Struggle tourism and Northern Ireland’s culture industries: the case of Robert McLiam Wilson
/Sarah Brouillette
Northern Ireland’s continuing political volatility has encouraged conflicting interpretations of its cultural development. Recently some scholars have begun to emphasize a transition from nationalist cultural production to a more liberal and transnational literary practice in both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. In the Republic the triumph of a new transnational politics is often associated with Mary Robinson’s presidential election. Its inauguration is dated back to the 1958 ‘watershed’ initiation of Sean Lemass and T. K. Whittaker’s First Programme for Economic Expansion, followed by the establishment of an Anglo-Irish free trade area in 1965, ridding Ireland of its former protectionist policies and opening it to foreign capital investment.1 Joe Cleary points to Robinson’s election as the culmination of a process underway since this time, which entailed Ireland pursuing ‘a policy of dependent development that involved the assiduous courting of multinational, mostly American, investment and the political integration of the country into the European Community’.2 Robinson’s inaugural speech, with its frequent invocation of Irish cultural history and its simultaneous celebration of the introduction of the ‘new’ into the political landscape, emphasizes the existence of a productive relationship between the traditions of Irish culture and the prospect of a united Europe. ‘The best way we can contribute to a new integrated Europe of the 1990s’, she says, ‘is by having a confident sense of our Irishness’, claiming the Irish must take ‘full advantage of our vibrant cultural resources in music, art, drama, literature and film’.3 For Robinson the maintenance of local Irishness is precisely what allows for a productive relationship with an international political and economic system that is not so much introducing the threat of homogenization, as it is solidifying a free market for the exchange of national identities and cultures.
In the North, a perspective like Robinson’s, emphasizing being Irish as a way of being more fruitfully European, and suggesting a willingness to give up some of the strictures of faith in a separate Irish nationality, has not been entirely possible. Writing in 1990 about the Field Day School, a literary movement that responded to the initiation of the Troubles and the events of Bloody Sunday, Seamus Deane denounces the Republic for having ‘surrendered the notion of identity altogether as a monstrous and barren anachronism and rushed to embrace all those corporate, “international” opportunities offered by the European Economic Community and the tax-free visitations of international cartels’.4 He claims that against the Republic’s ‘postmodernist simulacrum of pluralism’, and embrace of the ‘concealed imperialism of the multinational’, Field Day instead promotes the ‘search for a legitimating mode of nomination and origin’ that accords with its interpretation of the Northern Irish conflict as a colonial crisis.5 Thus, even as a more conciliatory point of view has arguably come to dominate both politics and cultural production in the Republic, in Northern Ireland political necessity fed and continues to feed nationalist cultural concerns, a situation that has only begun to change with the recent dissipation of sectarian violence. Given Northern Ireland’s embattled politics, the major questions posed about new authors as they enter the market concern their respective positions on, for example, Ireland’s relationship to England, the Irish diaspora, the EU (which Northern Ireland joined, as part of the UK, in 1973), the prospects for a united Ireland, and the related continuation of violence in the North. A literature uninterested in such concerns is not impossible, but its position never goes unchallenged.
Nevertheless, with the advent and growth of the EU and the general process of transnational capitalization, Northern Ireland becomes ever more implicated in the free market of capitalist cultural expansion and trade, making it less possible for Belfast to embrace a unique culture uninfluenced by foreign elements or influence. The introduction of the Euro as an accepted currency in 1999, for example, marked a significant upsurge in the EU’s attempts at eliminating economic borders in the region. More importantly, transnationalization has presented a radical challenge to the continued traditions of sectarianism and political atavism in the region. The general political situation has become considerably less hostile due to processes that include the role of American interests in securing the groundbreaking 1994 ceasefire and subsequent 1998 Good Friday Agreement; the export of Irishness abroad via increasingly open trade channels and the tourist industry, which now markets a form of Irishness that encompasses the island; and the importation of international businesses and cultural products that belie what Damian Smyth has called the ‘totalising imperative’ of the ‘coinciding complex of nation/state/culture’.6 As a result a number of critics have come to see this ‘totalizing imperative’, representative of the region’s continued emphasis on nationalistic and atavistic cultural rhetoric, as increasingly outmoded.
One key Belfast publisher, Blackstaff Press, has been caught up in this process. In 1995 it was sold to the W&G Baird Group, a publishing and printing empire under director Roy Bailie. In 2003 Corporate Document Services, Blackstaff’s sister company and one of the largest communications firms in the UK, took over managing control. Roy Baillie has in fact been a key player. He is not only director of the W&G Baird Group; he is also a director of the Bank of Ireland and of UTV, and until 2003 he was head of the Northern Ireland Tourist Board (NITB). In interview Baillie has drawn attention to Belfast’s ‘post-conflict cachet’, and the NITB encourages the curiosity of those incorporating a political history lesson into their vacations. For example, ‘Living History’ tours and black cab taxi company guides take tourists to locations where some of the worst atrocities of the Troubles occurred, memorializing the political violence that seems to characterize Belfast for an international audience. If publishing in Northern Ireland has been dominated by Blackstaff Press, then fiction about the region has been defined by political content and in particular by the Troubles, which had been the primary subject of upwards of 400 novels by 2003, and at least as many non-fictional accounts.7 Thus Belfast literary production, as exemplified by Blackstaff Press, shares more than personnel with the vacations offered through the increasingly popular heritage niche of ‘struggle tourism’, as both respond to audience demands for what Tim Brennan has called ‘exotica, political expose´, or simple Schadenfreude’
In turn, Northern Irish fiction often responds to the use of violent heritage as an export commodity. Local authors have self-consciously commented on both the dominance of Troubles narratives within Northern Irish literature and the increasing involvement of Northern Ireland’s culture industries in transnational markets. For example, Colin Bateman’s series of comic thrillers, initiated with Divorcing Jack (1995), depict a Belfast journalist who works for the government as an official guide to foreign media covering the movement toward peace in the 1990s. He exposes them to a place set to become a ‘Northern Irish Hong Kong’, a postmodern city whose major export is cultural products like news coverage and mass-market fiction. In Lionel Shriver’s Ordinary Decent Criminals (1993) the American protagonist is attracted to Belfast because of the excitement of nationalist struggle manifest in the Troubles. Glenn Patterson’s Fat Lad (1992) depicts Belfast as a city inundated with the same transnational businesses found in major cities throughout the world – including the bookstore where the protagonist works – but still viewed by tourists as a ‘ghoulish fairground [with] a murderous significance ascribed to every street corner’.9 Such literature raises significant questions about transnational economic integration as it intersects with political history and cultural representation. Has Northern Ireland been enshrined as peripheral to the world economy, reliant on the marketing of reductive interpretations of local heritage and violent history? As local publishers and other cultural producers are absorbed into international conglomerates, does local production suffer, or is Northern Ireland actually a unique beneficiary of global markets for regional identities? Seeking answers to such questions should involve discussion of the relationship between publishing and other culture industries, as well as between literature and the wider economic and political systems with which it often engages.
Robert McLiam Wilson features prominently in most accounts of the accommodation of Northern Irish literary concerns to the region’s changing political landscape. His Eureka Street (1996) was itself marketed as yet another tale of religious strife and violent atrocity set in ‘West Belfast’, according to media accounts one of the most embattled places in the world. It contains its own share of the graphic depictions of violence so prevalent within the publishing culture of Northern Ireland, which exports politically oriented local content to an international market. The cover of its British edition, featuring a large fiery cross, places the novel in some familiar categories: in the literary sphere, the tradition of serious and concerned fiction set in Northern Ireland, and in the world of the mass market, what is known as ‘Troubles trash’, the most common sort of mainstream fiction set in Northern Ireland. Crime novels and thrillers are the key genres, and Blackstaff Press has been a major outlet for these sensationalist works. Eureka Street depicts ‘West Belfast’ (only called that, as narrator Jake notes, by those who have never lived there) as a thoroughly mediated space, a region of the world that shares ‘the status of the battlefield’ with numerous other politicized locales like Jerusalem and Sarajevo: ‘The Bogside, Crossmaglen, The Falls, the Shankill and Andersonstown. In the mental maps of those who had never been in Ireland, these places had tiny crossed swords after their names. People thought them deathfields – remote, televised knackers’ yards’.10 In The Dispossessed (1992), his study of homelessness in Britain, Wilson says that ‘[l]ittle else is famous about Belfast. It has bred no famous painters; no great novels are set in Belfast. It has no great orchestra, its university is not celebrated. The “troubles” have made Belfast a celebrity’.11 In Eureka Street visitors to the city, such as the family of Jake’s ex-girlfriend Sarah, expect and hope to see bombed-out cars and police cruisers, tanks and IRA men with automatic weapons. Jake’s leafy street – Poetry Street – is profoundly disappointing.
Jake’s vision of the city is articulated in noted opposition to the major narratives the media offers. Sarah was stationed in Belfast as a reporter for a London paper that ‘would only run Ulster stories if the details were particularly appalling, if the killings were entirely barbaric’ (p. 73). Those who hold the extreme political positions that lead to such violence are the subjects of sustained satire throughout the novel. In contrast Jake and his friends, Catholic and Protestant alike, are depicted as holding no sectarian prejudices, and as reluctant participants in the culture of violence that characterizes their city. Jake himself is subject to a kind of politicized commodification. As a Catholic from West Belfast, a former orphan and foster child, and a man who received compensation from the government after being beaten by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, he is immensely appealing to middle class republicans who support the revolutionary politics of the IRA and its political wing, Just Us (Wilson’s satirization of Sinn Fe´in – a name members translate as ‘We Ourselves’, but which often appears as the less welcoming ‘Us Alone’). Jake jokingly claims to admire people who ‘get off’ on revolutionaries, people who themselves do not have to do ‘any of the dying’. The representative republican character, Aoirghe, both attractive and repulsive to Jake, falls into this category in his eyes, expressing ‘the impervious faith of the bourgeois zealot’ (p. 99).
In his earlier novel Ripley Bogle (1989) it is also the privileged who seek access to revolutionary fervor, often through affiliation with the working classes. Bogle, poor enough to be indigent, denies all political allegiance, while his firmly middle-class friend Maurice – ‘child of ease, silvergobbed and pretty posh, trying to be Che Guevara’ – dies at the hands of IRA factionalists.12 When Bogle attends Cambridge University his success with women there is also said to be a product of his Irishness. He refers to himself as ‘a piece of Irish rough. Albeit a very polite and acceptably refined one’. He does not refuse the attention this brings; instead, he says, ‘I began to affect something of the air of a Celtic working-class hero . . . though I was bloody glad that I was doing it in Cambridge rather than Belfast’.13 In accord with his tendency to associate himself with his characters, in an article in Fortnight Wilson links his own career history to the attractiveness of the republican North: ‘I’m a writer born Catholic and workingclass, so I’ve done well out of it, and the more battered and croppy boy I behave, the better I do. So I don’t like to bite the hand that patronises me’. On the other hand, a Protestant writer like Maurice Leitch, the subject of his article, suffers for his lack of ‘that cultural credit card’.14 Thus, as the cover of the American edition of the novel suggests – it features a portrait of Wilson – Eureka Street’s Jake is a notable figure for Wilson himself, in that both benefit from the ‘cultural credit card’ propped up by assumptions of authenticity or political positioning that both Wilson and Jake refuse to sanction.
In general, Wilson has taken an interest in the centrality of authors to Irish cultural life. In the reader’s guide to the American edition of Ripley Bogle he wonders at the ease with which James Joyce in particular, ‘the least Mickish of all writers’, is ‘seamlessly incorporated into the global industry of fake Irishness’. Wilson’s identification of Joyce as not overly ‘Mickish’ suggests that the consecration of authors can function despite whatever feelings about Ireland they may have expressed in their works or elsewhere, how much of their lives they actually spent there, or how a more local Irish critical practice scrutinizes both their texts and their allegiances to the formation and stability of the Irish nation. Moreover, Wilson’s identification of a ‘global industry of fake Irishness’ suggests he sees the mythical status of Irish authors as less a product of the necessity of creating and supporting a distinct Irish culture, and more a result of economic motivations that originate with a state-supported tourist culture selling images of Ireland to an international market. Wilson’s satirical depiction of Seamus Heaney in Eureka Street accords with this view.
Perhaps the most famous English-speaking poet to emerge after World War II, and certainly the most celebrated Irish literary export, Seamus Heaney has received the highest of literary honours at the hands of the international community, while continuing to trouble and engage his Irish critics. According to one critical tradition, Seamus Heaney’s work exemplifies the dominance of nationalist romanticism in the literary field.15 He is after all one of the most prominent writers affiliated with the Field Day School, in part a product of the general feeling that art in the region should be an act of resistance against English political domination. Yet in Eureka Street Heaney appears as an opportunistic poet called Shague Ghinthoss, whose primary responsibility is not to the Northern Irish political struggle or the Irish nation in general, but to his own career and success. Ghinthoss first appears one evening at a small Belfast cafe´, at a republican poetry reading Jake sheepishly attends. On first glance, Jake describes him as ‘an inappropriately famous poet who looked like Santa Claus. ... He was a vaguely anti-English Catholic from Tyrone but the English loved him’ (p. 173). It is fitting that Ghinthoss takes the opportunity to read his most overtly republican anti-English work, appeasing the local audience while simultaneously appealing to the English market for literary works that are critical of their own audience. ‘They had a real appetite’, Jake observes, ‘for hearing what a bunch of fuckers they were’ (p. 173).
That show behind him, the poet appears the very next day at a peace rally, where he gives a televised talk about the necessity of reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Spotting Ghinthoss in the crowd, Jake calls him ‘a famous face, or rather, several famous faces . . . a hypocritical Janus-faced tosspot’ (p. 186). The peace march is disrupted by violence. The police intervene after a bomb scare and again at the end of the march when the participants are met by a group of Just Us militants ripe for confrontation. Jake keeps a close eye on Ghinthoss, notably interested in how the famous poet will respond to the dual demands of his own duplicity, forced to mediate between the police and the republican faction. To Jake it seems ‘he didn’t want to lose any glitter with the authorities: there were too many prizes, grants and subsidies available to the genteel and careful Irish poet’ (p. 194). In fact over the course of the book Ghinthoss is honored with a knighthood, and also paradoxically named a Just Us ‘Hero of the Revolution’. Heaney did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, a year after the events the novel imagines. Wilson commented on Heaney’s win in an article in Fortnight, predicting Eureka Street’s characterization: ‘Far from saying to each violent extreme: a plague on both your houses, Heaney has said: a plague on neither of your houses, can I have another honorary degree, please?’16
When Ghinthoss is eventually asked to respond to the violence that ensues after the republican intervention, he claims ‘Sometimes . . . things were better left unsaid’ (p. 207). This cliche´d phrase is a kind of folk wisdom, but given Jake’s earlier commentary it more precisely indicates Ghinthoss’s fundamental desire to avoid compromising his precariously negotiated public face. His words evoke the Catholic maxim ‘Whatever you say, say nothing’, the title of a poem in North, in which Heaney explores ‘Northern reticence, the tight gag of place’, claiming ‘Smokesignals are loud-mouthed compared with us’.17 In evoking this common maxim Wilson references a debate familiar to the Irish literary community about the political posturing of ‘Famous Seamus’. Desmond Fennell suggestively links the maxim to a poetic tradition influenced by New Criticism, one that privileges those writers who consistently obscure the meaning of their works and undermine, through poetic technique, any pretense to absolute statement. If forced by public scrutiny to deal with larger public matters, such as his move from the North to the Republic in the early 1970s, or a fictional situation like the one Wilson constructs around the Just Us attack on the peace protest, Heaney insists on ‘making no clear, quotable statement about it, but dealing with it evasively, non-committaly, peripherally, and with the help of riddle devices – ambiguity, half-saying, inconsequential anecdote and so on’.18 By so doing, Fennell argues, he ‘prevents the harm to his own creative activity which might come from getting involved in media controversy; and escapes the damage to his poetic career which would result from offending powerful or influential people’.19 In other words, he does what Jake accuses him of: he avoids offending those who might be in a position to consecrate his success with official praise.
Both Fennell and Wilson present Heaney’s success as a reward for his ambiguous and evasive politics. Fennell writes as a spokesperson for the kind of politicized Northern Irish critical practice that dislikes art that does not make its meaning clear, and that does not situate itself precisely within available political positions. By way of his critique of Heaney’s success he argues for a more direct communicative purpose for literature, and ultimately for explicit political commitment as acceptable content for a literature of ‘stature’. He attributes to Heaney a refusal to engage with political realities, and a substitution of vague poetic questioning. It is not so much that he disagrees with the politics Heaney evokes – he does not castigate Heaney with the ‘liberal’ label often levied against other Northern Irish writers, for example – but that he cannot discern any explicit political position to sanction or condemn. As an Irish national commodity Heaney’s works express little enough that they are safely consumable, troubling to no one, designed for both local consumption and for the generally cosmopolitan English reading public described by Tim Brennan. That said, the fact that Heaney’s works come with a patina of political responsibility or engagement is equally important. It is the combination of political reference and obscurity of meaning that makes them attractive, Fennell claims.
Wilson’s critique of Heaney differs from Fennell’s in one important way. Whereas Fennell seems to charge Heaney with a kind of poetic obscurantism and avoidance of direct commitment, the motive for Wilson’s satire seems to be anger about Heaney’s refusal to officially denounce republican violence. In Eureka Street Heaney is made to seem the worst of those authors who write not to tell a specific perceived truth, not to advance any real meaning, but to exploit sectarian tendencies by appealing to a variety of audiences or his ‘many constituencies’ (p. 195) at the same time. Critiquing Heaney in a way that accords with attacks familiar to the Irish literary community is a convenient way for Wilson to construct himself as engaged in a different kind of project, one attempting to move beyond the old politics of republican nationalism. It shows that he is aware that those who neither fully embrace nor condemn the region’s violent nationalisms are those most likely to warrant ‘serious’ literary attention and to garner international repute. His portrayal of Heaney may not be accurate, nuanced, or fair, but it expresses a specific anxiety about the process of authoring literary works that respond to local political and cultural debates and that in turn become attractive to an international community. Wilson’s critique of Heaney is in part a liberal humanist critique of nationalist politics. That said, it is also Wilson’s opportunity to suggest that nationalist political struggle and positioning are eminently marketable, and that Heaney deploys such positioning not out of conviction but instead out of devotion to his own poetic career. What bothers Wilson is Heaney’s ostensible fear that committing to either republicanism or reconciliation will exclude him from consideration as a great poet:
Picking up his knighthood, he had spoken of the cloudiness of nationality, the New Europe, and the breaking up of borders. He had smiled twinklingly when someone asked him about the suddenly vacant poet laureate job. At the Hero of the Revolution Dinner and Disco, the very next day, he had told the rapturous crowd how he had always been an Irishman and how he would always be one. No one noticed any contradiction. (pp. 378–9)
In a sense, Wilson attempts to displace Heaney as a monument of Northern Irish literary production in order to erect his own brand of writing in its place. What Wilson sets up as an alternative to Heaney’s anxious careerism is another kind of self-awareness, one that registers a specific market consciousness that is informed by and comments on a transnational Northern Ireland where culture is an increasingly important export.
Wilson’s characterization of Ghinthoss is complemented by his portrait of Jake’s friend Chuckie Lurgan, who clearly represents transnational capitalism in the transformation of the Northern Irish political landscape. Chuckie comes from a Protestant family obsessed with fame, which includes an ancestor who lined up to see Charles Dickens, the consummate literary celebrity, on his first visit to Belfast in 1869. Fame is what Chuckie aspires to, and to attain it he creates a financial kingdom by exploiting the resources available for Northern Ireland’s industrial and cultural development due in large part to the region’s beleaguered status. For example, Chuckie’s start-up capital comes from a variety of agencies both local and international, such as the Ulster Development Board, and the Industrial Resources Board set up with British money to encourage investment in Northern Ireland, and said to be ‘most famous for giving enormous sums of British cash to American motor manufacturers who built expensive factories’ (p. 117). Chuckie’s friend Donal Deasely works for the government, allocating monies from the EU, the International Fund for Ireland, and other real or fictional funding bodies. All of these boards and agencies resemble the Irish Development Agency, as well as Noraid, both of which operated from the US throughout the Troubles at the hands of the Irish abroad, often supporters of the nationalist cause.
Chuckie uses his access to these agencies to market Irishness internationally. The angle Chuckie plays in acquiring funds is the ecumenical one, all his schemes involving bringing the ‘warring tribes’ together at last (p. 153). We are told: ‘Chuckie dreamt of buying Ireland. He could already visualize the estate agent’s description for the Ireland auction’ (p. 154). In Wilson’s earlier work, Ripley Bogle describes visiting Long Kesh (‘the Maze to you Brits’), where his imprisoned uncle was engaged in carving ‘exquisite Gaelic harps’ as ‘clumsy emblems of solidarity’. Bogle describes the harps as ‘spectacularly useless’ until his brother George begins selling them to American television crews at ‘hugely inflated prices’.20 Chuckie’s impetus is similar. He sells, for example, Irish leprechaun ‘walking sticks’ as ‘ethnic accessories’ (actually varnished twigs collected in the fields around Belfast). He imports ‘half-wool Aran sweaters, made by slave-workers in Romania’, which become Irish by ‘sticking a Made in Ireland label on them and shipping them to New York and Boston’ (p. 156). He markets Irish water, supplied in Kansas, but featuring a label with an Irish brook. He admires the so-called Irish utility companies that operate in the competitive US market and trade on the power of Irish nationalists in exile. And he develops a series of Irish theme pubs for operation in Paris.
Wilson’s portrait of Chuckie’s reliance on an Ireland and an Irishness that are primarily for sale accords with critiques of the increasing importance of tourist culture to Irish life throughout the 1980s and 1990s, often said to sell a false version of a pan-Irish identity to tourists too ignorant to ask questions.21 Chuckie’s activities in fact specifically evoke heritage tourism, which has been increasingly prevalent in Northern Ireland in recent years, having been identified as a ‘growth area’ after the 1994 ceasefire. 22 Ullrich Kockel claims that this particular variety of tourism is based on the ‘idea of utilising culture and identity as resources for regional economic development’, and that it has become popular in Northern Ireland and other regions ‘at a time when globalisation increasingly turned large parts of Europe into “resource peripheries”’.23 In other words, as raw material extraction and basic production are increasingly moving to less developed regions, those intermediary economic zones like Northern Ireland rely by necessity on practices like Chuckie’s, selling culture itself and finally ‘primitive’ identities rather than conventionally defined products (hence, I would add, the continued success of the region’s publishing industry). Dean MacCannell’s work on cultural tourism suggests that the term ‘primitive’, for example, responds to the need for
reconstructed ethnicities [that are] increasingly only a response to a mythic necessity to keep the idea of the primitive alive in the modern world and consciousness . . . because there are several empires built on the necessity of the ‘primitive’: anthropology’s official versions of itself [and] an increasing segment of the tourist industry.
MacCannell further characterizes this segment of the tourist industry as ‘the economic base of ex-primitives who continue to play the part of primitives- for-moderns’.24
The culture of rural Ireland is often treated in precisely this way, producing, as MacCannell argues, ‘highly deterministic ethnic forms’ that focus on ‘ethnicity-for-tourism in which exotic cultures figure as key attractions’. 25 Luke Gibbons’ analysis of the promotional material of the Irish Development Agency complements MacCannell’s work. The IDA ‘does not simply acknowledge but actively perpetuates the myth of romantic Ireland, incorporating both modernity and tradition within its frame of reference’.26 Thus, contemporary forms of market globalization and transnational capital exist in symbiosis with what Gage Averill calls ‘the spread of ideologies of local identity that demand products with local specificity’. 27 In that sense, Gibbons writes, ‘neo-traditionalism’ as a ‘fabricated relationship to the past’ exists in conjunction with the sophisticated information technologies and promotional mechanisms typically aligned with modernization.28
Such a conjunction precisely characterizes Chuckie’s business practices, which further evoke what Desmond Bell has identified as the tendency of the Northern Irish ‘tutelary state’ to deploy culture and heritage as ‘potential vehicles of political reconciliation’.29 During a visit to Toronto in 1999 Roy Bailie claimed that tourism on the island was going ‘all Ireland’. Bell notes that after the 1994 ceasefire the Northern Ireland Tourist Board and Bord Fa´ilte (the Irish Tourist Board) cooperated to market the North – especially to the US and the EU – as part of ‘unified Irish tourist experience’.30 In fact in 1999 the two Boards did unite to form Tourism Ireland Ltd.31 According to Bell, and to Chuckie’s own developing political vision, ‘the community relations agenda’ and ‘the heritage experience’ unite to sell a version of Northern Ireland’s past that diffuses conflict by insisting on the legitimacy of each competing interpretation of the region’s historical narrative, and by favouring the marketing of unifying stereotypes as cultural myth.
In turn, if some version of a ‘primitive’ Irish identity legitimizes or supports heritage tourism and marketed identities in Ireland North and South, Eureka Street’s focus on a similar marketing of regional violence – encompassed in the romantic attractiveness of ‘West Belfast’, and Jake’s own beleaguered Catholicism – evokes the newer niche of struggle tourism,32 or what John Lennon and Malcolm Foley have termed ‘dark tourism’, which they discuss as part of the larger heritage or cultural tourism industry.33 The Northern Ireland Tourist Board, formerly run by Bailie, has recently encouraged the state operated City Bus Company’s ‘Living History’ tours of Belfast, which are booked through the Belfast Tourism Information Centre and compete with the famous black cab tours for money spent by those interested in visiting prominent sites of violence.34 The Tower Museum in Derry, opened in 1992, is another example of the state’s willingness to support this politicized variety of tourist experience. Featuring a walk-through exhibit interpreting the history of the Troubles from both conflicting positions, the museum has variously incorporated a real AK-47 Kalashnikov rifle once used by an IRA gunman, a promotional booklet with an image of a masked revolutionary on its cover, and a floor mimicking a paved road, flanked by a loyalist kerb in red, white and blue on the one side, and the nationalist green, white and orange on the other.35
Furthermore, there is a parallel relationship between the phenomena of heritage or struggle tourism and the position of Wilson’s Belfast publisher, Blackstaff Press, within the international market. Founded by Jim and Diane Gracie in 1971, Blackstaff Press has been much praised within the Northern Irish arts community for its ‘devotion to Ulster literature – new and old, up-market and down’.36 From the beginning the press was uniquely situated for success. Jim Gracie was a librarian at the Linen Hall Library in the 1970s, where he also edited Irish Booklore, a journal focused on the history of Irish publishing. Irish Booklore was later subsumed by The Linen Hall Review, which claimed to offer ‘a Northern view on the world of Irish books’, and was run from the Linen Hall Library, which boasts a complete collection of fiction set in Northern Ireland. Advertisements for Blackstaff Press titles appear in most issues of the journal. Thus in its early years Blackstaff was run by people with an intimate knowledge of the history of Irish publishing and the market for works about both parts of the island. In addition, throughout its history Blackstaff has received significant financial backing from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In fact, at times the Council so privileged Blackstaff that critics accused the press of ‘monopoly, bias, and an unrepresentative list’.37 In 1989–90, for example, Blackstaff received more than 90 per cent of the literature budget, despite numerous other flourishing publishers competing for funds. Blackstaff is thus implicated in the sort of insularity noticeable particularly within the Belfast arts community, as the cultural world is loosely controlled by a coterie of workers to the exclusion of other voices. At the same time it has been dependent on a network of relationships with other publishers, acting as agents throughout the English-speaking world, marketing Blackstaff titles that appeal to a general interest in both the culture of Ireland and the Northern Irish political scene. Knowledge about Northern Ireland exported to international markets – from history to anthropology, from studies of religion to literary or popular fiction – is largely produced by one publishing house.38
Widely considered the Northern Irish publisher, the press won the Sunday Times ‘Small Publisher of the Year’ award in 1992, the first time a publisher outside of London had done so. One Belfast journalist called the win ‘heartening, given the pressures from the center conditioning the periphery – particularly through the popular media’, suggesting that members of the local community then saw the press as evidence of a culture thriving amidst external pressures.39 A measure of peace in the region had encouraged the EU’s elimination of trade barriers across the island. In 1994 Blackstaff Press made the unprecedented move of appointing a Southern publisher – Gill & Macmillan – as its distributor. Other Southern firms like Wolfhound Press have since joined forces with Blackstaff to collectively market their titles in the US.40 As stated earlier, a year before the appearance of Eureka Street Blackstaff was sold to theW&G Baird Group.41 Thus as the press became more profitable and developed more secure international ties, it passed into the hands of the major players in the publishing and printing industry in the UK.
Commenting on the publishing industry in the South, Hugh Carter Donahue has drawn a distinction between Ireland and other larger regions ‘where international media organizations dominate publishing and commercial considerations dictate editorial decisions’. Ireland is said to have a small market of informed and frequent readers, such that ‘[e]ditors may see their publications as literary or political advocacy designed to stir controversy or bring attention to social problems’.42 The local is thus significantly privileged, a situation made possible by the fact that, unlike many regional industries, Irish publishing has managed to retain a strong and stable export position. While managing director of Blackstaff Press, Anne Tannahill noted that Northern Irish publishers are ‘caught between the East – West (London – Belfast) axis and the North – South (Belfast – Dublin) axis’.43 Moreover, the sense that publishing activity, like general cultural production, should take a defining role in the political process continues to be particularly strong in the North. Nevertheless, writers whose works are locally relevant to Northern Ireland, and often concerned specifically with the Troubles, are also marketable to an international audience for politically oriented writing that elucidates various regional histories. In an oddly circular way, Blackstaff Press has been incorporated into precisely the transnational market so important to Eureka Street’s depiction of Chuckie Lurgan. In fact Blackstaff is a perfect example of a relatively small publisher that has achieved great success by speaking to the local community, releasing titles ‘mainly but not exclusively of Irish interest’, while also exporting a large number of these titles to an international market and maintaining Northern Ireland’s status as an exporter of cultural products.44
Since 1995, to summarize, it has quite been difficult to describe Blackstaff as a ‘small’ publisher at all, as it became positioned within the solid mainstream of general Irish cultural production. It aimed to address as wide an audience as possible both at home and abroad, often through the promotion of products espousing a generally acceptable, ecumenical, liberal viewpoint, a position for which it is often praised, and about which it boasts. Achieving true publishing success, in this case, required avoiding any strict adherence to a specific political stance, in favour of an ecumenical breadth of interest and concern that nonetheless traded in the popularity of materials about Northern Ireland. It was that ecumenical breadth that arguably made it possible for Blackstaff to garner so much support from the UK’s cultural elite (by way of government grants and partnership agreements with other UK publishers, for example). There is no sense in which a publisher like Blackstaff would want to abandon the political completely, since such content is precisely what many potential readers want, wooed by what Bailie refers to as the ‘post-conflict cachet’ associated withNorthern Ireland. Its locally based content, which could not help but be political, combined with its generally ecumenical orientation in presenting and interpreting that content, combined to make Blackstaff the key Northern Irish publisher. That combination also facilitated the Press’s move from a primarily local base to a position of prominence within a multinational media firm, which in turn made Robert McLiam Wilson’s international success much more likely.
Thus far I have claimed that Eureka Street attempts to assess the new conditions of transnationalism and the reliance on political conflict as marketable cultural content in Northern Ireland. The economic conditions that have made Wilson’s career successful, including the position of Blackstaff Press as the major Northern Irish content provider for a united Europe and an international market, are key contexts for recognizing this critique. What makes Blackstaff Press successful is also arguably what makes certain Northern Irish writers successful. As both his construction of Chuckie Lurgan’s business practices and his depiction of the romance attached to Jake’s beleaguered socio-cultural status suggest, Wilson’s sense is that a generalized nationalist romanticism legitimizes the heritage tourism industry, as well as his own career. National culture and transnational economics go hand in hand. Satirizing Chuckie Lurgan makes this point. Satirizing Seamus Heaney does as well, while also signaling Wilson’s anxious attempt to distinguish himself as an author from what he makes Ghinthoss represent, and to admit he has benefited from the cachet associated with writing as a Northern Irish Catholic from a working-class background.
Eureka Street offers one perspective on a region moving away from colonial dependency. The nation it depicts does not progress from colonial domination to a form of political and electoral independence and organization. Instead, through transnational communications and the EU’s version of the free market, it loses some of its colonial status to become subject to the neo-colonialism of late capitalism. It is a familiar story. In the cultural sphere the situation is analogous. Wilson’s novel does not depict the Northern Irish as moving from dependence on the colonial centre for cultural valuation to some form of ideal self-reference and native cultural development. Instead, it depicts a society that creates a culture funded by both local and international bodies, a culture that exists at all precisely for the world market, to appease the tastes of an international community that includes the English, and that wants a piece of the authenticity of the Irish world. As Heaney’s popularity suggests, that authenticity involves reference both to a ‘primitive’ culture and to one defined by a savage political violence, both to heritage and to struggle tourism.
In the latter part of Eureka Street, Chuckie Lurgan travels in the US, and his trip coincides with the tour of Just Us spokesperson Jimmy Eve. Eve is a clear satirization of Sinn Fe´in’s Gerry Adams, whose visit to the US was one of the most controversial aspects of the 1994 peace discussions and ceasefire. With some hostility, the novel depicts a US audience largely sympathetic to Eve’s views: ‘Eve did television shows coast-to-coast. His hairy, carnivorous smile was everywhere. He talked the language of American civil rights to interviewers too ill-educated in their own country’s history to notice’ (p. 324). Historians have characterized Adams’s visit in similar terms, though as Andrew J. Wilson notes Bill Clinton originally denied Adams entry to the US due to his links to terrorism. Eventually, partly because of the public relations influence of Noraid and a developing sense that the only way to encourage the peace process was through inclusion of Adams in negotiations, he was granted a visa, and went ‘from blacklisted sponsor of terrorism to honored guest’.45 He calls Adams’ appearances in the US a ‘dazzling publicity victory . . . with some newspapers describing him as the Irish Nelson Mandela’.46
While in America, both Eve and Chuckie are said to be selling a hallucination of Irish identity, one cultural and the other political. Chuckie ‘incorporated Eve’s Broadway-hit status into his own spiel’ (p. 327). He alternately assumes the persona of the ultimate Catholic and that of the WASPish aristocrat as necessity dictates. Chuckie and Eve appear together in a televised debate that references the actual debate between Ulster Unionist Ken Maginnis and Gerry Adams on Larry King Live in September 1994. During the debate the narrator describes both men as having ‘sold Ireland long and short, begetting their monstrous perjuries in tandem, united in an hallucinatory jubilee of simulated Irishness’ (p. 328). It is during this televised conversation that Chuckie establishes himself as a thorough critic of all sectarian affiliation, arguing the need to relieve Belfast and the North of their impoverished status instead of focusing on political conflict. His proposed solutions are capital investment and economic schemes, something he assumes his American audience will understand: ‘What America understands is what I understand – making a dollar, cutting a deal. There are no nationalities, only rich and poor. Who gives a shit about nationhood if there’s no jobs and no money? Bread before flags, that’s what I say. . .. Interested Americans should invest in my country. They should give their money to men like me’ (p. 331).
Chuckie’s economic exploitation of a pan-Irish identity eventually becomes a significant political movement in its own right, as his program for change, first explored in that initial debate with Eve, becomes linked to the ‘OTG’ graffiti that is just then appearing around town. The letters ‘OTG’ turn up beside the regular IRA, UDA, and UDP graffiti familiar to residents of Belfast, where politics are seemingly reducible to these abbreviated references to sectarian identities. Urban space in Belfast is policed by the regular forces and paramilitaries, but also by these logos that mark certain locales as controlled by particular alliances. ‘OTG’ confuses Belfast’s citizens because they cannot locate its political meaning. News reports comment on this particular marking precisely because of the confusion it causes. Over the course of the novel Chuckie, Jake, and their friends discuss its meaning and decide that the population of Belfast is the butt of a joke; someone is satirizing their political rituals by decorating the city’s walls with an abbreviation having no larger meaning, thus criticizing the local obsession with allegiance and alliance. The person behind the OTG graffiti produces a kind of situationist art, precisely the kind of satirical critique of local traditions that some critics have lamented as missing from Northern Ireland due to the demands of a more realistic or committed literature. The ‘rigid cultural nationalism’ that Desmond Bell calls Northern Ireland’s ‘dominant regional aesthetic’ is subject to radical scrutiny.47 In turn, Chuckie’s alignment of his own political program with the OTG graffiti suggests a connection between postmodernist satirical aesthetics and transnational capitalism.
Yet there is an important complication in Chuckie’s assumed alliance with the unidentified letters. Chuckie evokes the OTG graffiti in a gesture of co-optation. After his initial television success in the States, when an appearance on a Belfast talk show goes awry Chuckie evokes the OTG graffiti in order to maintain his newfound celebrity by shocking his viewers. It is in this context that he claims that OTG is the name of his new political party, suggesting that he has been in talks with the ‘people’ behind the mysterious graffiti. He has no real connection with any such people and his gesture is entirely opportunistic. Chuckie’s act of co-optation removes the OTG satire, one of the novel’s only examples of viable political art, from the realm of opposition. It is linked instead to Chuckie’s own economic enterprise. He attempts to structure an allegiance between the radical challenge to sectarian politics manifest in the OTG graffiti and the threat he intends to present to the integrity of sectarian violence by promoting transnational capitalism. Does Wilson’s novel thus celebrate the alliance between postmodern satire and transnational capitalism Chuckie’s assumed allegiance suggests, or does it lament the link as just another bastardization of a valuable political act absorbed into the system of political power? Does Chuckie’s form of marketed Irishness validate and inflate the power of the OTG critique, or simply appropriate it? I want to try to answer these questions by way of a conclusion.
The fact that Wilson originally thought to title his novel OTG suggests he saw his work as aligned to the aesthetic project of the OTG satirist. His novel would be his own form of writing on the wall. In fact such a title might have furthered Wilson’s attempt to critique the process through which his own work is marketed as a product with an explicitly political interest or purpose. To think of Eureka Street itself as a critique of Irish cultural politics, similar to the OTG satire that Chuckie appropriates, suggests that Wilson’s novel comments on the way it too becomes another Irish product sold to a transnational market for narratives depicting regional violence. Published by Blackstaff Press, a company owned by a man similar to Chuckie – a man who sits on the board of the Bank of Ireland and is associated with the Northern Ireland Tourist Board – Eureka Street attempts to predict its own future as a text that offers a social critique almost immediately reduced to a singular literary category – Troubles fiction by a working-class Catholic – and absorbed into commodity capitalism.
Yet Chuckie’s brand of patriotism is pan-Irish and ecumenical; he wants to be, he claims, a ‘non-sectarian third force in Ulster politics’ (p. 386), and this is something the book as a whole supports. It seems that Chuckie’s newfound interest in politics may result in support for a less polemical, hostile, or violent politics, and its source is his ostensible desire to bring peace and economic prosperity to the region (things he sees as going hand-in-hand). At times he seems to threaten to turn Northern Ireland into a zone of cultural production for mass consumption, and the Irish themselves into consumers rather than citizens. Chuckie’s initial impetus is, after all, making himself rich and famous, and the industries he capitalizes and develops are said to sell Ireland ‘long and short’ just as Jimmy Eve does, ‘begetting [a] monstrous perjury’ (p. 328). Yet just as Wilson’s characterization of Chuckie’s business practices suggests that Northern Ireland threatens to become little more than an ‘offshore assembly centre and access point to EC markets’,48 he seems unwilling to establish any other possible path for regional change, in part because his point is never really to satirize Chuckie’s political aspirations or pretensions. It is instead to lament that consumers let themselves be duped by the limited national iconography that circulates through the transnational market.
Wilson obviously has a considerable interest in the way what is local to Ireland becomes international cultural content by way of ‘the global industry of fake Irishness’. As I have attempted to show, Eureka Street’s exploration of the entry of newness into Northern Irish political life is intimately tied to concerns and debates within the Northern Irish arts community. The story of Chuckie Lurgan addresses the new Northern Ireland in economic terms, and suggests that people like Roy Bailie – who is, notably, not unlike Chuckie himself – and companies like the W&G Baird Group, representative of successful incorporation into both the EU and the larger market, form a considerable challenge to the continuation of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Thus transnational freemarket capitalism, embodied in Chuckie’s aspirations, remains a viable alternative to a harmful nationalism, even though it continues to deploy a national romance to sell stories about Northern Ireland as quickly as possible and to the highest bidder.
In short, Wilson reads the cultural industries in Northern Ireland in terms of MacCannell’s notion of ‘reconstructed ethnicity’, through which ‘ethnic forms’ are maintained ‘for the persuasion or entertainment not of specific others . . . but of a “generalized other” within a white cultural frame’.49 What are authentically local or native to Ireland are precisely those cultural products that are marketed as such, whether they depict an ideal rural world of shamrocks and leprechauns or the political violence of ‘West Belfast’. MacCannell suggests as much when he argues that an effect of ‘the alleged globalization of relationships’ within contemporary culture is ‘the production of an enormous desire for, and corresponding commodification of, authenticity’.50 A pseudo-authenticity is presumably what sells Wilson’s Eureka Street, as well as his identity as an author, and in the novel it is satirized as the manifestation of a misguided faith in the integrity of the local. To reiterate my point, nationalist cultural romanticism and transnational capitalism are not opposing forces; instead the movement toward what is commonly called ‘modernization’ is simply the progressive exploitation of the former through the cultural industries that perpetuate and subtend the latter. It is this that Wilson is at pains to suggest throughout Eureka Street. He thus attributes a reifying function to the marketplace for literary texts – a function that attaches him to a national mythology he constantly discredits, transforming whatever political viability his work might possess into the product of ‘a piece of Irish rough’ just beleaguered enough to be marketable.
If culture is an industry, what happens to specifically literary forms of production when the culture industries go global? How do globalizing markets influence the way literary authority and value are created and perpetuated? And if, as I have argued elsewhere, authors are becoming selfconscious piece workers within an increasingly rigid corporate publishing culture, selling each item they produce to the highest bidder through the intervention of an agent, how do their fictions admit, refract or negate the anxiety such changes can cause?51 In Eureka Street, finally, neither Chuckie nor his author can concede that continuing economic decline is potentially only compounded by incorporation into the general European community and the larger free market. Wilson satirizes the transnational market that Chuckie exploits, but he avoids fully questioning its value for Northern Ireland’s political and economic stability. Said differently, Wilson playfully critiques the cultural system that sells his texts, but he does not pose any real challenge to the general economics of transnational capitalism that attend his own success. In the world of Eureka Street, a reified pseudo-authenticity or ‘reconstructed ethnicity’, while offering amusing possibilities for assessing aspects of consumerism, nonetheless remains preferable to the ‘real thing’, if the real thing remains a legitimated cultural or political nationalism.
Syracuse University
Acknowledgements
I would like to extend special thanks to Neil ten Kortenaar for clarifying my thinking about Eureka Street.
Notes
1 See Peter Childs and Patrick Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (London: Prentice Hall, 1997), pp. 69–70; Joe Cleary, ‘Modernization andAesthetic Ideology in Contemporary Irish Culture’, in Ray Ryan, ed., Writing in the Irish Republic: Literature, Culture, Politics 1949–1999 (Houndmills: Macmillan Press Ltd.; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 106–7; R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 579.
2 Joe Cleary, ‘Misplaced ideas? Locating and dislocating Ireland in colonial and postcolonial studies’, in Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, eds., Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 102
3 Mary Robinson, The Inaugural Speech, in Katie Donovan et al., eds., Ireland’s Women: Writings Past and Present (London: Kyle Cathie Limited, 1994), p. 254.
4 Seamus Deane, Introduction, to Terry Eagleton et al., Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 13–14.
5 Ibid., p. 19.
6 Smyth’s phrase appears in his review of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, edited by Seamus Deane. See ‘Totalising Imperative’, Fortnight, 309 (1992), p. 26.
7 See Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles Since 1969: (de-) constructing the North (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), p. 7.
8 Tim Brennan, ‘Cosmopolitans and Celebrities’, Race and Class, 31.1 (1989), p. 9.
9 Glenn Patterson, Fat Lad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p. 203.
10 Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street (New York: Ballantine, 1996), p. 14. Subsequent references to Eureka Street will appear in the body of the text.
11 Robert McLiam Wilson, The Dispossessed (London: Picador, 1992), p. 109.
12 Robert McLiam Wilson, Ripley Bogle (New York: Ballantine, 2000), p. 102.
13 Ibid., p. 204.
14 Robert McLiam Wilson, ‘Rhythm Method’, Fortnight, 331 (1994), p. 45.
15 For a trenchant critique along these lines see David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1993), pp. 19–31.
16 Robert McLiam Wilson, ‘The glittering prize’, Fortnight, 344 (1995), p. 6.
17 Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 75, 80.
18 Desmond Fennell, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney is No. 1, 2nd ed. (Dublin: ELO Publications, 1991), p. 13.
19 Ibid., p. 14.
20 Wilson, Ripley Bogle, p. 43.
21 On cultural and heritage tourism in general in Ireland, see Victor Luftig, ‘Literary Tourism and Dublin’s Joyce’, in Mark A. Wollaeger et al., eds., Joyce and the Subject of History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); and G. O’Donnchadha and B. O’Connor, ‘Cultural Tourism in Ireland’, in Greg Richards, ed., Cultural Tourism in Europe (Wallingford: CAB International, 1996).
22 Desmond Bell, ‘Modernising History: The real politik of heritage and cultural tradition in Northern Ireland’, in David Miller, ed., Rethinking Northern Ireland (London: Longman, 1998), p. 299.
23 Ullrich Kockel, Regional Culture and Economic Development: Explorations in European Ethnology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 211.
24 Dean MacCannell, Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 34.
25 Ibid., p. 158.
26 Luke Gibbons, ‘Coming Out of Hibernation? The Myth of Modernity in Irish Culture’, in Richard Kearney, ed., Across the Frontiers: Ireland in the 1990s (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1988), p. 211.
27 Gage Averill, ‘Global Imaginings’, in Richard Ohmann, ed., Making and Selling Culture (Hanover: University Press of New England; London: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), p. 203. Averill’s conclusions about cultural globalization resemble Roland Robertson’s concern with ‘glocalization’. A term taken from Japanese business practice, glocalization refers to micromarketing, ‘the tailoring and advertising of goods and services on a global or near-global basis to increasingly differentiated local and particular markets’. Robertson contests the idea that global culture ‘overrides locality’: ‘we appear to live in a world in which the expectation of uniqueness has become increasingly institutionalized and globally widespread’. See his ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’, in Mike Featherstone et al., eds., Global Modernities (London: SAGE Publications, 1995), p. 28.
28 Gibbons, ‘Coming Out of Hibernation?’, p. 215.
29 Bell, ‘Modernising History’, p. 228.
30 Ibid., p. 229.
31 See ‘“United” Ireland puts out the welcome mat’ Toronto Star, 20 February 1999, Travel, p. 1.
32 In fact, official Northern Irish tourism policy has typically discouraged visitors from focusing on the region’s violent history. Given more space I would argue that local intellectuals tend to exaggerate the prevalence of struggle tourism in the region, due perhaps to an anxiety about their own roles in creating narratives that serve prurient interests.
33 John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000).
34 Ibid., pp. 160–1.
35 See Bell, ‘Modernising History’, pp. 233–6
36 Jeremy Addis, ‘This river keeps flowing’, Fortnight, 297 (1991), p. 35.
37 Ian Kirk-Smith, ‘Unpeeling the Parish’, Fortnight, 306 (1992), p. 39.
38 Upwards of 40 per cent of the books read throughout Ireland are what the industry calls ‘local interest’ titles. Thus it is hardly surprising that nearly all Northern Irish firms, from those specializing in literature to those that primarily market gift books, and including Appletree Press, The Guildhall Press, and White Row Press, focus their efforts on ‘local interest’ materials.
39 Kirk-Smith, ‘Unpeeling the Parish’.
40 Finola O’Sullivan, ‘Irish publishers seek more of their own market’, Logos, 6.3 (1995), pp. 121–2.
41 See Ian Hill, ‘30th birthday bash for a fine publishing house’, Belfast News Letter, 14 Sept. 2001, p. 49; ‘Publishing firm turns over a new leaf’, Belfast News Letter, 18 March 2003, p. 12.
42 That said, in the last few years the success of local Irish firms has been fundamentally undermined by the opening of Penguin Ireland in 2002. See Hugh Carter Donahue, ‘Tradition and Technology in Irish Publishing’, Eire- Ireland, 7.3 (1992), p. 16.
43 O’Sullivan, ‘Irish publishers’, p. 121.
44 ‘Company Profile,’ The Blackstaff Press, 9 June 2005 <http://www.blackstaffpress.com>.
45 Andrew J. Wilson, Irish America and the Ulster Conflict, 1968–1995 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), p. x.
46 Ibid., p. 295.
47 Desmond Bell, ‘Ireland Without Frontiers? The Challenge of the Communications Revolution’, in Richard Kearney, ed., Across the Frontiers: Ireland in the 1990s (Dublin: Wolfhound Press), p. 219.
48 Ibid., p. 223.
49 MacCannell, Empty Meeting Grounds, p. 168.
50 Ibid., pp. 169–70.
51 See Sarah Brouillette, ‘Authorship as Crisis in Salman Rushdie’s Fury’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 40.1 (2005), pp. 137–56.
