THE theatre tour of northern Ireland on which I am engaged currently continues apace. I used the small “n” in northern because we are taking our play to some of the Ulster counties which remained within the Irish Republic at the time of partition. To have used a capital “n”, as in Northern Ireland, would have referred to the political entity rather than the geographical and historic one.
Three of the Ulster counties had a majority Catholic population when Ireland was split up, so the powers that be at Westminster must have decided that it would be better to let them go.
The six counties that make up the present province of Ulster had then, and still have, a slightly higher percentage of Protestants to Catholics because the lowland Scots who took advantage of King Billy’s defeat over King James at the Battle of the Boyne to invade the northern counties of Ireland and dispossess the natives chose to live somewhere not too far from their Scottish homeland.
Even invaders like to be able to get a wee run home for the summer holidays and Hogmanay. Indeed, I owe my current employment partly to the generosity of the descendants of those Scottish settlers. Part of the funding for the tour comes from the Ulster Scots Agency, a body set up to promote the use of the Ulster Scots language, or Ullans, as opposed to its Scottish cousin, Lallans.
Some cynics on this side of the Irish Sea refuse to accept that Ulster Scots is a language in its own right. They say it is merely a dialect and, of course, they have a point. Just because the English “How are you?” becomes “How about ye?” is hardly enough reason to put Ulster Scots on a level with Latin, Greek or even Gaelic. But then that’s how this whole Ulster Scots debate started.
The descendants of the Scottish planters in northern Ireland have become increasingly resentful of the British Government’s funding of Irish Gaelic and have been casting about rather desperately, it would seem, for something that would justify them making a claim for some of this cultural slush fund themselves.
And so they came up with the concept of this Scottish patois being treated as a language rather than as the dilution of the English language laced with the odd “sheugh” and “bairn” that obviously it is.
The play in which I am appearing is called That Woman at Rathard. It’s an adaptation of the novel December Bride, written by the late poet and novelist Sam Hannah Bell. It was made into a film around 20 years ago, with some success.
The advocates of Ulster Scots have seized on Bell as their literary champion, although, if he were alive today, it’s just possible that he might tell them they are talking through their bahookies. I don’t know if bahookie is Lallans, Ullans or LaLaLands, but I’ve heard it used more often in Scotland than “sheugh”.
The tour started off quietly enough. We played for the first four nights in Peter and Iris Robinson’s constituency in Protestant east Belfast, so no problems there. Then it was off to Letterkenny, in Donegal, one of the Ulster counties to avoid British rule.
Much to our surprise, we got a considerably larger audience than we had managed to attract in east Belfast. Mind you, there isn’t a lot going on in Letterkenny on a Sunday night in February.
Some of the cast, myself included, booked into a hostel adjacent to the theatre rather than face the two-and-a-half-hour drive back to Belfast.
Those who braved the fog and icy roads managed to get only a few miles out of town when they were stopped by a police roadblock. They found themselves surrounded by a bunch of heavily-armed young men in sweaters, jeans and balaclavas.
These were Irish Special Branch operatives on the lookout for dissident IRA men who don’t believe the peace process has gone far enough towards achieving Irish unity and who are prepared to blow up anybody who disagrees with them.
Our stage crew were praying the cops didn’t look into the back of their van, where the two imitation shotguns used in the play were stored. They might have shot first and asked questions afterwards.
When the producer and director heard the next morning that four dissidents had been arrested outside Kilkenny, they thought for a moment that I and the three other actors who had stayed over had been lifted.
Tuesday night saw me walking up the Falls Road towards a venue known as Cultur Lann. This is an establishment set up to promote all things Gaelic and includes a small theatre seating about 75 people.
On my way there, I passed the Divis Flats, a massive tower block that featured prominently in the 30 years of murder and mayhem that ripped Belfast apart. It was there that a small boy died in his bed when a bullet from a heavy machinegun operated by the police tore through his bedroom wall on the night when the Troubles really kicked off.
The Divis tower also features the “crying stairs”, a stretch of steps where six young British soldiers were killed by a bomb.
A girl who grew up in the flats told me she and her neighbours often heard the ghost of one of the dead soldiers crying for his mother, hence the name.
When I arrived at the venue, it was clear that the folk who run it hadn’t gone out of their way to advertise our Ulster Scots piece. In fact, they had done nothing. There wasn’t as much as a flier in the foyer. We had an audience of nine, but three of those had been given complimentary tickets by the producer and another one was the agent of one of the actors, so we could have had five.
We are back there again tonight. I hope those five people liked it and told their friends or we’ll have made the trip for nothing.
If we can’t get a bit more co-operation between the folk on the cultural side of things, what hope have we got of getting the boys with the guns and bombs to see eye to eye?