Northern Ireland and the politics of boredom

Conflict, capital and culture

George Legg

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526145895
  9781526128867
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526128881
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a new interpretation of the Northern Irish Troubles. From internment to urban planning, the hunger strikes to post-conflict tourism, it asserts that concepts of capitalism have been consistently deployed to alleviate and exacerbate violence in the North. Through a detailed analysis of the diverse cultural texts, Legg traces the affective energies produced by capitalism's persistent attempt to resolve Northern Ireland's ethnic-national divisions: a process he calls the politics of boredom. Such an approach warrants a reconceptualization of boredom as much as cultural production. In close readings of Derek Mahon's poetry, the photography of Willie Doherty and the female experience of incarceration, Legg argues that cultural texts can delineate a more democratic – less philosophical – conception of ennui. Critics of the Northern Irish Peace Process have begun to apprehend some of these tensions. But an analysis of the post-conflict condition cannot account for capitalism's protracted and enervating impact in Northern Ireland. Consequently, Legg returns to the origins of the Troubles and uses influential theories of capital accumulation to examine how a politicised sense of boredom persists throughout, and after, the years of conflict. Like Left critique, Legg's attention to the politics of boredom interrogates the depleted sense of humanity capitalism can create. What Legg's approach proposes is as unsettling as it is radically new. By attending to Northern Ireland's long-standing experience of ennui, this book ultimately isolates boredom as a source of optimism as well as a means of oppression.

1

Geographies of boredom and the new city of Craigavon

On paper, the new city of Craigavon could have changed the face of Northern Ireland. Planned between 1963 and 1966 and undergoing a period of intense construction from 1967 to 1977, Craigavon was heralded as ‘a major symbol of regeneration’, which would transform the North’s industrial and social landscape.¹ The drawings that depicted the new city are charged with the energy and optimism of the enterprise (Plates 2 and 3). Here, sleek sports cars race futuristic shuttles towards a horizon filled with the promise of a new metropolis. This would be a city of desire and desirability, an arena of enticement and seduction. In many ways, Craigavon was a radically new endeavour: one that would propel Northern Ireland’s stagnating postwar economy towards the bright lights of economic regeneration, multinational capital and lavish consumerism. But despite its promise, the project struggled and never managed to attract the levels of industry or residency originally anticipated. Instead, Craigavon became an urban environment punctuated by abandoned junctions and ghost estates, representing a clear disunity between what we might call capitalism’s fixed and mobile counterparts. In this sense, Craigavon proved to be an early symbol of the complexities of capitalist planning in twentieth-century Northern Ireland, with its underdevelopment providing a potent example of state-sponsored capitalism encountering ‘barriers in its own nature’.² Consequently, if a cultural and historical reading of the new city can uncover the circumstances behind its ruptured urban form, then perhaps it might be possible to comprehend how Craigavon came to embody something close to what David Harvey has described as capitalism’s potential for ‘geographical inertia’.³

New towns have often been the subject of deprivation and decline – with their failure to create ‘social support networks’, encouraging them to be associated with a sense of boredom, banality or, as it is popularly dubbed, ‘New Town Blues’.⁴ But far too often these failings have meant that the social reality which produced them is consciously overlooked or disregarded. As Newton Emerson noted in his 2007 documentary about the new city, ‘Craigavon is just a black-hole in people’s knowledge of this part of the country’.⁵ Even during its worst years, the reasons for Craigavon’s failure were relatively unknown. As Madge Steele asserts in her poem about life in the new city’s vacuous landscape, ‘no officials take the time, to know it as they should’.⁶ Yet if Craigavon is considered as the product of a capitalist contradiction, rather than a misguided urban experiment better off forgotten, then the new city’s changing fortunes can serve an important function. In its unfortunate evolution, Craigavon can open a gateway on to the peculiar qualities of Northern Ireland’s geography – providing us with a unique insight into the North’s embedded political schisms, while also becoming a fragile marker of how capitalism has struggled to paper over such divides.

Craigavon was a top-down imposition of town planning upon a landscape riddled with its own internal difficulties. On the one hand, Craigavon was a site of considerable fixed capital investment, energised by a desire to modernise and monetise the North’s precarious political economy. On the other hand, however, Craigavon’s development needs to be seen in the context of a struggle between the wishes of a Unionist government, localised opposition, and the hopes and fears of those few working-class citizens who, in Steele’s phrase, moved to the new city ‘the seeds of life to sow’.⁷ Those who found themselves living in Craigavon were often unfortunate victims of circumstance. But they also came to shape their own circumstances, using the new city’s underdeveloped landscape to generate a politics of co-operation that countered prevailing attitudes in the North. As I will go on to argue, the literature of these residents illustrates something of the being-in-common that can be facilitated by a breakdown in the gyrations of capital. Ultimately, such cohesion would prove short lived, yet traces still remain, offering signs of hope against the backdrop of Northern Ireland’s often uncertain future.

The competing national and local impulses which dominated Craigavon’s development rarely wedded and, as they clashed, they came to create a landscape that was frequently petrified by its own instabilities. As Harvey has noted, ‘fixed capital embedded in the land may facilitate ease of movement for mobile capital but loses its value when mobile capital fails to follow the geographical paths such fixed capital investments dictate’.⁸ My argument will insist that it was precisely because of the inability for mobile capital to follow its fixed counterpart that Craigavon became replete with its own peculiar forms of geographical ennui. Central to this inertia is the intersection of capitalism and ethnic–national division, and it is ultimately through the spectre of plantation – the ominous origin of state-sponsored capitalism in Ulster – that Craigavon’s troubled history can be best understood. The divisive historical residues which lie deep within the geography of Craigavon’s designated area refused to be effaced by the imposition of the new city’s modernity. Instead, anxieties about external interference in the context of a settler culture stoked the flames of a fierce resistance, the combative language of which illustrated the violent animosity that can be aroused in response to the manipulation of Northern Irish space. The conception of Craigavon predated the Troubles, but the militant rhetoric that formed in response to the plans anticipated much of the bitterness that would dominate that conflict: talk of ‘not an inch’, ‘Brits out’ and ‘Ulster says no’.

Encircled by such fractious spatial relationships, Craigavon struggled to establish its own meanings within the geography of Northern Ireland. Instead of being the ‘city of people’s dreams’, it became an alien environment – a city haunted by insignificance and boredom. As I discussed at the outset of this book, while boredom has assumed different forms across a diverse range of critical commentaries, ‘all agree that boredom involves a loss of meaning and can be metaphorically described, in [Lars] Svendsen’s words, as a “meaning withdrawal”’.⁹ The geographical significance of this observation stems from the fact that it can rub against the foundational principle by which ‘places’ are generally thought to be conceived – namely that, as Tim Cresswell defines it, ‘places must have some relationship to humans and the human capacity to produce and consume meaning’.¹⁰ An absence of meaning can not only create the conditions for boredom, it can also destroy a sense of place. For Hubert de Cronin Hastings, long-term editor of the Architectural Review, this was the new towns’ fundamental problem. The lack of a fruitful exchange between planners and population meant that such projects tended to become ‘non-events’: ‘absolutely meaningless’ environments which were always ‘failing to come alive’.¹¹

A cultural and geographical analysis based on boredom is, nevertheless, complicated by the fact that – in the convergence of place and empty meaning – the terms of this analysis seemingly direct us towards the manifestation of ‘non-places’. That is to say, homogeneous regions which, in Edward Relph’s phrase, ‘not only look alike but feel alike and offer the same bland possibilities for experience’.¹² For Justin Carville, Craigavon’s repetitive road-schemes epitomise the sense of ‘placelessness’ Relph has theorised. ‘There is no time or space to dwell in this particular location’, Carville writes.¹³ But as I shall go on to argue, Craigavon’s design did, in fact, reproduce a distinctly Irish settlement pattern – albeit one rendered in a startling modern form. As such, it was because Craigavon’s attendant population failed to congeal around this architecture that the new city came to be punctuated with a sense of emptiness and desertion. Rather than geographies of boredom being the product of a placeless design, it is because of the ways in which those designs were imposed that such geographies became enmeshed with a peculiar sense of ennui. As the Northern Irish photographer Victor Sloan has stated in relation to Craigavon’s troubled gestation: ‘people want a structure and meaning in their environment that will reflect, and in part create, a structure in their lives. Craigavon has completely failed to provide them with this.’¹⁴ Through the photographs that Sloan would go on to produce in response to Craigavon’s uneven development, we get perhaps the clearest sense of how the disjunction between its fixed and mobile capital came to reflect this wider social disruption. Sloan’s photography would eventually come to challenge the perception that Craigavon was little more than a static and soulless locale. None the less, it is through his lens that we can perhaps most fully comprehend how the new city embodied a planned environment that was broken, disrupted and devoid of meaning.

Today, Craigavon’s uneven topography is well known, but its initial – often unrealised – aspirations have long been forgotten and are worth revisiting. Planned to be large enough to incorporate the surrounding towns of Lurgan and Portadown, Craigavon was always envisaged as a new city rather than a new town, and it was one that would be filled with the latest innovations in urban living. Central heating and piped systems of radio, television and telephonic services were to form part of Craigavon’s ‘ultra-modern town units’, and these would be connected to the new city’s nucleus via a road/rail corridor which promised both speed and ease of access.¹⁵ This mass transit system had the advantage of pulling people towards Craigavon’s new attractions – its recreation forum, its PVC sports dome, its air-conditioned shopping centre, its artificial ski-slope and its balancing lakes.¹⁶ But such a joined-up system of transportation also offered an opportunity for the almost seamless movement of industry to and from the new city’s business parks and beyond (Plates 4 and 5). This would be a city built for celerity, and with such ambitions it soon became a source of considerable financial speculation. In 1973 construction of its recreation forum was costed at over £2 million alone, and the finance necessary for the development of the new city’s industrial zones was even greater.¹⁷ State subsidies of up to £200,000 per annum helped entice Goodyear Ltd to set up a £6.5 million factory in 1968, thereby establishing a formidable industrial presence in the area.¹⁸ But the Stormont government cemented its own financial commitment to Craigavon through plans for a civil service trainin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the price of peace
• 1 Geographies of boredom and the new city of Craigavon
• 2 ‘Middle-class shits’: political apathy and the poetry of Derek Mahon
• 3 Double negative: the psychogeography of sectarianism in Northern Irish photography
• 4 Monotony and control: rereading internment
• 5 ‘The brightest spot in Ulster’: total history and the H-Blocks in film
• Conclusion: Alternative Ulster?
• Bibliography
• Index