Tune into the latest installment of ‘Evil Big Brother’ to gloat at contestants condemned to a mini-me version of hell and damnation, as brought to you by ‘Endemol’. Then there’s ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ with Gordon Ramsey, but that could just be a diabolical program. After settling down for an evening’s viewing, you might want to use your mobile, text a fellow coven member – ‘the devil makes work for idle thumbs’ you know.
The internet is another quick and convenient place to worship the devil. Simply log on, clickety-click, and you’ll be sacrificing virtual virgins before you can say Google backward. Or why not use your morning coffee break to try ‘Dante’s Inferno Test’, where through an online, multiple-choice test, ‘your purity will be judged, and you will be banished to the appropriate level of hell’.
Alternatively, you could always just go back to basics and do what I like to do – dress up in a big black cloak and head down to the park at the end of the road to scatter skinned animals about the place. Between the discarded porn and glue bags is usually a good spot. Cavorting adds to the overall effect.
]]>Purdysburn House and Estate were acquired for the purposes of a mental asylum from the unfortunately named landowner Narcissus Batt in 1894 due to the need for expansion and relocation of the original site on the Falls Road (where the maternity ward of the Royal Victoria Hospital now stands). Construction and development from this point right up to the 1960’s has left a kind of villa colony, with various self-contained units erected across the rolling countryside. However, as with many Victorian mental institutions, this air of bucolic beauty initially concealed a much more bleak reality relating to internment and incarceration.
Brian tells me ‘Phrases like ’round the bend’ come from the fact that, in Victorian times particularly, places like this were built just outside of town and just out of sight, so they were quite literally round the bend. It’s that kind of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ attitude which governed early thinking towards mental illness. In the early part of the twentieth century, you even had people like unmarried mothers institutionalized here on grounds of promiscuity, and they would’ve spent most of their lives here, which is a scary thought’.
In an effort to confront the negative connotations attached to Purdysburn, the management and clinicians decided in the early 1990s to rename it and open it up for greater use by the public. Brian describes this move as a deliberate policy to try and break down the barriers between society and mental health, which has traditionally been defined by very closed environments. Today, over 30 voluntary organizations also sit on the site, including an equestrian center, an organic farm, and an Arts Care project which emphasizes the therapeutic qualities of music, art, and dance. The population of patients at the facility, which peaked at over 1,800 between 1956 and 1957, has now been whittled down to around 300. This is largely due to changes in mental health provision in the last 15 years, with much greater emphasis being placed on alternative ways of treating people such as support in the community, rather than simply locking them up indefinitely.
I ask Brian whether or not the upheaval of the Northern Ireland conflict has had any significant effect on the mental health of the population.
‘I think there’s no doubt that the violence of the Troubles here had a major effect on people in terms of psychological trauma. We did some research with Queen’s about the subject, and what’s interesting is that it wasn’t until the ceasefires in 1994 that the full effects of that started to be realized. There was a sudden increase of people under 30 who were turning up at their GP’s with quite severe mental health problems, and the initial thinking was that these people were suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress. While the Troubles kept going, people somehow coped and went through the routines, but when it stopped a lot of people not even directly involved began blaming themselves for certain things, like wondering why their mate or neighbor had been shot and not them, and were basically unable to deal with these kinds of pressures’.
As we drive around the vast expanses of Knockbracken’s grounds, Brian points out the unfinished Shannon clinic, which is to open in January 2005 and will become Northern Ireland’s first regional secure unit.
‘At the minute if you went to court and the judge deemed that your actions were committed due to mental health problems, depending on the severity of your crime, the chances are that you would have to go to a high-security facility in Scotland because to date there hasn’t been any middle ground in the form of a secure unit for people with medium requirements. So this building will house people who are a potential danger to themselves and others, some of whom may have passed through the judicial system. It’ll also have single bedrooms and ensuite bathrooms, which is something else we’re very pleased to have broken ground on here, as opposed to the old long open wards which just weren’t environments that were conducive to any form of recovery’.
Further around the site, the Dorothy Gardiner clinic acts as a facility for acute admissions, but it is the Shimna building that provides the most stark evidence of the grim realities of mental illness. It acts as a residence for longer stay patients and is staffed by people highly specialized in dealing with instances of chronic illness and delusional behavior. A sense of catatonia permeates the building as we pass through day rooms full of disturbed-looking people suspicious of our presence, who occasionally engage us in bizarre conversation. As Communications Manager, Brian also has to deal with all manner of official complaints from such patients, including wrongful detainment. One such letter he tells me of which landed on his desk was from a patient who felt he wasn’t receiving the right form of treatment and was being held in the institution when he should have been let out to pursue his ‘career’.
‘He had copied the letter to his local MP, who was a prominent Ulster Unionist politician and high-ranking member of the Orange Order. The MP in question is a very good friend of ours, so he phoned us up to satisfy himself that this guy was being treated appropriately. So, we invited him up and sat round a table with him and the patient, who relayed his concerns. When he’d finished, his MP said ‘Can we just go over the bit about your career being impeded again? I understand that if you feel you aren’t getting the right medication and treatment you mightn’t be able to work and so on, so exactly what is it that you do?’. To which the guy replied ‘I’m the Pope!”. At which point the meeting was presumably adjourned. However, while this may provide an anecdotal aside, to witness an environment such as Shimna where people do suffer from severe problems and delusions is unsettling and also tragically sad.
Indeed, the official figures which show that 1 in 4 people in Northern Ireland suffer from some form of mental health problem each year indicate something of the fragility of the human psyche. And while structures of health and social welfare have tended to be hierarchical, bureaucratic, and detached from local communities, there seems to be a concerted effort at Knockbracken to engage with the issues on a very human level. While it still suffers from a lack of funding and certain stigmas which remain, mental health treatment appears to have evolved considerably in the past 10-15 years. Purdysburn, included for years in the Belfast vocabulary in the context of ‘Yer doin’ my head in, I’m away to Purdysburn’, is slowly shedding its negative image and becoming increasingly referred to as Knockbracken, something which Brian McDermott sees as a victory in itself.
]]>Even where no ready-made caves were available, civilizations started getting wise to the advantages of subterranean dwellings. Most notably in the deserts of China and North Africa, where whole communities dug down into the soft rock to create underground rooms grouped around sunken courtyards (think Luke Skywalker’s home on Tatooine). They discovered that they could live more comfortably, out of the harsh winds and extremes of temperature found on the surface, while at the same time keeping as inconspicuous as possible in a featureless terrain.
Though such habitations are still in use up to present times, (even evident in western countries, there are people living in cave dwellings on the outskirts of Granada, Spain) generally, these would be considered as ‘primitive’ and not suitable for modern living. This idea started to change in the 1960/70’s when North Americans were getting increasingly edgy about the escalation of the cold war and the fuel crisis. Experiments and developments in alternative construction techniques occurred, which, while never tested to destruction by those pesky Russians, were able to prove certain, clear advantages in terms of energy conservation.
So, if you are interested in becoming an environmentally conscious, nouveau-troglodyte, the principles are as follows: While air temperature fluctuates on a daily and seasonal basis, the temperature beneath the earth’s surface is relatively stable and should be well above freezing even in winter. The deeper you go, the more this proves to be true, but even at depths of little more than a foot, it starts becoming useful. Also worth noting (at the risk of sounding boring) that, because of its sheer mass, there is also a time delay – when the earth is at its coldest the air has already started to heat up and vice versa. Yes, that’s right, you guessed it, the earth is acting as a ‘temperature moderator’ or ‘thermal flywheel’. Some fancy graphs would probably be useful at this stage to validate these claims but to be honest, I don’t think The Vacuum is that sort of publication.
So, building a house underground or even partially ‘earth sheltered’ can help keep it warm in winter and cool in summer, and therefore offer great reductions on fuel bills against that of your average surface-dweller’s gaff. Because of lack of exposed surfaces or features, there are also savings to be made on maintenance costs (especially if you keep a goat) as well as time saved by not having to consider what color to paint the walls (although you will have to think of a name for the goat).
Living Underground
While in the long term this looks good financially, it’s time to point out one of the disadvantages because initial building costs will almost certainly be higher than a conventional construction, typically by 10-20%. How come? Well, first, you got to dig a great big hole. Bigger than the house itself to allow work to be carried out all around it. Then you got to construct a massive structure to take the weight of all that earth. The most suitable material is reinforced concrete for floor, walls, and roof. This then has to be completely waterproofed on the outer surface. It is critical to get this right at the outset because, believe me, you don’t want to be confronted with the job of trying to locate and repair a leak the next winter. No… really. Insulation is still required in decent quantities if you want to avoid condensation problems on the inside, which I presume you do. Besides, a layer of something is needed to protect the waterproofing from punctures, and this will do the trick nicely. Also, it is a good idea to provide a bit of the old drainage to the base of the walls before you backfill. So, only once the whole structure is covered in earth can you relax, sow your wild oats and let nature take its course. Yes… tucked up in the very womb of Mother Nature, sounds cosy but what about light and ventilation? Remember, this is supposed to be Home Sweet Home, not Tomb Sweet Tomb.
A lot depends on the room layout, which in turn is influenced by location, location, location. In basic terms, a well-drained, south-facing slope would be ideal. That allows the principal rooms to be arranged in a linear fashion, not too deep into the hillside, with plenty of glazing on the sunny side, providing warmth, natural light, fresh air, and views. How about two stories…with a terrace? Now that sounds nice.
If such a site is not available, it can be partially created by building above ground and simply covering the entire structure with earth afterward. This is not cheating. Failing that, a courtyard-type plan could be used, with rooms opening into one or more lightwells, though don’t be expecting dramatic views with this one.
The thermal mass of the concrete structure can turn out to be very useful for passive solar heating, absorbing energy by day, which will be radiated back into the space at night.
Warm, stale air can be extracted through a heat exchanger to pre-heat other stuff, like fresh air or domestic hot water. Long-term energy-saving features like these can soon outweigh the initial cost and energy put into creating the building. Underground living is good for those who like to plan ahead. Which is just as well because when it comes to altering or extending the building, you are fairly stuffed!
If designed properly, an earth-sheltered building has the ability to become almost invisible in the landscape. On the one hand, this makes it an ideal solution for sensitive rural locations. On the other hand, it is equally likely that planners in this part of the world will be gripped by fear when confronted with something unfamiliar. And on the other hand (I’ve got three hands), how do you find your house in the dark, especially perhaps after a wee drink? Imagine getting the wrong front door and waking up next to a badger? Such are the perils to bear in mind.
So, if you feel the urge to settle down and dig in, like the idea of a safe, cosy home with wildlife grazing/fighting/mating on your roof, and don’t mind children pointing and shouting ‘look at the funny mole-man mummy’, then underground living may be for you.
]]>Nevertheless, for me personally, ‘radicalised’ by the simultaneous indoctrination and enlightenment from the teachings of the Fine Art course at the College of Art in Belfast, ARE seemed a natural and timely vehicle for driving forward a set of philosophical and theoretical propositions that had been distinctly lacking in the mainstream arts infrastructure that permeated the city in those pre-Thatcher years.
So what was Art & Research Exchange? Originally, the organisation materialised and made its presence felt as the Northern Ireland workshop of the Free International University (F.I.U.), established in Germany some years earlier by the artist, Joseph Beuys, and the Nobel Prize-winning author, Heinrich Böll. The FIU, as its title suggests, had aspirations to become a global network of creative groups and individuals involved in interdisciplinary research and creative development; crossing boundaries between art and community, politics and economics, history and culture.
ARE was to be the FIU’s outpost in Belfast, and initially, as I understand it, the workshop operated as a standing conference, where events took place peripatetically; generating debate, agitating for bureaucratic change, and generally getting involved in ‘consciousness-raising’. In the context of the growing war pervading the North and with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (A.C.N.I) doing everything, it seemed, to studiously avoid embracing the conflict as a politically-charged source of artistic inspiration for the visual arts, the intellectual work of the FIU/ARE was, for me, a very welcome initiative.
As I remember it, there were three key figures in the evolution of ARE, and without whose dedication and doggedness I would not be writing this short article. In my mind, the most prolific was the indomitable Belinda Loftus. An English woman, with good old socialist principles, she was a fastidious researcher and energetic writer with a passion for social anthropology and vernacular culture. Her unflappable energy in those early years, and belief in making the impossible attainable, resonates with me now. Alongside Belinda, came the Scottish artist, Alistair MacLennan: one of the most extraordinary individuals I have ever had the privilege to be associated with. Where Belinda was the pragmatist, Alistair harnessed the ideological rudder of the ship, and in the dark days when resources, moral support, and conviction were low (especially when Belfast was being literally ripped apart and art seemed an irrelevance), this guy, with his quiet humility, provided the sense of purpose. The third protagonist that I recall, was the German artist cum community activist, Rainer Pagel, another interloper, who had taken to the politics of Northern Ireland like a fish to water. Rainer was a great fixer, both in a practical sense, when it came to things like the electrics in a building, but also as an intermediary, talking to funders, community workers, and a whole host of opinion-formers across the political, cultural, and bureaucratic divides. I think it was his detached Germanic perspective that allowed him to trespass on the complex cultural sensitivities in Belfast without any self-consciousness or caution.
So what did ARE do? When I became involved, first as a naive but enthusiastic volunteer and then as its first director in late 1979, the organisation had not long acquired the second and third floors of 22 Lombard Street as a base (An awkward and, on reflection, totally unsuitable premises in the centre of town). But that aside, there was a real energy to the place.
The artspeak said “ARE promotes an integrated programme of exhibitions and workshop activities that contextualise contemporary art practice within the framework of local, national, and international cultural developments.” In reality, the organisation housed two unexceptional exhibition spaces – which intermittently were used for seminars, conferences, and rehearsal space for wonderful bands like the Idiots and Stiff Little Fingers – a screen printing workshop/design studio, photographic darkroom, two artists studios, and eventually the first headquarters of the Artists Collective of Northern Ireland (A.C.N.I) and Circa contemporary art magazine (C.C.A.M).
The exhibition programme was very much glocal in its orientation. On one hand, showcasing the work of emerging Irish artists working in more traditional media, like Micky Donnelly, Dermot Seymour, Fergus Delargy, and Locky Morris as well as those artists committed to more expansive uses of performance and time-based media, including John Carson, Alistair MacLennon, Willie Doherty, and Adrian Hall. Complimenting this plethora of work by resident artists, (a number exhibiting in a one-person context for the first time) ARE was dedicated to providing a platform for many UK and international artists whose work – once again operating across a broad range of media – resonated with the organisation’s sense of purpose and place. Significant performances were staged by Dale Franks (Australia), Zbignew Warpecowski (Poland), the collective – Mutus Liber (Italy) and various UK artists including Mona Hatoum, Slivia Ziranek, Richard Layzell, and The Bow Gamelan Ensemble. This time-based work was complemented by exhibitions and events by many other leading artists included Barbara Kruger (USA), John Blake (Netherlands), and UK artists, Helen Chadwick, Tony Rickaby, and James Reilly. Punctuating this work by individual artists was a regular programme of exhibitions and events which explored more popular and, arguably, more accessible takes on visual culture including, for instance: a major survey of image-based political propaganda in Ireland; American movie posters of the 1950s; a review of comic culture; an exhibition of Irish Trade Union banners and a survey of poster works for bill-posting.
The idea, in essence, was to work across artistic disciplines, but just as importantly, to forge some kind of dialogue between the apparently disparate worlds of fine art practice and community-based art and culture. Certainly, artists used the spaces and community groups and individuals used the spaces – to great effect – but in reality, there was little cross-fertilisation. Generally speaking, artists, especially those older-generation artists cultivated by an ultra-conservative Arts Council, viewed ARE’s forages into community art and politics as a contamination of the artistic canon. Conversely, community groups hardened by communal conflict and the inevitable disenfranchisement that political violence brings with it, were, for the most part, hugely suspicious of bourgeois artists making indulgent art while Belfast burned.
In my view, these polarised circumstances weren’t helped either, with the symbolic introduction of state subsidy, which appeared to be a belated effort by the Labour government to mollify dissension and invigorate ‘community-relations’. In 1978 Lord Melchett, the then Minister for Education, announced a paltry new fund of £100,000 per annum for the development of a programme called Community Arts. Of course, this term had been widely used – and funded – in Britain for a number of years, but like all ‘mainland’ success stories, Northern Ireland was also to be subjected to this exciting and ground-breaking initiative.
Melchett said of the new phenomenon: “I have a feeling that trying to define community art is about as difficult as defining art itself, but I see a need for two related developments. First to encourage existing artistic activity, exhibitions of the visual arts, concerts, plays and so on, to expand into the more deprived and isolated areas of Northern Ireland where they would not normally be available and to do so in a way which encourages people who would not normally go and see or listen to, to start doing so. Second I believe the need to do more to encourage the artistic efforts of people living in deprived areas, particularly where the artistic activity, where ever it is, is especially relevant or linked to the lives and experiences of local people”. Laudable stuff. But consider the riposte from the then Director of the Arts Council: “The concern of those who may feel that these advances have taken place at the expense of quality in the existing institutions can be allayed. They have been made possible by the provision of new money from the Department of Education specifically negotiated for these purposes: none of the major institutions have been curtailed to facilitate them”. The de facto mantra had now been officially formalised; there was to be community arts for the lumpenproletariat and high art for the cultured few.
Against this backdrop, there is no doubt that the long-term aspirations and financial security of Art & Research Exchange were significantly compromised. The organisation inevitably got locked into an ideological battle with the Arts Council as to where its funding should come from. The Art Committee, led by the Art Director, Brian Ferran was only too pleased to palm ARE off onto the Community Arts Committee, and the Community Arts Committee, serviced by their hapless new Development Officers, John Morrow and Imelda Foley were determined that if funds were going to be forthcoming, ARE would have to demonstrate its ‘community’ credentials, in terms of bums on seats and geographical catchment. Fuck the art content.
So it was in a climate of attrition and institutional wariness (and weariness) that, I would argue, ARE articulated its portfolio of activities, propped up by a revenue funding base which was tiny by comparison to the resources that were made available to those arts organisations which followed mainstream models.
Yet, for me, it was in this uncomfortable space – this falling between two bureaucratic stools – which ironically strengthened ARE’s dynamic and philosophical prowess. It was also this dissenting framework which created the energy to enable the organisation to programme some very interesting and occasionally memorable, vanguard exhibitions and events, intimated earlier; bringing to Belfast for the first time a wealth of alternative visual art practice in mixed media, installation, video and live art. Equally significant, ARE was one of the first spaces in the country to stage a coherent series of exhibitions which foregrounded more popular artforms such as photography, comic culture, poster art, and other community-based practice, in a serious and curatorially uncompromising way.
Just as importantly, the organisation was the galvanising force behind the establishment of the Artists Collective of Northern Ireland and Circa art magazine. The former, a democratic artists support and lobby group, and the latter, a pan-Irish art journal that provided a critical context in which to examine contemporary visual culture. These two platforms were significant catalysts in driving forward a new agenda for the visual arts in Northern Ireland: one that was not predicated on personal connections and patronage; one that recognised that social and political imperatives were an essential part of visual arts discourse; and one that offered more democratic and transparent opportunities for the growing number of artists emerging in the city.
How any of this stacks up now I have no idea as I have not lived in Belfast for 15 years, but in the spirit of the premature death of a significant icon, perhaps ARE’s greatest attribute was that it was short-lived. It did not last long enough to become institutionalised. Mischievously speaking, if it did achieve anything beyond an artistic legacy, it was as a conceptual and irritating thorn in the butt of an arts establishment, which had long since given up caring about the aspirations of its non-aligned constituents.
]]>
I have no idea why my parents don’t believe in God – they just say they don’t and that “there’s no point making a religion out of it”. Of course there are plenty of people who lose their faith but to be born into the faithless is something else entirely. I have no sense of disappointment, disillusionment or loss, no sense of the hole in my soul where Jesus should be. I’ve also long realised that I’m an atheist for the same reason most people around me are Christians i.e. I was raised that way – so there’s not much point in claiming some special insight. Few people are demonstrably religious and I’ve never felt the need to be demonstrably atheistic. At school I mumbled through a million assemblies and yawned through a thousand RE lessons just like everybody else. I was extremely curious about this strange extra dimension my friends had to their lives, with their BB football teams and youth clubs and trips to Bangor, but when you have been warned from infancy that the Bible is ‘just a story’ no amount of scripture or ceremony can bring you in to faith’s circular argument. Regular attempts were made to convert me and they all went straight over my head.
It was only when I got into my late teens that Christians started to annoy me. By that point I had noticed that while I was morally obliged to ‘respect their beliefs’ the reverse did not apply. As alcohol and fornication loomed over the spotty horizon my friends acquired a Stakeknife-level expertise at leading double lives, usually managing to wash the vomit out of their hair in time for church on Sunday, although any straying from the path could always be blamed on the heathen in their midst. I also had my first up-close experience of real, nasty and politically-motivated religious intolerance. Arnold Hatch, a UUP councillor and governor at our school, tried to have Seamus Heaney removed from the literature syllabus on grounds of ‘blasphemy’. When some of us kicked up a fuss over this we were slapped down in short order (people have been expelled for getting Portadown College in the papers, don’t you know.) After that I noticed the nastiness everywhere: a Free Presbyterian friend who only shopped in Free Presbyterian shops; the chemistry teacher who wouldn’t keep evolution textbooks in the science library; the fact that everybody hated the Methodists and that the feeling was mutual; the Portadown priest who introduced my girlfriend to every available Catholic male in a ten mile radius; the Brethren father who called me up to enquire as to the whereabouts of his daughter by asking “What sort of person are you?” I wouldn’t have minded that one so much if she’d actually slept with me.
Christianity in Northern Ireland is above all else a cult of respectability and so adult life only raises the stakes. One by one those around you fall. Formerly wild couples suddenly marry in church and order you to do likewise, relatives worry rather too loudly about how you’ll raise your children, friends and colleagues and strangers express medieval opinions that you must agree with – and finally, the last straw, a fat man in a sweater shouts his judgements and insults at the blameless shoppers of Portadown. He made me see the light. Because the simple truth is that Christians are just fucking rude. And from now on, I’m going to be rude right back.
Wetherspoon News does not necessarily belong into the same category as it is given away for free (like this publication), it’s obviously intended as advertising (unlike this one – at least not directly) and has ‘over one million readers’. The review copy evidently had gone through the hands of several people before it reached me. It was weathered and crumpled. The first page that fell open were the ‘letters to the editor’. Apparently Tim Martin, the owner of Wetherspoon plc, purports to be the editor of the WN and takes it upon himself to answer all the printed letters. There is, for example, the complaint of David Kelly’s wife that is put into words by her husband’s letter. Though generally a (red and white) wine-drinker she occasionally thirsts after a bottle of alcopop at her local. Unfortunately the straws provided are too short to reach to the bottom of the bottle and once they fall into one are ‘very difficult to retrieve’. Martin offers to investigate this problem. He could alternatively have drawn our concerned attention to the ‘celebrity interview’, a few pages prior to the letters section. In the accompanying photographs, the celebrity can be seen drinking her alcopop with a straw out of a glass. There you are Mrs Kelly – problem solved.
In the celebrity interview we learn not only from, but also about the celebrity, an actress from a hospital drama, who is described as the ‘girl next door’ but also posed for ‘raunchy shots’ for a ‘saucy new range’ of underwear from a department store (which she was not happy with), as well as for photographs taken of her posing ‘fresh-faced and wearing a Gypsy-style low cut top and oh-so tight jeans’ in an empty Wetherspoon pub. For good measure we are also given a picture of her among starving Ethopian children and the information that she is expecting to ‘meet the love of her life in 2003’. Slightly more condensed this would make an ideal soul-mate ad. And if anyone is in doubt, she poses in a Central London pub-space with both alcopop, beer and her ‘oh-so tight jeans’ unaccompanied.
Other articles promise less but provide background information on pubs, the events organised by them and the staff. There is a Kylie Minogue look-alike pulling pints in a pub in Eastbourne. Potential new staff are enticed by a double page of careers. The featured employees from middle-management are successful enough to inspire but not too old to alienate the potential target group, when they come forward with homilies in manager speak that are dotted with adjectives like ‘flexible’, ‘hard-working’, ‘fast working’ and ‘achievable’. There are all some features about customers. Some sing the praises of the accessibility of the pubs, their smoking policy and then there are Mike, Derek and Ian. Their ambition is to drink in every Wetherspoon bar within the United Kingdom. So far they have managed ‘more than 600’. Let’s hope their livers have an ability to expand that parallels the growth of the company.
The main aim of WN is to throw out a line in which a present customer and reader will entangle himself. And it is very much a man’s world, where husbands write for their wives, where bland irony tries to pass itself off for humour. WN portrays the company in the most humane way. Customers and staff are named; there is a glossary of pub-names that try to explain why certain pubs have got the names they have. The Jack Phillips in Godalming, a converted supermarket, was named after a wireless operator on The Titanic who was born in that town. Here a place with hardly a history hijacks a past.
That a supermarket could be converted into a pub is highly symptomatic. In effect the Wetherspoon pubs are little else than supermarkets. They manage to provide a certain product range at a competitive price – so competitive that individual local traders find impossible to underbid. The reason they can do this is of course that they have the buying power to do it. Unlike a supermarket they only have a restricted range of products. This is where Martin’s entrepreneurial genius sets in. By selling himself as a stalwart of beer tradition he can present his potential customers with a wider product range. This is where the WN comes in. Some of the articles provide us with information about promotional events while others discuss superfluously organic wine, the history of gastronomy and brewing, and gives a portrait of a small brewery. The success of Wetherspoon to carry this off can only be judged if one carries the comparison with supermarkets a bit further. There can be little doubt that the position of one of the major supermarkets, as regards their relatively dependent suppliers and their customers, would not be accepted as uncritically. Who could imagine Mike, Derek and Ian crossing the United Kingdom in order to buy potatoes and milk in every Tesco, Sainsbury or ASDA supermarket? In a way the WN contributes to make this seem ridiculous. A public relations exercise that other retailers have not yet managed to master.
It is evident that the WN aims to link the customer to the pub. Its city portrait (of Glasgow) provides us with a list of the Wetherspoon’s pubs in the place. The WN tries to create the illusion that consumers, bar staff and management form a community. Of course we don’t. However, given that the ‘magazine is FREE’ one should be grateful. At least it provides us with something to leaf through while we are sitting in a Wetherspoon pub and are waiting for a date. It also serves as a good guideline. If we get bored looking at its pages we have waited too long, though those of us hoping to bump into the celebrity with ‘a Gypsy-style low cut top’ in a Wetherspoon’s in Sheperd’s Bush may find that we turn the pages till the ink fades.
]]>One of the best ways of thinking about grief is to see it as the response to loss. In life we become increasingly attached to people, places and things and when the time comes to cut that link, for whatever reason, we experience the loss of attachment. The greater the part played in our lives by the object of our attention the greater the loss. But it is relationships that come to be most filled by powerful feelings of attachment and that is why it is the death of those we love that strikes hardest at us. Sometimes people speak of retirement and other aspects of life as a kind of bereavement and when they do so it is to this break of attachment that they refer. Still, it is death and the loss involved in the death of those to whom we are bound, that brings the real pain of bereavement. And this is where pets have come to be significant, especially in a world where relationships with other people can become reduced in number.
Pets become a kind of honorary human, they become friends, most especially for those who spend a great deal of their time with them. To live alone perhaps, or to be bereaved of one’s partner is to experience a degree of social void into which pets come with great comfort. Such a pet comes to occupy a place in people’s lives that is hard for others to understand. Busy people with hectic jobs who deal with many people every day can often find it hard to imagine a world in which an elderly or disabled man or woman hardly meets or speaks to anyone all day long. A pet can be a vital oasis of friendship within such a human desert. Under those conditions we talk to our pets, we speak to them of times past and of persons past. For an elderly person who has lost their spouse the dog becomes the continuing link with the dead husband or wife. Indeed, if and when that dog then dies the grief felt by the survivor is all the greater because she had not only lost her dog but also her final personal link with her previously deceased husband. She encounters an echo of her earlier grief, a kind of double grief. Here her dog has become a kind of symbol of her husband, its death reminds her of his death, bringing back her sense of loss and wedding it to the death of the dog.
One of the greatest of human capacities lies in our ability to generate symbols, to take certain objects and fill them with many layers of meaning. To do this is to pour ourselves and our relationships into things which is why, for example, we often speak of something as possessing ‘sentimental meaning’. We mean that it reminds us of people and events, in fact it reminds us of our relationships. More than that, it helps us keep alive the memories of those relationships. The death of pets is powerful precisely because of their symbolic significance. To children, for example, the death of a pet may involve a sense of grief, as above, but it can also carry a variety of other meanings. It can, for example, be an introduction to dead things. Children are often interested in dead things, pondering how they differ from things that are alive. It is one of the most basic of human ways of looking at the world and the things in it. Here curiosity and grief merge in a way that may well be absent for much older people though the human ability to distinguish between living and dead things is probably connected with the sense of the fear of the dead, since inertness is a very strange human ability. People are characterized by movement, corpses are still.
Dog and cat deaths:
Our response to pet death has become particularly marked over the last decade or so by the tremendous growth in pet cemeteries and pet crematoria. Except for deeply rural areas there are now few places that are not within reach of such a facility. About ten years ago I was involved in a study of pet death along with Laura and Martyn Lee who published a book Absent Friend: Coping with the loss of a treasured pet. In a survey involving keen pet owners we found that 36% of dog owners and 25% of those owning cats had engaged in some sort of animal funeral, with cremation being most common with 34% of their dogs and 22% of their cats being cremated. About a third of these pet owners had the ashes returned to them. This reflects the increasing British practice of taking the cremated remains of one’s human relatives and placing them in locations of personal significance. In a further survey we asked pet owners if they thought their pets had souls, and 77% said they did, but that did not mean that they also believed their pets had ‘eternal life’. To speak of our pets having souls seem to indicate that we see them as having some personality and a kind of ‘depth’ to them.
Being able to cremate pets is, itself, particularly useful for many urban dwellers precisely because we can take the ashes and treat them in ways that reflect that depth and the relationship we had with them. It is easier to place ashes in a flower bed than the corpse of a dog. Similarly, a small number of people, those with very deep and special attachments to their pets have expressed the wish to have the pet’s ashes placed in with their own, once they have died and been cremated. They can, in that sense, be together after death. As long ago as 1991 The Cambridge Pet Crematorium and Cemetery featured in a television documentary and story in the Radio Times (April 27th 1991). It showed pet owners watching the cremation of their pets and then taking away the remains in small boxes, all was respectfully and very humanly done, almost with a degree of pastoral care and attention on the part of the proprietor. A different kind of service is, apparently, available in Japan where a Tokyo company owns a mobile crematorium that will come to someone’s house and cremate the dead pet.
In our own survey of pet owners nearly three quarters felt that some sort of bereavement support was useful when a pet dies and nearly half said they would be prepared to pay for it. More than half, however, said that they did receive some support from other family members, showing something of the way in which the whole family is often involved in the death of pets. Often it is with the death of dogs that most support is felt needed and given, the dog seems to be, in this sense, a more ‘social’ pet than the cat. But this is also because people take their dogs out for a walk and are likely to meet other people by doing so. Some people have also reported sensing the presence of their dead pets, an experience that is not far removed from the experience of a very large minority of people who report sensing the presence of their dead human relatives sometime after their death. These experiences show just how much pets become part of the identity and memory of their owners in a trend that is likely to grow as more people live alone in a society that is focused more upon televisions and private leisure than upon many open encounters. The death of pets is almost certainly to rise in profile as a cause of grief in ways that cannot be ignored by those of us who may be petless and very busy people.
]]>The Agreement is a Beaconsfield commission in partnership with over sixteen organisations from arts councils, art organisations and government bodies across the two islands. The commissioners’ aim is to celebrate the signing of the Agreement reached in the multi-party talks on Northern Ireland in 1998. Beaconsfield overall objective is to educate the public by providing a streamlined resource for the development and presentation of contemporary art and initiating dialogues between artists and their audience. The exhibition in Belfast will also travel to Dublin, Derry, London and Manchester, were in each location its significance will be discussed and interpreted through seminars and debates by the context in which it is presented, therefore shifting according to the cultural and political climate in which it is viewed.
Wandering around the exhibition of grey tone foam-like board with precision cut text, gave me the opportunity to read and consider the text of The Agreement’ again. But more importantly in terms of the examination of language as a means of classifying and ordering the world, this commission is possibly a catalyst for discussion of society’s incessant production of a distorted reality through images, signs and language. The constraints of language cannot be overcome, but what I hope this forum offers us is not so much an opportunity to be educated’ but to explore the complexity and deep implications for the individual of an 11,500 word text, as a catalyst to examine what written language is and its limitations in the lived reality of the individual.
Sources: [1] Wilson, Michael. Fragments and Responses’ in Kelly, Liam. (Editor). Shane Cullen Fragmens Sur Les Institutions Républicaines IV, Derry: Orchard Gallery, 1997, p 20. [2] Quotes taken from www.theagreement.org [3] Check out this text if you are interested in a comprehensive and accessible read on Linguistics. Cameron, Deborah. Feminism & Linguistic Theory, Second Edition, New York: Palgrave, 1992 (1985).
]]>