A COUPLE of weeks ago, I spent the night in Belfast, doing a gig for the Slugger O’Toole Political Awards where I was drawing the winners as they won – and what they won was my drawing of them. This could have been a tricky – indeed, dangerous – assignment, as quite often politicians of every stripe don’t particularly like the way I portray them. However, as things turned out, everyone seemed delighted, all the way from the delightful female DUP Councillor of the Year to the impressively dour Sinn Fein Assembly Member who won the Up and Coming Politician prize.
This universal approval of my handiwork was a first for me. The awards themselves were another first – this time for Northern Ireland, as this is the first time for 40 years everyone across the province’s abysmal political divides has felt confident enough to stand in the same room as each other, having a drink, sharing a joke and celebrating each other’s achievements. It was also the first time I’d ever been to Belfast, so it was good to see first hand the setting for all those horrendous events I and every other cartoonist have been covering for longer than most of us can remember. To enhance my enjoyment, the awards’ organisers arranged for me to go on a black cab tour of the city. This is now an established part of the “Belfast Experience”, originally set up by a cabbie who is also a former member of the UDF, but is now married to a Roman Catholic and has Irish-speaking children. My cabbie was a Catholic called Pat (although he told me in the bad old days he used to tell his Proddie fares that he was called Billy the moment he drove into a Loyalist area) and we had a fine old time of it, driving through the pouring rain up the Falls Road, down the Shankill and over to Shortstrand, trying to work out between us what the hell any of it had really meant.
The ultimate legatee of the horrors of History is Heritage (usually with an illuminated capital H, thank you very much) and, in these easier times, it’s tempting to look at all those famous, murderous murals painted on the end walls of their slums by both communities and see them slowly, thankfully, aspiring towards the condition of gift shop kitsch – the kind of thing you could reproduce on the packets of fudge on sale in the Troubles Visitor Centre gift shop. They’re not quite there yet, as the
60-foot high “Peace Walls” still attest, but it probably won’t take long: say another 30 or 40 years. That said, in the pub after the awards dinner, I suggested to the dour young Shinner that the whole bloody mess could have been sorted in 1971 if someone had had the presence of mind to get the rival muralists together and fly over a couple of sales reps from Windsor and Newton to get them to discuss materials.
In my experience among cartoonists, nothing unites as effectively as the common analism of what materials you use, and these extraordinarily gifted young artists would soon have forgotten how much they hated each other as they compared how different paints and brushes worked on crumbling brickwork.
This appeal to the redemptive power of art was, of course, a joke, although with serious intent behind it. To his credit, my new-found friend from Sinn Fein laughed – albeit rather nervously. But I believe very strongly in the redemptive powers of laughter as well. There’s also redemption to be found in hope. And the most hopeful things I saw in my drive round Belfast, although far less artistically accomplished than all those famous murals, were some slogans daubed on hoardings round an undeveloped building site on the Shankill. These weren’t sectarian, but indicative of the return of proper politics to Northern Ireland: “Homes for Ordinary People, Not for Yuppies”.
There’s also hope to be found in the prospect of those yuppy flats now never being built. And as we watch capitalism’s latest final crisis unfold, not trying too hard to resist the temptation to scream “I told you so”, as well as laugh ourselves silly, hope abounds everywhere. As the criminally mad and unjust hegemony of the past 30 years crumbles away, it’s not just the long-overdue humbling of our hubristical masters we should be savouring, but also the inevitable consequences of us all being obliged to produce and consume less tat we don’t need, stop striving ceaselessly for never-ending growth irrespective of the social or environmental cost, and basically just slow down a bit so we’ve got room enough for hope instead of merely expectation.
And while there’s hope, I hope that this won’t be my last column for the last edition of Tribune. I hope to see you next month.
