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The Planter and the GaelAuthor(s): FelixSource: Fortnight, No. 6 (Dec. 4, 1970), p. 10Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25543216 .
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10 FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4, 1970
think and cowardice that Mary Bourke's simple solution has been injected.
The Bill itself ? although it has not yet
been drafted ? will not be a long one: it will simply repeal the restrictive clause in each of the three Acts already mentioned. If it is
signed by no fewer than three (and no more
than six) Senators, it automatically goes onto the Order Paper.
This does not guarantee a debate; the Government has left many important Opposition motions undebated on the order paper for
years. But undebated legislation is more
embarrassing to the Government than undebated
motions, and sooner or later they will have to
make up their mind what to do with it.
They can, of course, accept the Bill. Miracles have been known to happen. Nobody will
complain if they do. If they decide to oppose it,
on the other hand, the stage is set for all sorts of potentially embarrassing confrontations. Will Senator Neville Keery, for instance, who is a liberal Protestant senator on the Government side of the house, vote according to what one
presumes are his convictions on civil and
religious liberty, or in line with the party whip? Will Fine Gael's natural unwillingness to
support the government be weakened to any appreciable extent by its equally natural Catholic conservatism? What will Labour do?
The Dublin Senate has often been described ? and correctly
? as a powerless and largely irrelevant institution. Mary Bourke is in the
process of showing that this need not be a
permanent condition. There are more important things to debate, it is true ? but few so
simple.
The Planter and the Gael Armagh on a soggy Saturday
night. In the County Museum. An
exercise in definition. In competi tion with he CRA and the Rev. Ian
Paisley in the political dialogue as an art form sweepstakes, the Arts
Council predictably chose a more
refined plane for its political presentation: a tour of country towns by a tandem of poets, John
Hewitt and John Montague, reading their poems and, as the Arts
Council brochure hopefully implies, defining the respective cultures of
the Planter and the Gael.
Well, frankly, not quite. One
does, it is true, get glimpses of
divergent heritages. But the overall
impression doubtless comfort those
concerned enough about poetry and or Ireland to pay the eight shillings admission. At this level Prod and Pape meet fruitfully. So
why not at others. Though back
grounds differ, their consciences are the same. Is this the hope of
the future? Resolution through the
Arts Council? The poetry itself, of course,
differs greatly. Hewitt's is the
plainer verse, delighting in "the
good thump and bang of a rhyme," often telling a neat story with a
moral for his divided homeland.
Montague is the technically more
adventurous, taking the risk of
boring us with Gaelic metre, care
fully placing internal rhymes. At
least one of his poems, Like
Dolmens Round My Childhood, the
Old People, has the haunting
plangency that makes for the very
best folksongs ? meant as no faint
praise. One can almost hear the
steel-string guitar and acrid Ken
tucky mountain voice intoning life
in the "old country". Hewitt's commonplace poems
seem more accessible, more related to life here and the place itself.
Montague's seem more suitable for
foreign consumption, unrooted, as
though their subjects are observed
from a great distance and their
observer is concerned to present the Irish setting as a mere
backdrop to his reactions and his
faint emotions. You may say that
this is the poet's trade; taking his
temperature publicly a hundred times a day. But poets are also, as
the famous phrase has it,, the
unacknowledged legislators of tjie world, which is why Plato reckoned
them too dangerous for his Republic.
Perhaps what is most disturbing about this Arts Council enter
prise is its safety, its lack of
danger. The two bodies of work do
indeed complement each other ?
both poets are content, despite their concern for Ireland's plight, to distance themselves from what
they can only describe and not
affect: Montague by interposing the individual and personal, Hewitt by
interposing the universal. In
Auschwitz, Mon Amour, when re
counting his schoolboy indifference
to a war-time newsreel of liberated
concentration camps, Montague is
not content to describe it in terms
of the well-known callousness of
children to horror and cruelty; he
wrings from it: "To be always at
the periphery of incident-Gave my childhood its Irish dimension; drama of unevent;-" This hunger for personal involvement in drama is very reminiscent of Gavin
Burke's in Brian Moore's The
Emperor of Ice-Cream: the world
and the war does come to him
when the Germans bomb Belfast
and he revels in history conferring such drama on his "dull, dead
town." It would seem that the
moral is that in a divided land
unamenable to change or control, one merely waits, stupefied with
ennvd, for an outside entity to
change one's world.
Why then are we petrified in
self-absorption? No abount of tes
ting our own pulse-rates (a la
Montague) or recognising our
common humanity (a la Hewitt)
does more than describe the
situation yet again, and give our
elite consciences a bit of exercise.
What am I asking for? What, in
times of trouble, we need: great ness ? the courage to be
unsentimental, to puncture absur
dities, to portray reality today, to
forecast the future with poetic vision. But perhaps this doesn't fit
the Arts Council's view of itself, of
the times .. or of us.
And the most haunting image of
a poetic Saturday night? The
convoy of silver police vans
arrowing homeward on the Ml,
going back to Belfast after their
Saturday in a country town. FELIX
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