Writers like Jan Carson understand that, in the absence of the Troubles, people of Northern Ireland may not know who they are, culturally or artistically, or may struggle to articulate who they are without it.
New York writer Rosie Schaap moved to the small County Antrim coastal town of Glenarm in 2019. Her 2024 memoir of this relocation, The Slow Road North, is peppered with blunt observations about the natives of Northern Ireland. The women in this seaside town – and others like it across the province – get their hair done with such frequency and regularity that they must be the vainest people in the world.
Schapp is not the only writer to move to Northern Ireland long after 30 years of The Troubles – a complex inter-community conflict – finally ended. In John Patrick Higgins‘ Fine (2024), the debut novel by the Belfast-based Englishman, Paul Reverb, arrives in that city with contemptuous presumptions about the place. He leaves with those presumptions satisfied: Belfast is knocked-together, its sad, crumbling walls masked with murals and bric-a-brac tat, a past with only the veneer of a present, the people almost delusional in how they view the city’s significance, resilience, and vitality.
Higgins’ sense of Northern Ireland now may not tally with outsiders who see so many traces of how it was back then. For those strangers who don’t pick up the history, the resilience and significance of the land and its people are invisible.
Higgins’ opinion is very much the observation of someone who has lived in Belfast, not the weekend visitor who narrates Fine. Of one local pub, he observes: “The only concessions to modernity are a couple of pumps of craft beer and a wall dedicated to exhibitions of local art, art which suggested The Troubles were still affecting people in strange and horrifying ways.” Such pubs are tourist traps, built to capitalise on peace and the visitors, like Paul Reverb, that peace might bring in. Although these city centre pubs aren’t the ones that aging ex-combatants, seen slouching at the end of the bar, ready to bore you with stories from the conflict, are drinking at, the effect is the same – there’s something you’re meant not to forget.
Even in the realm of the fantastical, Northern Ireland inspires an unease and otherness. In the short story “Silent Valley” from The Black Dreams (2021), Sam Thompson transplants a version of himself, an Englishman moved to Belfast for love, into the city after an apocalypse, where the tribal divisions of The Troubles reconstitute themselves in a primitive, urgent way. Although warned not to move there by older neighbours in England –“They’re friendly on the surface, he said, but underneath there’s something nasty.” – he finds himself drawn into the passionate feelings the place evokes, if never fully understanding them.
Northern Ireland is such a small and distant part of the UK that the ease with which the Westminster government forgets it, as our protagonist only learns by experiencing that distance, raises its significance in the minds and hearts of those who live here. Absence makes the heart feel more deeply.
While all these authors write of Northern Ireland with thoughtfulness and compassion elsewhere, observations like these strike me most. Perhaps it is because they smart a little. Also, because they ring true: yes, we do feel keenly, we do talk a lot, and we are concerned with how we are perceived. More than anything, it is because these observations are hardly different to those made by English author and philosopher G.K. Chesterton when he visited Ireland in 1919, on the eve of the island’s partition between the predominantly Catholic Irish Free State and the Protestant-Unionist governed Northern Ireland, with its large minority of Catholic-Nationalist residents.
The people of Belfast and Northeast Ulster, he wrote, live under a sort of dream, a trance, a shimmering glamour of reality that is hard for others to share or break. This creates a seismic gap and, to this date, “that strange cloud of self-protecting vanity may still permit Belfast to believe in Belfast, but Britain does not really believe in Belfast.” Nor do visitors or immigrants from the Republic of Ireland, Europe, North America, or anywhere else. Not in the same Belfast as its citizens anyway – a city of special exemptions, rules, and logic. That goes for Northern Ireland as a whole.
Northern Ireland’s Relentless Longing
Northern Irish writer Jan Carson explores the surface tension separating this dream’s inside from the outside. Across short stories and novels, including 2019’s The Fire-Starters, winner of the EU Prize for Literature, and most recently The Raptures (2022), she allows traces of illogic and magic to leak out of the Northern Irish psyche into the post-conflict reality in which it lives. Unashamedly, Carson toys with elements of the magical realist writing that arose in post-colonial South America and India, places that were affected by violence, extremism, and questions of identity, places where, like the island of Ireland, new borders were drawn that did not adequately hold the contradictory identities contained within them.
Situating yourself in such a place can become all-consuming; it has to consume all; otherwise, the identity may slip and the dream shatter. This is the self-protecting vanity. Even after the Peace Process began in 1998, the inhabitants of the North, as divided as they were and remain on the question of Northern Ireland’s relationship with Britain and Ireland, are united in their sense of exceptionalism: they are a people apart, in an unique situation, with a particular past, and a multitude of futures, none of which ever come.
The modes and effects of that insulating parochial egoism are evident throughout Carson’s latest collection of short stories, Quickly, While They Still Have Horses.
Coming from Ballymena, Co. Antrim, a staunchly Unionist town, Jan Carson is perhaps the greatest chronicler, in recent times, of the Ulster Presbyterian way of life: tray bakes, garden centres, farming, and God. It was these people specifically that Chesterton described as living under a cloud of dream, living their lives and their faith very differently to those in Great Britain and those in the rest of Ireland, surviving by forcefully committing to their version of reality.
However, it isn’t easy upholding faith or identity. In “Tinged”, a grieving Presbyterian farmer turns to a local Catholic man in secret, hoping that the man’s access to the cure will save his ailing cow, when the same farmer wouldn’t accept the help of a competing Charismatic communion to heal his dying wife. There is a stubborn adherence to the image of identity that has awful repercussions in material reality.
However, the act of partition in 1921 merely sectioned off an area of the island in which the dreaming could be contained: those who wanted to be British could create their idealised version of Britishness there; those who wanted to be Irish continued to believe in the dream of the 1916 revolution, even as it fell apart south of the border. One can’t govern a dream, though. Certainly not when the citizens believe stubbornly in different dreamworlds. They inevitably come up against each other. In such a situation, reality is left underdeveloped, underinvested in, and under a cloud, all largely invisible to the dreamers who are more invested in what they want to be the case than what is the case.
That longing continues to this day, for even the Good Friday Agreement, the framework that brought an end to the conflict in 1998, requires the imaginal commitment of those involved to conjure a functional peace into being. As Jan Carson once told me – she may even have written it down, but I can’t find it! – the Good Friday Agreement is a dream that we must all agree to dream together. To those who come to Northern Ireland from outside, however, it must appear as though the politicians and many of their voters are asleep on the job.
In “Fair Play”, for example, Andrew, another Englishman, relocates to the home town of his Northern Irish wife – this remains the main source of immigration into the North now, as spouses are sold on theories of affordable housing, lower cost of living, and a family willing to help with childcare. However, Andrew finds his new home unsettling: the production values are rough, the spoken English unintelligible, and the customs tainted by a silent aggression.
When he takes his two children to a local softplay area alone, he must navigate his discomfort without the guidance of his native wife, and he can’t do it. She grew up here, and he did not. Now, his children are growing up here, and he fears them becoming of the place, rather than of him. For now, they “have taken after him. They speak London with a side of Oxford plum,” but, given time, they may speak with the consonant-free Mid-Ulster drawl and vernacular he doesn’t consider “fit for everyday use.”
Yet, he can’t even control his children now in the softplay area, let alone in the future. They run around. They disobey. They go missing. Finally, he spies them at the top of the big slide. They jump into its tunnel, but never come out the other end. He has truly lost them to the place.
This is the great fear of the Northern Irish: that the dream will consume everything, leaving nothing substantial behind. You go in the one end, but nothing is on the other side. If you woke, then, from the dream, what would you find?
In the title story, the narrator is a Belfast man in London, but, like Andrew’s wife, he feels the pull of home. There is no real justification for this, he knows – the weather is awful and, as his Spanish girlfriend tells him, there are better beaches in Spain. Still, Belfast is home, and it is an endless frustration to him that he can’t convince his girlfriend to return with him, just for a visit. The place can be a hard sell.
However, due to a freak, unexplained environmental change, the horse population is dying out the world over. It is only when he learns that there is one final, living horse on display in Belfast’s Botanic Gardens that he convinces Paola to come back with him. It’s an excursion that is both sentimental and exploitative, although ultimately disappointing for the narrator.
Since 2012, Belfast’s most popular attraction has been the Titanic Experience at Titanic Belfast, a museum built on the dry dock where the ill-fated ship was built. It was the Ship of Dreams, for sure, but long overshadowed by tragedy. The Experience is not an easy day out any more than the artwork that hangs in the pub in Higgins’ Fine allows one to have a care-free sesh. It’s all heavy.
Similarly, wringing tourism from historical trauma, former combatants from the conflict run Black Taxi Tours around the areas worst effected, acting as admittedly biased guides to massacres perpetrated by Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries, the security forces, and the British army. Like the horse, these tour guides are the last of a dying breed, and you’ve got to see them before they go. But what then?
An English journalist goes to a peacewall interface to do a follow-up story on an action photo taken during the 2021 riots, in “Mostly People Just Throw Bricks”. In the photo, a doll, set alight, has been thrown from the loyalist side of the peaceline onto the Republican side, a surreal projectile that causes havoc and may earn an award for the photographer. However, as the journalist tries to unravel the true story, he finds himself navigating the exploitative relationship between Northern Ireland and the outside world.
There is a straightforward story for him to tell, one in which the riots were one community’s outburst over two-tier policing, governmental connections with past violence, and Brexit. It is a story where the players are easily understood: West Belfast’s working-class, comprised of disenfranchised boys and pregnant girls, each one scarred by The Troubles and hating the other side. His interviewees are happy to perform the role for cash, but both parties know the real reason for the rioting: “It was something to do, wasn’t it?”
Without the material fact of the conflict, there is nothing else to define the place. There is also nothing much else to do if you are from one of these working-class communities. The bar bores and taxi tour guides are the same: they give you the one story they know, because there isn’t another one, and without that story, they have no identity. In the absence of the Troubles, Northern Ireland risks invisibility.
This isn’t to say there aren’t competing perspectives on the conflict, but the conflict is the story. As dreams go, it is more compelling and active than the dream of peace.
Navigating Between the Material and the Imaginal
When Northern Ireland Screen, the film agency for the region, was established in 1997, there was an implicit policy of ignoring Troubles stories – there was more to Northern Ireland than that. However, the most successful screen productions to come out of Northern Ireland in recent years, Lisa McGee’s black comedy series Derry Girls (2018-2022) and Englishman Rich Peppiat’s dark comedy/docudrama Kneecap (2024), have the conflict and its aftermath as central selling points, both thematically and aesthetically. The Troubles remain Northern Ireland’s only identifiable feature. It took Joshua Zetumer’s 2024 historical drama Say Nothing to get Disney interested in the place at all.
So, the heart of the conflict becomes this: without the conflict, would Northern Ireland be indistinguishable from the rest of Ireland or the rest of the UK? Does anyone really want to lose the identities forged through conflict?
As a rap act, would Kneecap register without the symbology of a conflict that two of the band’s members are too young to have even experienced? Burning Saracen vans, wearing balaclavas, and the historically politicised Irish language? It is these things that make them identifiably Northern Irish; without them, there is no identity. Not that the rest of the world can see anyway. To be perceived, the old story must be performed.
In “One Hander”, one of those most potent symbols in this story disappears. The Red Hand of Ulster – an emblem of Irish mythology utilised by paramilitaries on both sides, as well as the security forces – disappears from the Ulster Banner, from wall murals, and the flags that demarcate territory on certain Belfast streets. The magical loss of the symbol leaves only a white flag: for some a blank slate, for others a sign of truce, for others still a signal of their defeat. This white flag is certainly not an identity, a past, or a culture, but a void.
For Laura, however, the daughter of a loyalist paramilitary family, recently taken up with a Polish Catholic immigrant, the symbol hasn’t disappeared. It materialises as a genuine severed appendage in her fridge. A bloody hand is the image of guilt and trauma being passed on through generations – Northern Ireland may have nuances, but no subtlety. There are those for whom the conflict was and remains a material reality – lost loved ones, lost limbs, lost years, lost opportunities.
Trauma is a constant navigation between the material and the imaginal: what has happened, what may happen, and what you thought happened. The navigation is inward-looking, and self-insulation sometimes appears as self-indulgence.
Even when the aesthetics of the conflict aren’t apparent, Jan Carson’s characters are always close to the dream’s edge. Only the visitors appear surprised by it. The elderly women, in “Troubling the Water” are happy to believe that an East Belfast swimming pool has developed healing properties. They all need to heal something, so better to believe in the illogical story than not. What harm can it do? Of course, they come to blows to be the first into the waters. The water ruins more than their hair, which they already have an appointment for anyway.
This is the risk of Chesterton’s dream. We all go into it and may not all come out. Like the father who watches his children slide into oblivion, there is no way of knowing whether it is better in there or not. From the outside, those who enter look foolish, and their bluff determination to go looks like vanity. However, as Carson articulates, for those of us born in Northern Ireland, there is nowhere else to go.