Listowel Writers' Week underwent a seismic shift under the guidance of a Belfast curator, sparking both admiration and resentment. Malachi O'Doherty reports
When a Belfast publisher and poetry editor got the job of organising a literary festival in Kerry he was given a hard time.
Stephen Connolly was met with comments like, ‘could they not have got anyone Irish to do it?’
Stephen says he is as Irish as ‘”someone whose granny lived on An Blascaod Mór”.
But he says there was a lot of that kind of vitriol.
His appointment of Listowel Writers’ Week seemed novel and inspired. Northern writers have always felt that the rest of Ireland does not comfortably include them. I have had twelve books published over the last 25 years, mostly by Irish publishers, and not once been invited to Listowel.
As it turned out, people in the town who cherish their annual festival and resented the reorganisation that brought an outsider in to run it, decided that he had too generously favoured Northerners.
One approached him in the foyer of the venue after a major event and said, “I have been involved with this festival before and I just want to tell you that you’ve ruined it.”
One, simplifying the complaint for him compared his running of the festival to the unionist gerrymandering of the local government electoral system here in the 1960s.
Which is a bit strong.
Stephen’s contract was not renewed.
Now some will argue that there were other factors in play here than aversion to Northerners when Stephen was so badly abused. Locals who had been involved in curating the festival before would have been annoyed by any outsider coming in, whether from Galway or Ballinalsloe, for they were being sidelined.
But clearly there was a strong element of partitionism in the hostility, a clear sense that Northern Ireland is another country, where things are done differently, a country which is alien and strange and which is best left alone and kept apart.
It would be hard to call this attitude racism but we should have a word for it.
There are regional suspicions in England as well, where Geordies and Scousers may be sneered at.
Even within Northern Ireland, apart from our distinct and famous sectarianism, we have a local humour which disdains culchies, that is, people from country areas.
The comedian Paddy Raff does a brilliant parody of the snooty middle class arriviste in BT9, recognising class prejudice and the affectations that come along with it.
But in Northern Ireland, exercising prejudice against someone on the basis of their cultural or national identity can get you into big trouble.
Which is not to say that is why Stephen’s contract was not renewed. His employers there have not explained their decision though I have asked them to.
And maybe we are all no better than the bigots who want nothing to do with the North and can’t even acknowledge that someone like Stephen Connolly might have something to offer.
It seems particularly cruel that a curator would be dismissed after one year, a period within which most professions would allow you some latitude for learning on the job. If he brought in more northern writers than the sensitive souls of Kerry could comfortably accommodate, they were at least writers of merit with significant reputations.
It’s not as if he rounded up his mates in the pub or some reminiscence group on an old peoples’ home.
There was Wendy Erskine, Paul Brady, Michael Magee, Stephen Sexton, Lucy Caldwell and Paul Muldoon. These are big names. Most of them have been on the festival circuit for the past year and perhaps there are grounds for complaining that including them did not distinguish Listowel sharply from what others were doing.
On the other hand, any festival that had excluded all or most of them would have seemed deficient. You’d wonder about the curator of such a festival. It would have to be someone who knew nothing at all of the most exciting developments in Irish literature this year?
Then again, of four Irish writers included in the Booker long-list this year, only one, Elaine Feeney featured at Listowel. But you could compare that with say, the John Hewitt Summer School in Armagh, a similar week-long festival of literature, which had none of the four.
Clearly what happened in Listowel stays in Listowel and Listowel must take ownership of it. But seeking to be at the centre of literary life in Ireland is not conceivably compatible with being averse to writers from Northern Ireland.
What did they expect of a new curator but that he would draw on his own contacts books for festival guests?
I’m left wondering if this aversion to the outsider is symptomatic of something specific to Listowel, born of grievances that were deep even before Stephen Connolly arrived in town, or if it tells us that ireland really is divided along the border and that a lot more work has to be done at acquainting the two sides with each other before unity can be taken seriously.
