Fighting the Peace: Counter-Narrative, Violence, and the Work of Gary Mitchell.

Tim Miles

‘It’s this: I am free when I am free of what people want to tell me. All stories are lies. I protest against all stories. All. I protest. A Protestant’ (Welch 51).

‘I wrote this piece in an ocean of optimism. The cease-fire was six weeks old and everybody on TV made the point of saying that the war was over and that there was peace in Northern Ireland … It was dreadful to see world leaders shaking hands and saying that everybody was going to get on from now on’ (Gibbons, 24).

‘Why do I feel stranded? Why does everyone around me feel stranded?’ (Mitchell, Stranded)

Gary Mitchell is a prolific playwright whose body of work includes over thirty stage plays, radio scripts and screen plays, including In a Little World of Our Own which won The Irish Times Best New Play award in 1998, and The Force of Change, winner of the Royal Court’s Best New Play award in 2000. His plays represent the extremist Loyalist community in Northern Ireland and their response to the ceasefire. Praised in the press, his work has sold out in Ireland, England, and the United States, and was performed in the Czech Republic for the first time in 2007 as part of the British Council funded ‘Diversity, Identity, Dialogue’ programme of events focusing on Northern Ireland. However, despite international success, he now finds it increasingly difficult to get his work produced in the UK or Ireland. He has not had a major professional production in England since 2004, when Loyal Women played at the Royal Court. Many of the theatres that performed his work in the past, such as The Tricycle and Royal Court in London, the Lyric in Belfast, and the Abbey in Dublin, have turned down scripts in recent years.

This essay considers Mitchell’s work as presenting a counter-narrative to the hegemonic movement towards peace and ‘normalization’ in Northern Ireland. In analysing Mitchell as a writer of counter-narratives, I argue that his work is best understood as a response to the marginalization of working-class Loyalists from much cultural and political discourse. This may be seen in his documentation of working-class Loyalist experiences, via on-stage discussion and dramatic analyses of that community’s institutions and customs. Mitchell’s representation of violence is part of this documentation, in analysing a community who may be post-war, but are not yet post-conflict. His work resists what he calls ‘the peace process narrative’, an ideological construct that presents peace in binary extremes of success or failure. In this way, his writing acts as a counter-narrative to recent media representations of his community.

Molly Andrews defines counter-narratives as:

only mak[ing] sense in relation to something else, that which they are countering. The very name identifies it as a positional category. But what is dominant and what is resistant are not, of course, static questions, but rather forever shifting placements. The discussion of counter-narratives is ultimately a consideration of multiple layers of positioning (2).

Counter-narratives, however, clearly exist beyond this definition, in a wider intellectual context. They embrace post-modernity’s interest in the deconstruction of the meta-narratives of modernism, and also, implicitly, the binary oppositions that underpin much of Western thought. They connect to Barthes’ idea of being ‘surrounded by narratives’, and link to Foucault, developing Gramsci’s thinking on the problem of hegemony – that certain social groups need to be marginalised in order to maintain social order (Foucault, 1965).

Peters and Lankshear suggest that:

Counter-narratives have a strategic political function of splintering and disturbing grand stories which gain their legitimacy from foundational myths concerning the origins and development of an unbroken history of the West based on the evolutionary idea of progress (Giroux et al 2).

The movement from war to peace, in a postcolonial context, may be seen as part of this ‘evolutionary idea of progress’. Peters and Lankshear go on to refer to Lyotard and his belief that all meta-narratives mask the will-to-power, and serve to exclude the interests of others. They go on to say that ‘Counter-narratives are specific and local, and offer critiques that counter the official and hegemonic narratives of everyday life, such as those legitimating stories propagated for specific political purposes to manipulate public consciousness by heralding a national set of common cultural ideals’ (13). Counter narrative, they continue, are ‘little stories’, the stories of those individuals and groups whose knowledge and histories have been ‘marginalised, excluded, subjugated or forgotten’ in the telling of official narratives. So, taking these theories together, I suggest we have counter-narratives discussed in terms of positioning, as resistance to hegemonic notions of progress which are intended to ‘manipulate public consciousness’, serving to expose the masking of the will-to-power, and as stories of the marginalised and excluded.

At first glance, it may seem strange to regard Loyalists in Northern Ireland as marginalised and excluded. They are, after all, the majority population, in favour of maintaining the political status quo, who over centuries have gained substantially from discrimination against Catholics and Nationalists. Nevertheless, many commentators have written about Loyalists’ marginalization. Alan Parkinson, for example, argues that from the start of the ‘Troubles’ the British media have misrepresented the Loyalist community which has, in turn, failed to present itself in a positive way. Parkinson cites Martin Smyth’s Ulster Unionist Information Institute, the first organization specifically designed to promote an understanding of the Unionist position, which did not emerge until 1988, almost two decades after the conflict began. For a culture built on heavy industry, religious faith, and military service, he argues, such ‘spin’ seemed unimportant (1998, 31). Developing this point, Hutchinson argues that the peace process is problematic to many Loyalists partially because of the word ‘process’ itself. ‘Process’ as a concept is anathema to a culture that respects certainty, stead-fastness and contract, echoing the religious slogan ‘today, tomorrow and forever’ seen displayed outside many Protestant churches in Belfast (2006, 207).

Parkinson argues that the British media were ill-informed about Northern Ireland’s history and population, so it tended to portray Loyalists as ‘bigots in the bowler hats’, as well as ‘quizzing the government’ on high profile ‘miscarriages of justice’, allegations of ‘shoot to kill’, and the abuse of Republican prisoners (78-82). As a result Loyalism looked entrenched, inflexible and irrelevant to many observers. Steve Bruce similarly claims that media commentators often failed to appreciate the strength of Loyalist identity which, in turn, led to a failure to fully understand the Troubles. He claims that during the Troubles there was a move in Loyalist self-definition from Ulster British to Ulster Protestant, and that the community’s sense of isolation from the British state increased, as did its sense of perceived threat from the Irish state (vi). Indeed, there has always been a paradox at the centre of Loyalist paramilitary activity, in that it seeks to demonstrate its allegiance to the state by breaking the laws of the state. In so doing, Loyalism undermines its own loyalty, and thus increases its own marginalization. Susan MacKay, in her book Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People (200), repeatedly comments on confused identity and factionalism within the ‘lost tribe’ of Ulster Protestantism, showing, over many interviews, a community combining defiance with apathy, and a tendency towards negative self-definition. Its perceived exclusion from discourse, and identity discourse in particular, may perhaps be best summarised by Billy Hutchinson, former prisoner and member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (the UVF). Commenting about his teenage years he said: ‘no one talked about politics … our politicians did our thinking, our clergy did our theological thinking, and our bosses did our economic thinking. We just got on with it’ (1999, British Library Sound Archive).

The lack of intellectual engagement may well have been fostered by the education system teaching the UK national curriculum. Councillor Tommy Kirkham comments in the documentary Red, White and Blue: ‘We were taught British history in school and not Irish history. Had we been taught Irish history we might have had a better understanding of where we are today’ (1998). Peter Taylor in his documentary and subsequent book, Loyalists, makes a similar point. Referring to Gusty Spence, the leader of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) at the start of ‘the Troubles’, Taylor states that ‘Spence knew that Loyalist prisoners had one fatal flaw. They knew about guns and bombs, but nothing about history and politics’ (211). Mitchell has made a number of references to his belief that his community has no access to its own history. Speaking about his only history play, Tearing the Loom, set during the Protestant rebellion of 1798, he stated:

Since I began to do all the research, it became very clear to me that, when you read Irish history, you have to be aware who is writing it, because there is no clear Protestant historian, no sense of certain times in history from a Protestant perspective. Even the iconic figures don’t come through – you go from King Billy, straight into Carson and Paisley (The Irish Times 15/6/2000).

Returning to Andrews’ point about ‘layers of positioning’, it is important to realise that there are a number of histories of the Protestant working-class that Mitchell ignores. He tends to position his community as excluded and as the victim of discrimination, claiming that at school he was discouraged from any ambition to be an actor or a musician, and that when he first joined an amateur dramatics group he was told that plays about working-class Ulster Protestants did not exist (The Irish Times 15/6/2000). Later, he claims a film producer told him that his screenplay could not be made, because Loyalists have no legitimate cause and therefore the audience would feel no empathy with the characters. He has said that the Lyric Theatre wanted his play In a Little World of Our Own set, not in Belfast, but in an English city like Birmingham, a position denied by the Lyric. He says he knows Protestant actors who have changed their names ‘to sound more Catholic’ (The Guardian, 5/4/2003), and in 2003 was quoted as saying that his work is ‘too close for people in Northern Ireland, and too uncomfortable for British Artistic Directors’ (The Irish Post, 7/11/2003), despite enjoying considerable success around this time. He positions himself as the outsider, seemingly attributing inabilities to get his work produced to his working-class Protestant background. Commenting on the failure of the National Theatre to produce any of his work when he was writer-in-residence there, for example, he says:

I had to continually remind everyone that it was the national theatre of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I was told that my plays were not Irish enough. When I explained that I was not Irish, and I wanted to do British plays, I was pretty much shown the door (interview, 2007).

Mitchell offers the following explanation for why he finds it increasingly difficult to get his plays produced:

It is in everybody’s interest to keep paying me and produce nothing. I have written radio plays that cannot be made, and given my award winning status, to not even be able to get a radio play made, and yet I am still being commissioned, and I am still being paid. I am still writing them. Is this a very clever strategy to silence the voice of the people that no one wants to hear? (Interview, 2007).

The BBC, he says, ‘do not want to have anything to do with the Protestant community whatsoever’ (Interview, 2007) and he now refuses to write for them, as he refuses to allow anyone else to adapt his work for television. He finds the origins of this conspiracy in a construction of peace designed – to refer back to Peters and Lankshear – to ‘manipulate public consciousness by heralding a national set of common cultural ideas’, about the advent of peace.

In December 2005 Mitchell’s home and car were bombed, allegedly by dissident Loyalist paramilitaries. Responding to what he considered to be limited press and public sympathy he stated:

If I was a Muslim writer whose work upset members of my community so much that some were threatening to kill me, then it would be a cause célèbre. There would be questions in parliament, writers would stage protests and Salman Rushdie would write letters of support. But because this is Northern Ireland what’s happening to my family isn’t part of the peace process narrative (McDonald, 2006).

Because his plays explore the continuing influence of Loyalist paramilitary organizations, principally the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), Mitchell claims the blame lies firmly with the highest political power:

You have a Prime Minister who is so determined that the history books will record him as the man who bought peace to Northern Ireland. Part of the process means you set up the committee and they go in to do a report on paramilitary activity. If they come back and say yes, the paramilitaries are doing everything, the peace process is failing. If they come back and say the paramilitaries are doing nothing, then the peace process is succeeding, so they’re not sending in Sherlock Holmes (interview, 2007).

Although many of his allegations are difficult to assess, what is clear is that Mitchell positions himself as an outspoken maverick. He has spoken of a ‘culture of victimhood’ whereby, in his words, ‘we can all agree to feel sorry for gays or blacks’ (interview, 2007). However, he feels his community is excluded even from a public acknowledgement of its suffering and marginalization, his argument resonating with the slogans on one of the larger murals on the Shankhill Road which proclaims: ‘Where are our enquiries? Where is our truth? Where is our justice?’

Mitchell argues that he is from a marginalised community, and has been discriminated against by producers and theatre companies despite considerable success. Positioning himself accordingly in the media, he argues that his treatment is the result of the construction of a hegemonic peace narrative. In interview he agrees that there is ‘a lot of good work on the ground’ and talks admiringly about the community work done by both the DUP and Sinn Fein, calling this a ‘real’ peace process. We now need to consider his assertions of a dominant ‘peace process narrative’, and that English people think that ‘everything is fine now you have peace’. My aim here is to place Mitchell’s counter-narratives in context.

Speaking in February 2007, Pam Brighton, Artistic Director of Dubbeljoint and producer of most of Mitchell’s radio plays, claimed that ‘there are only two stories the BBC wants now’, these being, in her words, ‘my life as a bomber’, or ‘Belfast is like everywhere else’ (interview, 2007): that is either a sensationalisation of conflict, or an acceptance of the universality, and success, of peace and normalization. Peace also requires new forms of theatre. Paula McFetridge, former artistic director of the Lyric, has spoken of the ‘end of the single community drama’. Much arts funding is aimed at ‘bringing people together’, rendering problematic Mitchell’s enclosed dramatic worlds of Protestant in-fighting.

Malachi O’Doherty has intervened into the controversial topic of arts funding, to argue that the funding bodies for the arts are involved in ideological manipulation of culture for a political purpose: ‘The politician reads culture as allegiance and community as support … To be an artist – for whom culture is a description of what we do, not a prescription of what we ought to do – this is repulsive’ (2003, 74). He continues, claiming that: ‘Political movements feel entitled to take responsibility for wider areas of our thinking and demand conformity … There is pressure to direct arts and community funding towards those who best represent the elements of the predominant political model’ (74). He goes on to suggest that ‘in an effort to establish political harmony … simplistic readings of local culture are privileged above all others’ (75). These ‘simplistic readings’ are the representation of ‘intense, monolithic and dangerous sectarianism’, or its converse, peace and normality. He concludes: ‘It assumes that this society doesn’t need honest reflection but can get by sufficiently on delusion’ (75).

To give one example of a post-conflict Belfast drama, in March 2007 Leaves by Lucy Caldwell, winner of that year’s George Devine award, opened at the Royal Court, having transferred from Dublin. The play is set in Belfast in the ‘present day’, and concerns a family’s attempts to deal with the aftermath of the eldest daughter’s attempted suicide. Nicholas De Jongh, reviewing the London production for the Evening Standard, noticed that ‘any political / religious discussion about Northern Ireland’s violent history or its impact on the girl never moves beyond the minimal or anecdotal’ (2007). The play represents Belfast as being much like everywhere else. Mitchell, however, is anxious to point out what he sees as the reality, positioning himself in opposition to these kinds of representations. In interview, he expresses his belief that the reality is vastly different to the popular perception:

MILES. I wonder how much violence there is that is no longer reported?

MITCHELL. Millions. Millions. It is exactly the opposite of what is portrayed (interview, 2007).

In a report for the Institute for Conflict Research, published in 2006 and entitled No Longer a Problem? Sectarian Violence in Northern Ireland, Neil Jarman states that between 1994 and 2005 there were on average five attacks per month on churches, chapels, or Orange Halls: that there were 376 riots in the interface zones of north Belfast over the same period: that the police recorded 294 sectarian incidents between April 2001 and March 2004, and these incidents were ‘largely of the most serious type, while minor forms of sectarianism, such as verbal abuse, harassment, visual displays and graffiti were largely unrepresented’ (2005). At least seventeen barriers (peace walls) have been built, extended or heightened in Belfast since the ceasefires of 1994. Younger people are, according to Jarman, more likely to experience sectarian harassment and violence than older age groups, and a ‘very high’ percentage of young people favour a segregated living, schooling and working environment. The Northern Ireland Housing Executive reported that from 1991–2005, an average of 1,378 people per year sought re-housing because of sectarian, racist, or paramilitary intimidation.

Peter Shirlow has published a number of studies on sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. In ‘Who Fears to Speak’: Fear, Mobility, and Ethno-Sectarianism in the two ‘Ardoynes’ he states ‘this study indicates that the implied de-territorialization needed in order to shift Northern Irish society towards more agreed and agreeable forms of political ownership and consensus-building remains distant and geographically rootless’ (2006, 18). He goes on to say that:

Despite the cessation of most paramilitary violence we are left with a situation in which the creation of territorial division and rigid ethno-sectarian communities means that fear and mistrust are still framed by a desire to create communal separation. Without doubt residential segregation still regulates ethno-sectarian animosity through complex spatial devices (84).

Similarly, John Gray states that culture exists to create ‘greater mutual understanding’ and to ‘change ourselves and our society for the better’ (2003), reflecting again this notion of the political manipulation of art. However, he too claims that arts funding has, paradoxically, increased sectarian polarization by showing equal respect for the two traditions:

Belfast appears simultaneously to have become more Irish than anywhere else in Ireland, and more determinedly Ulster-Scots than the Scots in asserting its Scottishness. We are in danger of putting down cultural markers in a way that a newly confident Irish Republic and an emerging Scotland are moving beyond (2003, 47).

In his book Belfast: Segregation, Violence and the City, Shirlow reads the chilling potential of this development, arguing that ‘there is Balkanization at present: in a benign way it could turn into ethnically-divided Belgium, or in a malign way, towards the former Yugoslavia’ (2006, 78).

Nevertheless, the British press has voiced often unqualified statements of optimism about peace, especially in recent months. Much media coverage was given to the withdrawal of British troops in July 2007. Andrews states that ‘one of the key functions of master narratives is that they offer people a way of experiencing what is assumed to be a normative experience’ (1), and Mitchell has expressed his anger that ‘English people think everything is fine now’. Christopher Hampton once commented that John Osborne, a playwright with whom Mitchell has much in common, wrote plays because he felt that ‘the propaganda is not true’ (Palmer, 2006). Mitchell claims a similar position:

MILES. How consciously are you aware when you write of countering misconceptions about Protestantism?

MITCHELL. One hundred per cent. One hundred per cent.

MILES. Are you countering different preconceptions with different audiences, or maybe they are the same?

MITCHELL. I think generally they are the same (interview, 2007).

These misconceptions are formed by a lack of reporting of violence and the continuing role of the paramilitaries in drug dealing and other forms of racketeering. But other mis-conceptions are evident in common cultural representations of working-class Protestants:

The problem I had with the usual representation of Protestants would be that they were always the same, you know, the drunken, depressed man who beats up his wife, and the funny, silly UDA cowboys. All seemed to be one dimensional … no attempt to express the very real differences within Protestantism, the fact that within one family you could have a born-again Christian and a paramilitary (Gibbons, 2000).

An example of such stereotypical characterization may be seen in the BBC television drama, Holy Cross. The story concerns two families caught up in the headline events of 2001 on the Ardoyne Road in Belfast where a dispute arose concerning the rights of schoolgirls from the Catholic Ardoyne area of north Belfast to walk a few hundred yards through the predominantly Protestant area of Glenbryn to the Holy Cross primary school. Local Protestants objected and the dispute escalated. Holy Cross won much critical praise winning three FIPA D’Ors at the FIPA Biarritz Festival International de Programmes Audiovisuels. The BBC broadcast proudly introduced the film as a ‘searing indictment of sectarian hatred in Northern Ireland’. Copies are available at The Centre for Education for Racial Equality in Scotland (CERES) at the University of Edinburgh. However, the Protestant men are portrayed as vicious and amoral, even terrorizing their own children. To quote from one angered viewer whose message was posted on the BBC’s website:

I would like to comment on the portrayal of the Protestant community represented on tonight’s programme, Holy Cross. I feel it is a disgustingly stereotypical view, one-sided and grossly inaccurate. It depicts the protesters as lolly sucking buffoons complete with combat 18 clothing. I am very disappointed at the whole program and the BBC itself (http://www.bbc.co.uk, accessed 20 Feb 2007).

Similarly, the film Resurrection Man which was released in 1997, and is loosely based on the lives of the ‘Shankhill butchers’, who tortured and murdered nineteen Catholics during the 1970s, fails to provide a social or political context. The film is slick and violent. Reviewers use such phrases as ‘the Irish predisposition to violence’ (Eircom, online). As Finlayson points out, ‘treating people as emerging from some sort of essential nature depoliticises the groups themselves’ (73), thus linking to Foucault’s belief that certain social groups need to be marginalised in order to maintain social order. Mitchell is scathing about Resurrection Man and others such as The Boxer, or Some Mother’s Son, that include representations of Ulster Protestantism. He adopts a similar adversarial position when commenting on many plays. Marie Jones’s A Night in November, for example, is the story of Kenneth, a Protestant civil servant. Appalled at the sectarian attitudes of his wife and father in-law, Kenneth abandons his Loyalism and adopts a new all-embracing Irish identity, following his decision to support the Irish football team: ‘I am free of it. I am a free man … I am a Protestant man. I’m an Irish man’ (2000, 108) he proudly declares at the end of the play. To Mitchell the play is ridiculous:

I do not know of any Protestant who just changed overnight and started supporting the Republic, unless there was money involved. I think that those kinds of plays are suggesting that corruption is a virtue. The way our community would look at that is that man is a traitor. He was born a Northern Irish Protestant! … There are elements of our community that have moved across but they are so few and they are so dodgy. Look at the elections. David Ervine is the only ex-paramilitary ever to have been elected (interview, 2007).

However, for Mitchell’s plays to work dramatically, audiences need to empathise with his hard men of Loyalist violence. In In a Little World of Our Own, for example, Mitchell gives us UDA member Ray, who commits a murder, and is virulently sectarian, disapproving of the ‘namby pamby’ ways of the new UDA leadership and their desire for peace. But Ray is also loving and protective towards his learning-disabled younger brother, Richard. Indeed, he owns up to the killing when suspicion falls on Richard, sacrificing his own life to defend his young sibling. During a post-show audience discussion with Mitchell at the Peacock in Dublin, one woman in the audience claimed that Ray could not have committed the murder because during the play she fell in love with him, and she could not fall in love with a killer. Mitchell’s response was to say ‘But that’s the point’. He wants us to see Ray as a tragic hero, a victim of circumstances, whose flaw is one of commitment, passion and loyalty, and thus a man worthy of being loved. Mitchell has said that he believes violence to be ‘a waste of time’ (2007), but Ray’s tragedy is inherently linked to his violence: we feel for him, in part, because he is compelled to be violent, to defend his community and his family. There is a line to be drawn between an attempt to understand violence, and an act of justification, and Mitchell’s work can come close to that line: there is inevitably a mutual suspicion between him and anyone who sees art as an agent of social change.

Perhaps in a similar way to 1970s feminist companies who sought a female-only space to enable an internal debate, Mitchell wants to create a film and theatre company that is funded by Protestants, staffed by Protestants and presents Protestant stories, to enable debates about Protestantism while, in the words of Maguire, ‘resisting pressure from outside to conform to particular perspectives on the community from within which he writes’ (146). Mitchell sees his function as a playwright to create a body of work to ‘challenge and ultimately replace’ existing representations of Protestants during the struggle for peace (2007), to counter ‘those legitimating stories propagated for specific political purposes’ to again quote Lankshear and Peters. McFetridge comments about Mitchell as never having really seen him as a theatre writer, but more of a documentary maker. His work, to him, is indeed about documentation:

MITCHELL. I want the history recorded. Tony Blair is writing his own history. He is so desperate to be the man who brought peace to Northern Ireland, but it is all nonsense.

MILES. You’re trying to be a historian?

MITCHELL. Yes, I am. Yes, I am (interview, 2007).

In his plays, Mitchell’s documentation of history may be said to broadly take three forms: dialogue-driven discussion about Protestant history and politics: an examination of Protestant institutions and traditions: and an analysis of the isolation and in-fighting that has come from a supposed peace. In Remnants of Fear, for example, the teenage Tony is impressed by the men of violence, principally his uncle Geordie who bears many similarities to Ray from In a Little World of Our Own. In both plays, these reactionary men of violence are given foils with whom to have discussions about a dilemma within the family. This serves as a metaphor for a problem within the wider family of the United Kingdom. Ray has his brother (a well-meaning liberal), his sister-in-law (a devout Christian) and his friend Walter (who conforms to the wishes of the UDA leadership), and they discuss what to do when Richard is suspected of murder. In Remnants of Fear, Geordie, argues with Charlie, Tony’s father, who believes in progress and negotiation. Here is Charlie talking to Tony who has been caught in bed with his girlfriend by her father:

You are worse than the DUP. I want you to listen very carefully without butting in. (Pause) I am going, as your dad, to see him, as her dad, and we are going to sit down, as adults, and sort this whole thing out. Now, he won’t get exactly everything he wants from this deal and I won’t get exactly everything I want from the deal but we will come to an agreement somehow, some way. And when we do, what I am telling you is that you have to stick to it this time. Can you do that? (63).

He could easily be talking about the peace process. At other times, Mitchell’s documentation of history is more literal and less metaphoric. Maud is Tony’s grandmother. She analyses the rift between the UDA and the DUP:

They used to be the same but they’re not any more. Too many people fell out with each other and bickering started between the two organizations. It’s like the way the UDA no longer supports the DUP because it got tired of the DUP blackening their name on TV. Or the way they just don’t do whatever Paisley says any more because Big Paisley also started to call them terrorists and said they were just as bad as the IRA (72).

In his radio play Stranded Mitchell writes a pained tone poem, documenting Protestant ignorance and isolation:

We always believe what we are told … why should we change? Jesus doesn’t change? We are often quoted words written a long time ago, and you cannot remember when, but you know it isn’t now …when did we start saying ‘Ulster says no’? 1912? 1995? If a culture refuses to change can it progress? … Was it because someone said ‘no’ and we all backed them up? I can’t remember. I can remember saying ‘no’: No United Ireland, No Pope here, No change, no, no, no … the word Protestant implies we are against something, anything, everything. A negative word … we know what we are not, what we are not going to do, what we are going to fight against, to break down, to destroy … Where is our culture? Where is our identity? Where is our history? Where is our future? (2001)

These questions recur in Mitchell’s work. Similarly, characters give voice to issues relating to Protestant ignorance and media misrepresentation. In Remnants of Fear Charlie comments on the contrasting experiences of Loyalist and Republican prisoners:

The IRA all came out of prison with degrees and diplomas. They went on to become politicians, journalists and whatever else but what did the Prods do? Weights and drugs. That’s it … While the IRA young men were studying. They were actually bringing in lecturers from Queens. Professors. While they were doing that the UDA young men were marching in circles, playing snooker, lifting weights and doing drugs (120).

This rather overstates the case, as Billy Hutchinson’s prison reading, for example, included William Wordsworth and Kier Hardy. But the perception of exclusion from learning and culture is one that recurs in these plays. The context for the above quotation is the debate between Charlie, Maud and Geordie, in which government policy and media representation is also critiqued:

CHARLIE. I packed my wife in when I found out she was sleeping with someone else and I packed the UDA in when it became an illegal organization.

MAUD. The government only made it illegal to suit the IRA.

CHARLIE. The government had to make it illegal because it was killing innocent people and pretending they were all in the IRA. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

GEORDIE. Propaganda, propaganda, propaganda. You’ve been watching BBC Northern Ireland for too long (133).

Mitchell is concerned with analysing and documenting the changes happening within Unionist traditions and institutions. Many of his plays consider change and conflict within the UDA, such as Trust and In a Little World of Our Own. The Force of Change and the radio trilogy Dividing Force concern change within the traditionally Protestant dominated police services, and Marching On looks at the Protestant tradition of marching to celebrate victory at the battle of the Boyne. Commenting on Marching On Michael Billington claimed that the play: ‘fulfils one of drama’s most basic functions: the anthropological recording of the country’s customs’ (The Guardian 17/6/2000), and Mitchell is keen to confirm his accuracy saying ‘I went to the bother of writing these plays, so I am going to be accurate. If there are words in the play it is because I have heard them. I am writing what people say’ (interview, 2007).

In all of these plays power structures are collapsing, within both legal and illegal organizations. In Marching On there is a common Mitchell character, the police officer divided in his loyalty. Here Christopher, an RUC officer, finally breaks under the pressure, unable to combine the roles of police officer, father, brother and Protestant:

Well, here’s the thing – who’s stopping them marching? – Me. And who’s to bring him in? – Me. And who’s to do this Scottish fucker for shagging his sister? – Me. And who’s not allowed to see his own kids? Me-me-me-fucking me. Well, fuck it. Fuck it all, fuck the lot of you’ (135-6).

As the Beast Sleeps is the story of Kyle, persuaded by the UDA leadership to lead a punishment squad to attack ‘renegade’ members of the UDA who wish to continue the war, as the leadership negotiates for peace. He is motivated, at least in part, by money, and the play asks, in the words of Stuart Graham who played Kyle both onstage and in the film version, ‘what does an unemployed terrorist do?’ He is also motivated by a sense of loyalty. Kyle tries to be loyal to all sides: to his wife and child, for whom he feels obliged to earn money, to his friend, Freddie, whom he is ordered to beat, and to the UDA leadership, who give this order. The play ends with Kyle alone, accused of treachery on all sides. During the war, Kyle was a thief with close friends and family, who stole for the UDA, but during the move to peace, he has become isolated and violent.

Mitchell represents violence as morally ambiguous. In so doing he offers a counter-narrative to its representation in works like Holy Cross and A Night in November, where the characters are one-dimensional heroes and villains. Ray is violent but loving: Kyle is violent but loyal and does want peace. Ray’s violence is motivated, in part, by fraternal devotion, as is Kyle’s by a need to provide for his family and help the UDA achieve peace. Opposing violence is, in Mitchell’s plays, usually a complicated and uncertain position, involving great personal risk. The journalist in Independent Voice, for example, seeks to try to stand up to the local UDA and their involvement in drug dealing, but ends up being so intimidated that he agrees to their demands, and operates as little more than a mouthpiece for the paramilitaries – the UDA having realised, through the journalist’s actions, the power of the press.

Mitchell represents the delivery of justice and its consequences as complicated. Caroline in The Force of Change attempts to purge collusion in the RUC and, in so doing, alienates a junior officer who, fearful for his future in the force, further co-operates with the men of violence. The other officers, as they become aware of this situation, use threats of violence against a prisoner to obtain the necessary information to prevent further violence. An attempt at justice, to exclude and condemn the paramilitaries, leads to corruption, which is countered with further violence, and the circle is complete. Similarly, in Independent Voice, the journalists’ attempts to confront corruption lead to the murder of an alleged paedophile who is almost certainly innocent. Telling the truth is no easy matter.

Mitchell’s plays offer a counter-narrative to the hegemonic narrative of a movement towards peace in Northern Ireland. His plays offer resistance to a construction of peace that fails to acknowledge the complexities of an Ulster that is not yet post-conflict. However, as Andrews says, writers of counter-narratives may consider their circumstances to be specific, but not unique. In his stories of conflict within families and in the work places, Mitchell offers narratives that transcend his own locality. As he says, ‘I do not write about Northern Ireland, I write about people.’ In so doing he counters the dominant narratives that seek a blanket condemnation of the Loyalist paramilitaries. Andrews claims that we become the stories we know, and this process produces and reproduces the master narrative. The challenge then is to avoid its internalization: ‘Master narratives offer a way of identifying what is assumed to be a normative experience … they become the blueprint for all stories. Ultimately, the power of master narratives comes from their internalization’ (13). By presenting counter-narratives, Mitchell argues that the Peace Process can offer ‘the very real chance to show that we are not this mass triumphalist band of bigots’ (Mitchell, The Guardian 2006), not just to those outside Ulster Loyalism, but to themselves as well.

Primary Texts:

BBC The Art of the Troubles, (BBC Radio 4, 3 June, 1995).

Brozel, Mark, dir. Holy Cross (BBC Northern Ireland, BBC2, May 2004).

Caldwell, Lucy, Leaves (London: Nick Hern, 2007).

Evans, Marc, dir. Resurrection Man (Revolution Films, GB, 1998).

Hutchinson, Ron, Rat in the Skull (unpublished script).

Ibsen, Henrik, An Enemy of the People, adapted by Martin Lynch, dir. Roland Jaquarello, BBC Radio 3, 15 October 2006.

Jones, Marie, A Night in November (London: Nick Hern, 2000).

Leigh, Mike, dir., Four Days in July (BBC, 1985).

Lynch, Martin, The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty (Belfast: Lagan, 2003).

Lynch, Martin, and Conor Grimes, The History of the Troubles Accordin’ to my Da (unpublished script).

McGuinness, Frank, ‘Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme’ in Frank McGuinness: Plays 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).

Mitchell, Gary, As the Beast Sleeps, (London: Nick Hern, 2001).

---, Dividing Force, dir. Pam Brighton, BBC Radio 3, 10 – 24 May 2002.

---, Energy (unpublished script).

---, The Force of Change, (London: Nick Hern, 2000).

---, In a Little World of Our Own (London: Nick Hern, 1998).

---, Independent Voice (unpublished script).

---, Marching On (unpublished 155

---, Red, White and Blue: A Protestant Tale (Brian Waddell Productions, BBC1, January 1998).

---, Remnants of Fear (unpublished script).

---, Stranded dir. Pam Brighton, BBC Radio 3, 4 September 2001.

---, Tearing the Loom, (London: Nick Hern, 1998).

Palmer, Tony, dir. John Osborne and the Gift of Friendship (GB: Isolde Films, 2006).

Welch, Robert, Protestants (Belfast: Lagan, 2006)

Secondary Texts:

Anderson, Chris, The Billy Boy: The Life and Death of LVF Leader Billy Wright, (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream, 2002).

Andrews, Molly, ‘Counter-Narratives and the Power to Oppose’ in Andrews, Molly, and Bamberg, Peter (eds.) Considering Counter-Narratives: Narrating, Resisting, Making Sense (John Benjamins: Amsterdam, 2004).

Bamberg, P., ‘Considering Counter-Narratives’ in Andrews, Molly, and Peter Bamberg, eds. Considering Counter-Narratives: Narrating, Resisting, Making Sense (John Benjamins: Amsterdam, 2004).

Brighton, Pam, Interview with author, 12 Feb 2007.

Bruce, Steve, The Edge of the Union: The Ulster Loyalist Political Vision (Oxford: Oxford, 1994).

Byrne, Ophelia, The Stage in Ulster from the Eighteenth Century, (Belfast: Linen Hall Library, 1997).

---, (ed.) State of Play? (Belfast: Linen Hall Library, 2001).

Cornell, Jennifer, ‘Walking with Beasts: Gary Mitchell and the Representation of Ulster Loyalism.’ Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 29.2, (2003): 27-34.

Culler, Jonathon, Barthes: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University, 1993).

Carruthers, Mark, Stephen Deeds & Tim Loane, eds, Re-Imagining Belfast: A Manifesto for the Arts (Belfast: Cultural Resolution, 2003).

Etherton, Michael, Contemporary Irish Dramatists (New York: Sant Martin’s, 1989).

Feldman, Allen, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991).

Finlayson, Alan, ‘Discourse and Contemporary Loyalist Identity’, in Shirlow, Peter and Mark McGovern, eds, Who are ‘The People’? Unionism, Protestantism, and Loyalism in Northern Ireland (Pluto: London, 1997).

Foucault, Michael and Donald Bouchard, eds, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).

Freeman, Mark, ‘Charting the Narrative Unconscious: Cultural Memory and the Challenge of Autobiography’ in Andrews, Molly, and Bamberg, Peter (eds.) Considering Counter-Narratives: Narrating, Resisting, Making Sense (John Benjamins: Amsterdam, 2004).

Gibbons, Fiachra, ‘Truth and Nail’, The Guardian, 10 April 2000, p.24.

Giroux, Henry A, Colin Lankshear, Peter McLaren & Michael Peters, Counter Narratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Post-Modern Spaces (Routledge: London, 1996).

Grace, Sherrill and Jerry Wasserman, eds, Theatre and Autobiography (Vancouver: Talon books, 2006).

Gray, John ‘Culture is for Change’ in Mark Curruthers, Stephen Deeds, Tim Loane, eds., Re-Imagining Belfast: A Manifesto for the Arts (Belfast: Cultural Resolution, 2003).

Harrington, John P. and E. Mitchell, Politics and Performance in Contemporary Northern Ireland (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts, 1999).

Holdsworth, Nadine, ‘Namby Pamby Ways Don’t Get Results: Cultures of Machismo and Violence in the Work of Gary Mitchell’, The Twelfth Annual Central New York Conference on Language and Literature, 28 October 2002.

Hutchins, Wesley, ‘Gary Mitchell’s Talk Process’. Poesie Theatre De L’Ireland Contemporanie, 56.2 (2003): 206-218.

Hutchison, Yvette, ‘Counter-Narratives: Challenging or Underpinning the Dominant’, University of Winchester, Counter-Narratives: Challenging/Conflicting/Confusing Voices, April 4, 2006.

Irish Playography, http://www.irishplayography.com/, accessed 5 May 2007.

Jarman, Neil, ‘No Longer a Problem? Sectarian Violence in Northern Ireland’, Institute for Conflict Research, 2005 http://www.community-relations.org.uk/consultation_uploads/OFMDFM_-_Sectarian_Violence.pdf, accessed 5 May 2007.

Llewellyn-Jones, Margaret, Contemporary Irish Drama and Cultural Identity (Bristol: Intellect, 2002).

McDonald, Henry ‘Playwright Hits Back Against Intimidation’, The Guardian, 29 January 2006. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk. Last accessed 15 April 2006.

McDonald, Henry, & Jim Cusack, UDA: Inside the heart of the Loyalist Terror (Dublin: Penguin, 2004).

McFetridge, Paula, Interview with author, 14 Feb 2004.

McKay, Susan, Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People (Belfast, Blackstaff, 2000).

McKenna, Bernard, Rupture, Representation and the Refashioning of Identity in Drama from the North of Ireland, 1969-1994 (Westport, Praeger, 2003).

MacNeice, Louis, Collected Poems (Faber and Faber, London, 1992)

Maguire, Tom, Making Theatre in Northern Ireland (Exeter, Exeter University, 2006).

McDowell, Wallace, ‘Traditional Routes’, Irish Theatre in England, National Portrait Gallery, 17 June 2005.

Mitchell, Gary, Interview with author, 12 Feb 2007.

Morash, Christopher, A History of Irish Theatre, 1601-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2002).

Morrow, Duncan ‘Suffering for Righteousness’ Sake? Fundamentalist Protestantism and Ulster Politics’ in Shirlow, Peter, & Mark McGovern eds. Who are ‘The People’? Unionism, Protestantism, and Loyalism in Northern Ireland (Pluto: London, 1997).

Mulholland, Marc Northern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002).

Murphy, Y., A. Leonard, G. Gillespie, and K. Brown eds, Troubles Images: Posters and Images of the Northern Irish Conflict from the Linen Hall Library, Belfast (Belfast: Linen Hall Library, 2001).

O’Doherty, Malachi ‘A Bit of a Nuisance’ in Gray, John ‘Culture is for Change’ in Curruthers, Mark et al (eds.), Re-Imagining Belfast: A Manifesto for the Arts (Belfast: Cultural Resolution, 2003).

Parkinson, Alan F., Ulster Unionism and the British Media (Four Courts: Dublin, 1998).

Pilkington, Lionel, ‘Theatre and Cultural Politics in Northern Ireland: The Over the Bridge Controversy, 1959, Eire-Ireland, 30.4 (1996), 76-93.

Russell, Richard Ranking, ‘Loyal to the Truth: Aesthetic Loyalism in the work of Gary Mitchell’ Modern Drama, 48.1, (2005).

Sass, Louis A., ‘The Consolations of Counter-Narrative’ Narrative Enquiry 8.2 (1998): 429-443.

Shirlow, Peter, ‘Who Fears to Speak’: Fear, Mobility, and Ethno-Sectarianism in the Two ‘Ardoynes’ in The Global Review of Ethnopolitics. Special Issue: Northern Ireland, 3.1 (2003): 76-91.

Shirlow, Peter and Mark McGovern, eds, Who are ‘The People’? Unionism, Protestantism, and Loyalism in Northern Ireland (Pluto: London, 1997).

Shirlow, Peter and Brendan Murtagh, Belfast: Segregation, Violence and the City (Pluto: London, 2006).

Sinnerton, Henry, David Ervine: Uncharted Waters (Dingle: Mount Eagle, 2002).

Tachibana, Reiko, Narrative as Counter-Memory: A Half-Century of Post-war Writing in Germany and Japan (Albany: State University of New York, 1998).

Taylor, Peter, Loyalists (Bloomsbury: London, 1999).

Whitehead, Baruch, ‘Music of the Civil Rights Movement’ conference paper presented at ‘Counter-Narratives: Challenging/Conflicting/Confusing Voices’ University of Winchester, 4 April 2006.

Wood, Ian S., God, Guns and Ulster: A History of Loyalist Paramilitaries (Caxton: London, 2003).