Mike Quille interviews Carl Joyce, maker of the award-winning short film The School on Seaside Lane. Below is the trailer...

What inspired you to create 'The School on Seaside Lane?' Was there a personal connection to Easington Colliery or the school's history that motivated you?

The initial idea came to me during the first Covid 19 lockdown, I read a local news article about Durham County Council buying the school back from the private development company that owned it for £50k and their plans were to demolish the building.

I’m originally from Horden Colliery, the village next to Easington, and I went to Easington Comprehensive School in the 90’s, so I was familiar with the school and its importance to the area. Whenever we’d pass the school on the bus I always remember the playground looked so full of life, the children always looked so happy there. I always wondered why they had a separate entrances for boys and girls.

I remember the school closing around 1997 and standing empty. Over the years it became vandalized and eventually it got boarded up, the playground became overgrown and the pigeons moved in. There was always a rumour that the school was about to be renovated but it never happened. People in Easington Colliery became sick of it, it was a black cloud  preventing people moving on from the past.

When I read about the plans for the school to be demolished I felt sad that people were celebrating the end of the school. This was a school that had been through wars, it had educated most of the miners in Easington along with their children & grandchildren. This is what motivated me to make a film about it, it seemed vital to document positive  memoriesof the school before it was too late.

Can you talk about the artistic choices you made in the film, such as the use of slow-motion sequences and poetry narration? How do these elements help convey the film's message?

I wanted to use slower sequences to give the audience time to absorb the messages and reflect on their own past experiences. I don’t think you necessarily have to have gone to that school to be able to relate to the stories and unpick the messages from the interviews. Another reason was to juxtapose the harshness of the demolition against the softness of the poem and archive footage, to heighten the audience’s emotions.

The poem was a happy accident. I went to interview Chris Robinson (the woman who describes the village as fractured like a crack in a coal seam) and she told me she’d written a poem about the school after she heard the school was going to be demolished. I asked if I could use the poem in the film and she agreed, so we set up a makeshift audio booth and I recorded her reading the poem there and then.

The film shows multiple shots of estate deprivation and buildings left to rot. What was the impact you wanted these visuals to have on the audience?

My initial idea was simply to make a record of the school for posterity, but it quickly became more than that. I was aware of the issues Easington had, just like Horden had/has when I lived there, but being on the streets and talking to people gave me a stark reminder of the massive impact that the closure of the pits and the loss of jobs and general deindustrialization has had on the area.

So my plan for the film quickly shifted, after the first couple of days filming. The school became a metaphor for the village –  a once grand building left to rot and ruin, just like the village itself.

At the same time I wanted to be respectful to the people who lived there. I knew how important it was to get the balance right, to document the hardship and suffering but to do it in a dignified way – the people who live there are proud. There were many interviews where people said quite harsh and derogatory things about the village which I didn’t include in the final edit. After showing the completed filmto people in Easington, I’ve not had any negative feedback, so I feel like I got it right.

You interviewed several local residents who described the community as fractured and the area as an eyesore. How did you approach gaining their trust and encouraging them to share their stories?

I think being from the area helped to break down some of the initial barriers. People are wary of outsiders in places like Easington, so when they hear you’re from the local area and hear you speak with the same accent, people tend to open up more. When I was on the street filming the more spontaneous interviews, it was also quite easy to find people to chat to me on camera. People had a lot to say about the school and they had strong feelings about it, so once you asked them their thoughts on the school they opened up.

I found the interviewing the easiest part, everyone I spoke to had an emotional pull towards the school, people either went there themselves or had a family member who were pupils.

The demolition of the school and the closing of the pit are central themes in the film. How important do you think it is to document and preserve the history of working-class communities like Easington?

I think it’s vital, I don’t think there’s enough done to preserve the rich history we have in the North East. For example, there was a recent study done by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre which revealed that in the film and TV industry there is only 8%of workers from working-class backgrounds, compared to 60% from middle and upper-class backgrounds. So when there’s a local history story that should be preserved (like the school) who is going to cover it? Anyone that’sMost people from the 60% are unlikely to have an emotional pull towards an area like Easington, and so the story would be untold, and the history and memories would be forgotten.

It’s a similar story with funding. There’s a much smaller amount given to artists in working-class areas than the more affluent areas of the country, making it very hard to fund projects like this. It might be worth adding that I have not received any funding to make this film, it’s been financed completely with income from paid jobs.

"Billy Elliot" was filmed in Easington and brought some attention to the area. How do you think the film affected the local community, and how do they feel about it now?

People in Easington are still very proud of Billy Elliot, they still talk about him a lot. It’s not  only the fact that Easington was chosen as a film location for production, but it’s more about the story of Billy Elliot and how he fought hardship, his father's disapproval and the societal expectations placed upon him, so he could follow his dreams and become a ballet dancer. Billy Elliot is a story of grit and determination which people in areas like Easington pride themselves on.

The school on Seaside Lane is a powerful symbol in your documentary. What do you believe it represents for the former students and residents of Easington Colliery?

I think it represents pride in their past. I’ve tried to show what a bold and important part of Easington’s history the school was, and I think people feel that when watch the film. Most of the people who’ve watched it and who went to the school become emotional after seeing it, they often share positive stories with me from their time going to the school. You can see there’s a sense of pride that they went there, thatthey’re a part of the school’s history.

The film touches on the economic decline following the pit closures and the lack of regeneration. In your opinion, what are the biggest obstacles preventing the area's recovery?

When the pits closed the start of the problems was that initial lack of investment, there was nothing to replace the pits and there never has been, 40 years on. The area needs significant investment, it needs jobs. When I left school in 2001, I searched the area for a job for at least 6 months and I ended up working in a call centre in a nearby town on minimum wage for 4 years before I packed up and went abroad for work.

Since then there’s nothing been developed in the area to give people any other options, you still have to travel to a larger city like Sunderland or Newcastle to have a more varied choice of work. So  people end up moving there, and the community looses another resident.

The area needs a reason for people to stay there, there’s so much available land in places like Horden where the pit used to be. Apart from the odd small industrial unit it beggars belief that there’s still nothing been built on there to give people jobs, 40 years on from the pit closure

Also there are areas in the village, where Billy Elliot was filmed, with very poor housing conditions. Out of town landlords  buy up cheap houses and rent them out - but they don’t maintain them, leaving people living in poor conditions which has a knock-on effect with people’s physical and mental health .

Do you have any future projects in mind that continue to explore themes of community, history, and working-class life? If so, could you share some details about what you're planning next?

I‘ve started filming a new documentary about the old Durham City ice rink, which was home to the infamous (amongst ice hockey fans) Durham Wasps. The Wasps were the biggest ice hockey team in the country at one point, winning everything there is to win and selling out the ice rink weekly. The end for the Wasps was abrupt and heartbreaking for fans – Sir John Hall, who owned Newcastle United FC at the time, bought the Wasps and tried to take them over to Newcastle. However, it didn’t work out and the team quickly disbanded, leaving the fans with no team to support.

A friend of mine, Lewis Hobson, who is a mural artist in the North East recently put together an exhibition displaying Wasps memorabilia. He even unearthed and displayed their old winners’ trophies that had sat in a garage for nearly 20 years. On the back of this I’ve secured funding to make a documentary about the Durham ice rink. It will be similar to the film about the school, about the lack of community space in the area than the loss of the hockey team. The filming will start in September and the film will be launched in the Spring of 2025.

Above image: Salmon Net Drying Rack, 1973. This photograph and all the others in this review are courtesy of the artist.

Fixing Time is the title of a comprehensive exhibition of 50 years’ work by Ian Macdonald, the North-East photographer and artist. It takes place across two venues, the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland until 3rd November 2024, and Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens until 4th January 2025.

Macdonald’s extensive body of work is dedicated to documenting working-class life, and the rise and fall of heavy industry in the North-East in the last decades of the 20^th century. This has been, of course, a period marked by massive deindustrialization, accompanied by political shifts and social upheaval, including the recent disturbances on the streets of Sunderland. The two exhibitions cover a wide range of themes, including People, Towns and Portraits; Greatham Creek, Teeside; Smith’s Dock Shipyard; Redcar Blast Furnace; and School Portraits.

Some detailed large-scale drawings are also included in the exhibition, showing the importance of Macdonald's training as an artist and draughtsman in the evolution of his distinctive, craftsmanlike photographic practice. Technically, this is based on careful composition, making balanced images using large format camera equipment, black-and-white film, and traditional, painstaking print-making techniques.

Canteen staff catching up on the day at the end of their shift, Redcar Blast furnace, Autumn 1983

Artistically, the compositions show not only an awareness of ‘fixing time’ in the sense of capturing the moment (see ‘Canteen staff’ above) but of capturing different times, using light and spatial relationships to convey meaning.

Cote Hill Island, Greatham Creek

In Cote Hill Island, for example, see how the future, evoked through the broodingly dark sky, the high tide and the horizon of modern industry, threatens to inundate and overwhelm the island of life in the present.

The warmth of Macdonald’s relationship to his subjects also shines through many of the photographs, particularly the series of individual portraits taken at a school, but also in photographs of working people at leisure and at work.

Easter Monday, Whitby 1970

Burner, Mark Dewse, standing by a 40 ton crane, Smith’s Dock Shipyard, 1986

The appreciation and warmth of Macdonald’s approach extends to places as well as people...

Redcar Blast furnace, 2am, Midsummer night 1986

Paddy’s Hole at the South Gare, Teesmouth, at dusk

Although the photographs have clear documentary value, many of them transcend the particular time and space they are ‘fixed’ in. Some of them have much deeper, timeless meanings. For example, this photograph, which positions a family using dramatic diagonal composition against the hugeness of the sea – the vast, unknowable future? The world around them, full of beauty and danger? It’s a poetic, mythic image which both stimulates the imagination and generates calmness.

Family standing on the edge of South Gare on a summer’s evening looking across Tees Bay towards Hartlepool

Similarly, this beautiful image of a salmon drying net and boat, stimulates imaginative association with the Cross of Christ, and thus associates his suffering with the suffering of working fishermen:

Salmon drying net rack at Greatham Creek, 1973

So it is a subtle and complex body of work that is on exhibition. It certainly documents the essential truths about working-class life and communities in the North-East over the last 50 years – the heyday of heavy industry and its sad decline – but it goes much further than that.

The aesthetic beauty of the images – their deep blacks, clear shining lights and balanced, lively compositions – together with the empathy and warmth of Macdonald’s perspective, draw the viewer into the photographs. They kindle our own memories and cause all kinds of ideas, emotions and relationships to be shared. Nostalgia and a sense of wonder and loss are evoked, but there is also a glimpse of some deeper truths which transcend the particular time and place of the photographs.

Fixing Time at the NGCA runs until the 3^rd November 2024, and at Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens until 4^th January 2025. While visiting the NGCA, you can also catch Jeremy Deller’s best known work Battle of Orgreave, a re-enactment of 1984 Miners' Strike filmed by Mike Figgis, which is on display to mark the event’s 40th anniversary. 

Mike Quille interviews Mark Thomas about comedy, politics, pubs, Starmer, the miners, his latest show, and being a pastor. Image above by Tracey Moberley

1. Mark, looking on the internet, your work history is more like an encyclopaedia than a cv. Comedian, author, activist, protestor, actor, artist, curator, playwright, journalist – and what's this, pastor!? Do you think it's fair on the rest of us to have succeeded in so many different ways? It would help our readers with self-esteem issues if you could tell us what you can't do and haven't done?

Ah, the pastor. I think it was related to finding out that religious buildings were exempt from Council Tax and as an experiment I wanted to see if I could convert my office into a temple, I became a pastor online and in the USA I can legally marry, baptise and bury someone, though the certificate is very clear under no circumstances am I qualified to act as a motel. As things I can't do: I can't drive. I have never learnt. Aged 16 I was inserted into the cab of a forklift truck and instructed on how to use it. I promptly backed it into some portable offices and went halfway through them. So that was the end of driving for me. Other things I am useless at include angling, sharp shooting, rodeo tricks, and I have never hunted foxes. I am average at crazy golf.

2. Can you tell us something about your career as a comedian – and what's the funniest joke you know?

My first political shows were in the Red Shed in Wakefield as a student. It is a socialist club and mates and I would write and perform shows to raise money for local campaigns. During the Miners’ Strike we even took to performing in soup kitchens. I started performing in clubs 39 years ago. It was enormous fun. It was and is a form of monetised showing off.  You get up, chat, rant, misbehave and tell jokes and get paid. As I get bored easily, I generally look to do something new and different, but the essentials are the same: mucking about and pissing off the right people. 

Some of my favourite gags? Dave Allen, The Clock:

3. What about your lifelong political activism, can you tell us something about its highs and lows?

The highs and lows...well they don't call it the struggle for nothing. The most formative events for me were punk rock, Rock Against Racism and the Miners’ Strike.

I was a student at Bretton Hall College in Yorkshire when the strike started. We took a collection of money and trays of beer to the local picket line and were greeted by cheers and shouts of "Students – bloody heroes!"

After the ultra vires ban on donations to the miners, my mate was organising a student event and to circumvent the ban he massively over-ordered the catering – on paper he spent money on students, in practice a massive pile of freshly cooked food goes to the miners’ soup kitchen. A great idea marred only by vegan catering and the donations were greeted with the cry of "Wha' th' fuck are mung beans!" From heroes to zeros in one fell swoop. 

I'm attending the 40th Anniversary of the strike with the striking Notts. miners this weekend and, despite the strike being beaten into submission by the state and its press partners, 40 years later it will be a privilege to be in the same room with the men and women who stayed out in the face of the Notts. scabs. 

I suppose one of my favourite things was working with Dr Sam Beale and the Jenin Freedom Theatre in the West Bank to set up a comedy club in the refugee camp. It is something that we are both incredibly proud of because the students and young comics and performers have moved on way beyond our initial engagement and are now trying to establish a circuit for Palestinian comics in the West Bank and beyond. That has to be one of my favourite things. 

4. Looking back over the last 50 years or so, what do you see as the main things that have happened to this country?

Gangster capitalism, climate change and debt are the big changes. Corporations have increased their capture of the public realm. It's socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us. In essence the state has increasingly shed its responsibilities to citizens but has demanded we are more accountable to the state. The Labour Party has increasingly shrunk from the fray. The Tories barely bother to hide their kleptocratic behaviour.

Climate change is the big one, it is the existential threat that we increasingly shrink from acting on.

5. What's your view of the state of the main political parties, and their leaders?

The Winners: Didn't win as much not fuck up and allow the Tories to lose. 58% of voters went for the two main parties, that leaves a hell of a lot of people who can and will vote for smaller parties. Labour did not inspire, on Palestine, poverty, spending, future of the NHS... a host of things that just went business as usual. Starmer and Labour are of course better than the Tories, they have scrapped the Rwanda policy and not stolen anything yet. So we are ahead so far. 

Starmer's move to banish the left in the Labour Party has left him exposed on the left. HURRAH!

Green policies on renationalising essential services (train, water, energy) were what the left wanted and in Brighton and Bristol that proved winning. But they managed to put up winning threats to rural Tory lands. Four Greens is a move forward. HURRAH!

Four Pro-Palestinian independents and Jeremy Corbyn: HURRAH! 

Tories and Farage: The Tories enter a prolonged period of self-destruction,k and I have popcorn. The threat to move merge with Farage is not as potent as the Tories think. Farage works as an outsider and if he joins the Tories and is forced into positions of accountability and responsibility he is quickly exposed. There would be a sizeable number of Farageists who would not support him working with the Tories. BUT Labour has vacated the battlefield of inequality, when you vacate the ground and the fight against poverty and inequality, the right wing will take that ground and claim themselves the only ones capable of winning.

Image by Tony Pletts

Where were the Labour leaders fighting for safe routes to the UK, for arguing that we should accept asylum seekers, for arguing for migration? If you drop the fight, you again leave the ground open to the right. Labour has basically said we will manage the system better than the Tories (not hard) BUT you cannot beat the far right by trying to be more right-wing, even if it was morally and politically acceptable. 

The system: We have a democratic deficit, FPTP is an antiquated awful system that truly does not represent the most important people in a democracy, the voters. Yes I know it would mean the Farageists would get more seats BUT so would the Greens, the Independents, the Lib Dems, Plaid, SNP and the Pro Palestinian vote. Whichever system used other than FPTP would create a because they show a talent for exploiting others.

6. Your last show was England and Son, a tremendously powerful and poignant one-man play written by Ed Edwards. What's your current project?

England and Son won 6 awards, toured the UK, Adelaide festival, performed the show in prisons and did workshops with addicts in recovery and now there is talk of being invited to bring the show to New York next year... and the team is completely skint. We have no money, so I am back doing standup on the comedy circuit creating a new show for the Edinburgh Festival and then touring. To find my feet again I did a load of free gigs and open spots on the circuit, new performers have not got it easy. One gig was in a pub kitchen, which shows how far I have come from the soup kitchen gigs 40 years ago.

Mark Thomas will be at the Edinburgh Festival 31st July – 25th August, then touring, see here. Get your tickets soon, as his shows sell out quickly!

He’s done it again!

A few years ago, Ed Edwards exploded into Edinburgh with ‘A Political History of Smack and Crack’, performed at the Fringe Festival. It was a brilliant piece of political theatre, setting personal stories of drug addiction in Eighties Britain against the background of brutal Tory policies of deindustrialization and the historical encouragement of the international drugs trade by the U.S., Britain and France in the course of their imperialist adventures.

Now he’s back in Edinburgh, together with Mark Thomas, the actor, comedian and political activist, with the equally explosive ‘England & Son’, which could well have been called ‘The Political History of Toxic Masculinity’.

This time, the personal story in the foreground is about a boy’s relationship with his father, named England. It’s about his unmet childhood need for approval and parental love, and his chaotic descent into crime, drink and drug addiction.

This history of domestic abuse is framed by the bigger England – the political story of imperial exploitation and oppression. His father is an ex-soldier scarred by experiences in the British Army, suppressing the communist-led insurgency in Malaya by using torture, killing and mutilation to maintain the exploitation of bauxite and rubber by British companies. The parallel to this ‘legalised robbery’ as the boy sees it is his juvenile offending, as he becomes an expert at valuing and stealing jewellery and antiques out of well-off middle-class homes.

Ed Edwards’ writing weaves comedy and tragedy together in a way which accentuates both elements. Right from the start, where the homeless, sleeping son is about to be emptied into a bin lorry, the viewer is immersed – or rather thrown into – a ferociously funny and thrilling drama, full of rage and hurt but also laced with humour, tenderness and empathy.

Edwards has overcome one of the pitfalls of the British tradition of social realism, whereby novels, plays and films sometimes come across as very worthy but also as monotonous, bleak and despairing as the world they portray.

Through skilful use of techniques such as flashbacks, variations of pace, comic asides, lively dialogue and arresting light and sound effects, he manages to convey both the horror of the personal and political stories, and the essentially warm humanity of the main characters.

Photo: Alex Brenner

Edwards has also found the perfect expressive skillset in Mark Thomas, the sole actor in the play. For an hour, Thomas is in our faces, roaming round the circular stage in a tremendous display of acting, expressing both the sweaty, spitting rage and violence of the father and the innocent, joking resilience of his son.

Amidst the frothy banalities of so much of the Fringe these days, this play stands out – political theatre at its most entertaining, engaging and effective.

Mike Quille interviews Jenny Farrell, editor of Land of the Ever Young. Illustrations are by Karen Dietrich, and are taken from the book

Mike Quille: The third book in the trilogy of working people’s writing from contemporary Ireland, which have all been edited by you, has just been published. Can you tell us about the background to the project?

Jenny Farrell: I was approached by the socialist website and publisher Culture Matters about this project. Culture Matters focuses in particular on the voices of working people, who represent what I call the second culture: not the mainstream celebration of the ruling class, but the distinct voice of the disadvantaged who make up a large proportion of any country’s population.

Culture Matters was aware of my background: I was born and educated in the GDR. This background meant that I was particularly conscious of the importance of working-class culture and its absolute validity in the cultural discourse, the importance of its development, and as a subject of academic research. In addition to this, I grew up in a household with a heightened awareness of the significance of working-class cultural expression. My father Jack Mitchell spent his entire academic career researching Irish and Scottish working-class literature, and as a singer he took a great interest in folksong and political song. A family friend was Mary Ashraf, one of the outstanding scholars of working-class writing.

A little table for Packy

Perhaps I should explain why working-class writing was important in the GDR, and how it was promoted.

The GDR state defined itself as a working-class state, one where the working-class had taken power, where this state distributed the wealth produced back into the living standards of the working people. To ensure working-class input into all spheres of social life, specifically culture, most workplaces had creative writing circles, free of charge. These were usually tutored by established writers. From these workshops arose several successful authors. In addition, professional writers were encouraged to spend time in production, familiarising themselves with working-class people and life, to be able to write more authentically about it, set stories and novels in the factory sphere. Authors were financially supported by the state, which meant they could write fulltime, irrespective of other income.

MQ: Thanks for that background information. Can you give us some more details about the first two books in the trilogy, and then tell us about the latest book, Land of the Ever Young?

JF: When I began work on the first anthology, the big question for me was how to reach out to working-class writers. I realised that there had never before been such a collection of working people’s writing in Ireland. At the back of my mind I had the idea of the Working Class Movement Library in Manchester. As far as I know, nothing similar exists in Ireland. This made the anthology project even more important to me.

So how did I go about trying to find working-class writers? I consulted the working-class poet Rita Ann Higgins, who was very helpful in identifying potential contributors and their networks. I also put out the call for submissions via many writers’ networks, and through Culture Matters. Salmon Publishing was also most helpful.

Until recently, I taught modern Irish literature at GMIT and have, over the years, observed the difference between the effect highly wrought poetry by representatives of the literary canon have had on students as opposed to the poetry that calls a spade a spade. The students respond far more enthusiastically if they think a poem has something to do with their lives. This is not to put either side down, devalue the texts of our Nobel Prize for Literature winners etc., nor is it to say that the poetry of the working people is somehow simplistic. Yet, the latter find a more direct line, shall we say, to the people about whose life experience they are writing.

Molly, Brigid and the Irish Revolution

These anthologies are different to collections of political writing. As far as I am concerned, all writing is written from a particular point of view, the author’s point of view. This can either consolidate or undermine the mainstream culture. I believe that in the anthologies of working people’s writing, the point of view is that things are not as they should be. Things as they are, are not in the best interest of the working population. Important themes are homelessness in all its forms, including emigration, the abandonment of women in the mother and baby homes, poverty, but also about fightback, internationalism and solidarity. There are very many more themes of course, but all of them reflect what if feels like to be disadvantaged, a victim in a society that punishes the poor and rewards the rich. By writing about his experience, the authors are creating political writing with a small p.

Many contributors only took up writing because they felt no one like them was in the books they read. To make this common ground clear to the readers, I asked every contributor to supply a short biography outlining their connection with the working people. Many readers have commented to me very favourably on the inclusion of these biographies. It is a break with convention, where authors are asked to list their publications, prizes and successes, never their socio-economic background. This can sometimes falsely alienate readers who wish to find themselves in a book – their biographies, their stories, their life experience.

I wanted the anthology to be a collective voice of working people – not individual voices, but that the anthologies would make a statement greater than the sum of their parts. That this was a class making a statement about being excluded from the establishment discourse.

Another important consideration for me was that I wished to include Irish language writing. Far too often, an artificial divide is put up between Irish and English – commonly published in separate books, which obscures what authors have in common. We need to see the writings in both languages put side by side and highlighted for their collective concerns. I wanted to include Irish language writing for many reasons – one is that there is such a strong working-class tradition in writing in Irish, and this is rarely acknowledged even in academic study. English literary writing and Irish literary writing are kept separate, when they belong together. It was very important to me that the anthologies should make this point.

Finally, I wanted these anthologies to represent the whole island of Ireland, and I am very proud to have achieved this. There are a significant number of contributors from the North of Ireland, and here from both communities. These include two women and one trade unionist from the Protestant tradition. The trade unionist writes about the importance of the Irish language in his family, also the tradition of aspiring for Irish independence. Another interesting contributor from the North is Linda Ervine from East Belfast who is the heart and soul behind the Irish language classes in the Protestant community. There are of course also several contributors from the nationalist community who reflect on British military violence, sectarianism and how this lives on.

Puss in Boots and the Ogre

The fact that there are contributors from both parts of Ireland also highlights common ground between the people living in the North and those living in the Republic: working-class people’s lives are not so different. I also aspired for a good gender balance for obvious reasons.

The first of the anthologies, entitled The Children of the Nation, was published in 2019. It is a poetry collection and was launched by Peter McVerry, who is very well known in Ireland for his outstanding role in championing the cause of the homeless

The poetry anthology was a fantastic success, the book selling out on the day of the launch. So when the pandemic hit, I was then asked to consider putting together a prose anthology. I agreed and I applied the same principles. The volume that emerged, is entitled From the Plough to the Stars. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the true value and critical importance of workers’ contributions to our communities, worldwide, takes centre stage. These contributions expose the parasitical captains of industry and their fellow travellers in global finance.

The third and final volume in the set, Land of the Ever Young, is an anthology of the writings by working people in contemporary Ireland for children. All the stories are packed with humanity, tenderness, and wisdom. The authors present children and adults who confront wrongs, challenge superstition and injustice, and who often see further than others around them. The heroines and heroes in these stories are always filled with a sense of the common good, highlighting the qualities necessary to make society a fairer, better place, a home for a happy future, a Tír na nÓg. Such a place can only materialise in the absence of wars, of profit-driven greed with its contempt for equality, humanity and the environment – a place where instead the common good is the measure of society.

Swimming

Children read and re-read stories many times, and they often stay with them for a lifetime, acting as a moral compass. This is what makes literature for children so very important. The images that accompany children's stories are also remembered for a long time, and Land of the Ever Young has been beautifully and sensitively illustrated by the artist Karen Dietrich. Her images comment on and expand the humanist themes contained in the texts and help make them truly memorable for the readers, children and adults alike.

We have been extremely lucky that all three anthologies were financially supported by the Irish trade union movement. It is a first time that a literary project of this magnitude has been fully supported by the trade unions, in recognition of the importance of creativity and the right of the working class to express the wealth of their culture and to articulate their experience of life.

MQ: Thank you. Have trade unions or political parties engaged with the class-based inequalities that lead to this lack of working-class cultural representation? Academic research in Britain over the last few years has revealed huge class-based inequalities in cultural production and consumption. Despite the image generated by the cultural industries that culture keeps you healthy, brings people together etc., the reality is also that there are deep and long-standing inequalities in the cultural landscape.

So according to Culture is Bad For You, the recent book by Dave O’Brien and others, working-class people are systematically excluded from cultural occupations, and the consumption of cultural experiences like theatre, art, music etc. is heavily biased towards the well-off, tourists, and people living in the South of England. In publishing, for example, only around 15% of the workforce is of working-class origin, and the representations of working-class life on TV, films and books are often absent or unfair. For example, children’s literature is overwhelmingly focused on the lives of young middle-class children. All these inequalities are also predicted to worsen following the pandemic.

What is the situation in the whole of Ireland, and what efforts are being made to tackle the problem by trade unions, political parties, cultural institutions and universities?

JF: I agree completely that mainstream cultural hegemony is expressed in the most unsubtle ways in the media, TV, literature, where we are presented with middle-class people, and where the working-class appears, it is frequently ridiculed. The ruling class determines the ruling ideas, in culture as in all spheres of life.

That cultural consumption eliminates the low-paid population is not a new insight as far as the working class are concerned. Likewise, that their narrative is omitted from mainstream cultural discourse is a matter of their everyday experience.

When working-class writers depict the realities of their lives, they are quite often silenced by these mainstream cultural powers. I have experienced this myself even in trying to promote the three anthologies I have edited. I applied to two literary festivals, Cúirt in Galway, and the Dublin Book Festival, to include readings from the anthologies. Cúirt did not answer, despite repeated emails, and the Dublin Book festival, after months of very intermittent communication, finally wrote to say they didn’t have the space. A coincidence that it was these anthologies? I think not.

The Blind Ones

Another example of a prize-winning working-class writer who has been a firm part of the anthologies and who has experienced class prejudice is Alan O’Brien.

He submitted his radio play Snow Falls and So Do We to RTE, based on the true event of Rachel Peavoy freezing to death in a Ballymun flat in January 2010. O’Brien won the P. J. O’Connor Award for Best New Radio Drama but encountered significant opposition from RTE when they were to broadcast his play. O’Brien was told his lines were crude and that the portrayal of the Gardaí was unacceptable. A significant and inappropriate change in the narrative was suggested whereby the main character, Joanne, rather than disliking the Garda known as “miniature hero”, actually fancies him, and wants him to take her out of this hellhole.

This smacked more of make-believe Hollywood that the reality of Ballymun. O’Brien’s statement that the people of Ballymun have a very different experience of the Irish constabulary was sneered at. He rejected the changes to his script, explaining his reasons. But RTE made them anyway and many more, without further consultation. Most significantly,  they changed the ending of a working-class woman dying as a result of social deprivation, metaphorically (and actually) freezing to death. Working-class tragedies are not allowed. The establishment will only accept its own interpretation, and rewrite history accordingly.                            

I quote this because it is representative of the working-class writer experience. Academia has in recent years discovered working-class studies in Ireland. It has become a subject of study and research, in fact there was an international conference held in early November. However, most of the writers I work with had negative experiences as working-class people in academia, often being told that they had now “made it” into the middle class, the ultimate goal, it would appear.

Gerry Murphy, past president of the ICTU, comments about the role of the labour movement: "We have yet, despite some valiant efforts, failed to fully employ the many forms of expression culture encompasses as a vehicle for change”. He emphasises the need to “come up with a plan to persuade the gatekeepers in government and the creative industries to change their approaches and open culture and (…) to present an alternative narrative."

Murphy believes the unions’ extensive education programmes should be broadened to include cultural education and to assist cultural workers and local communities to access the existing limited arts funding available from the government and charitable avenues.

There are some community festivals that break mainstream hegemony, however, and they must be mentioned and commended. Among these are the Belfast People’s Festival, Féile an Phobail, and the Connolly Festival organised by the Communist Party in Dublin. There are also community groups and libraries that organise little festivals that are not exclusive.

MQ: To conclude then: how can we as individuals, trade unions, community organisations, political parties and Government work to tackle the problems we’ve discussed? How can a more equal, communal society or Tír na nÓg be imagined and created in the various areas of cultural production and enjoyment?

Every year for the past five years, Culture Matters has run a Bread and Roses Poetry Award, supported by Unite the Union. The competition is free to enter and is aimed at supporting and encouraging poetry with a broadly social and political content, written by and for working people.

They Want All Our Teeth To Be Theirs is an anthology of some of the poems submitted, including the five winners of the Award. The poems cover the whole gamut of contemporary political vicissitudes and social injustices: the desperate plight of refugees; the indignity of unemployment and the exploitation in employment; homelessness; poverty; deindustrialisation; the solidarity of working people; the climate emergency; racism; and the redemptive solidarity of working people.

Every poem in this anthology is of poetical and political significance, showing how the poet can express themselves as a cell of the body politic rather than as an atom of consumer culture.

At a time of deepening structural inequalities in British life, the world of contemporary poetry is increasingly remote and inaccessible. The enemy controls all the cultural institutions. All the Left has on our side is poetry. Where the enemy's ideas of culture are disfigured by snobbery, backwardness, ignorance, laziness, tastelessness, dullness and uncreativity, we have the poets with something to say. — Andy Croft, poet and publisher of Smokestack Books

They Want All Our Teeth To Be Theirs: The Bread and Roses Poetry Award Anthology 2021, 80pps., ISBN 978-1-912710-44-7, £9 inc. p. and p.

This is the final book in a set of three volumes of working people’s writing from contemporary Ireland. It follows on from a poetry anthology, Children of the Nation and a prose anthology, From the Plough to the Stars, all edited by Jenny Farrell and available here.

The children’s stories in this book are packed with humanity, tenderness, and wisdom. The authors present children and adults who confront wrongs, challenge superstition and injustice, and who often see further than others around them. The heroines and heroes in these stories are always filled with a sense of the common good, highlighting the qualities necessary to make society a fairer, better place, a home for a happy future, a Tír na nÓg, the Land of the Ever Young. Such a place can only materialise in the absence of wars, of profit-driven greed with its contempt for equality, humanity and the environment — a place where instead the common good is the measure of society.

Land of the Ever Young has been beautifully illustrated by the artist Karen Dietrich. Her images comment on and expand the humanist themes contained in the texts and help make them truly memorable for all readers, children and adults alike.

Land of the Ever Young: An Anthology of Working People’s Writing for Children from Contemporary Ireland, edited by Jenny Farrell with illustrations by Karen Dietrich, ISBN 978-1-912710-43-0, 12 Euros/£11 plus p. and p. 

From the Republic of Ireland.....

This is the final book in a set of three volumes of working people’s writing from contemporary Ireland. It follows on from a poetry anthology, Children of the Nation and a prose anthology, From the Plough to the Stars, all edited by Jenny Farrell and available here.

The children’s stories in this book are packed with humanity, tenderness, and wisdom. The authors present children and adults who confront wrongs, challenge superstition and injustice, and who often see further than others around them. The heroines and heroes in these stories are always filled with a sense of the common good, highlighting the qualities necessary to make society a fairer, better place, a home for a happy future, a Tír na nÓg, the Land of the Ever Young. Such a place can only materialise in the absence of wars, of profit-driven greed with its contempt for equality, humanity and the environment — a place where instead the common good is the measure of society.

Land of the Ever Young has been beautifully illustrated by the artist Karen Dietrich. Her images comment on and expand the humanist themes contained in the texts and help make them truly memorable for all readers, children and adults alike.

Land of the Ever Young: An Anthology of Working People’s Writing for Children from Contemporary Ireland, edited by Jenny Farrell with illustrations by Karen Dietrich, ISBN 978-1-912710-43-0, 12 Euros/£11 plus p. and p. 

From the Republic of Ireland and Europe generally.....

Moya Roddy’s new collection of stories catapult us into the minds and hearts of working-class people who, despite a class system that offers them very little, reveal their own strength and potential through friendship, community and solidarity.

Whether it’s the young mother in Doctor’s Orders fighting to get the right treatment, the joyrider in Going Nowhere who protects his selectively mute half-sister, the single parent being bullied at work in I Also Had My Hour or the elderly woman whose life does an about-turn in They Also Serve Who Only, the characters in these stories spring to life in memorable situations readers can easily identify with.

Written with a lightness of touch and a compassionate warmth that shines through every story, this outstanding collection is original, profound, and a must-read for everyone. 

Fire in My Head, Stories by Moya Roddy, ISBN 978-1-912710-34-8, is 12 euros or £10.

For orders from the Republic of Ireland, use this button...

Moya Roddy’s new collection of stories catapult us into the minds and hearts of working-class people who, despite a class system that offers them very little, reveal their own strength and potential through friendship, community and solidarity.

Whether it’s the young mother in Doctor’s Orders fighting to get the right treatment, the joyrider in Going Nowhere who protects his selectively mute half-sister, the single parent being bullied at work in I Also Had My Hour or the elderly woman whose life does an about-turn in They Also Serve Who Only, the characters in these stories spring to life in memorable situations readers can easily identify with.

Written with a lightness of touch and a compassionate warmth that shines through every story, this outstanding collection is original, profound, and a must-read for everyone.

Fire in My Head, Stories by Moya Roddy, ISBN 978-1-912710-34-8, is 12 euros/ £10.

For orders from the Republic of Ireland, use this button...

For orders from the UK, use this button....