Culture | After the Good Friday Agreement

Northern Ireland’s arts have blossomed. But divisions endure

Raucous or heartfelt, portrayals of Northern Irish life tend to stick to one community or the other

T37E5C Mural featuring the main characters from the Channel 4 television series Derry Girls on the wall of the Badger Pub, Derry, Londonderry, Northern Ire
|BELFAST

It was a milestone in Northern Ireland’s journey from a shaky ceasefire in 1994 to the more durable political settlement that was reached four years later. In November 1995 Bill Clinton stood near the historic walls of Derry—Londonderry to its Protestants—and uttered a sequence of sonorous lines by Seamus Heaney, a local poet and dramatist who had just won the Nobel prize: “Once in a lifetime/The longed-for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up/And hope and history rhyme.”

Listen to this story.
Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.

Whatever the hopes fulfilled or dashed in the 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement—signed on April 10th 1998—the cultural life of this once-benighted land has blossomed, often in unexpected ways, and especially in film and drama. World-famous actors who had fled the region’s mayhem have reclaimed their roots; locally based creative types are earning global acclaim. But the sad part is that in the performing arts, just as in politics and daily life, the deep intercommunal division at the heart of the Troubles, which erupted in 1969 and cost more than 3,500 lives, shows no sign of melting away.

Even now, most representations of Northern Irish life, whether funny, sad or (as is often the case) both, are firmly rooted in one community or the other: among Irish nationalists who are mostly Catholic, or pro-British Unionists or loyalists, whose background is Protestant. For instance, Sir Kenneth Branagh, a star of the stage and screen, returned to his own beginnings in the loyalist proletariat to make “Belfast”. Released in 2021, the film focuses on a working-class Protestant family, traumatised as much by their community’s role in the burning of Catholic homes as by their own collective suffering.

“An Irish Goodbye”, a short film that last month won an Oscar, unfolds entirely in the rural Catholic world. It portrays two quarrelsome brothers on a desolate family farm, one of whom has Down’s syndrome, who horse about with their mother’s ashes. For its part, “Derry Girls”, a hit television series about lippy female adolescents in the early 1990s, has some side-splitting moments involving awkward Protestant-Catholic encounters. But most of the action is set deep inside a Catholic scene where—as in real-life Derry—piety and bawdiness can be strangely juxtaposed. (In works such as “The Exodus”, a local playwright, Jonathan Burgess, has told the lesser-known story of Protestants who were intimidated out of homes in the same city, over on the west bank of the River Foyle.)

This bifurcation reflects Northern Ireland’s wider pattern of peaceable but largely separate coexistence. Oddly enough, the work that challenges sectarian divisions most directly does so by appearing to be weirdly, surreally obsessed by them: a comedy called “Give My Head Peace” that began as a TV sitcom and became a touring stage show. It features screamingly caricatured Protestants and Catholics in perpetual and often improbable interaction with one another, ranging from the banteringly social to the conspiratorial and the erotic.

The lead character is a grumpy, lecherous old Irish republican called, simply, Da. He is played and was created by Tim McGarry, a prolific comedy writer and veteran of the legal profession who grew up amid the horrors of religiously divided north Belfast in the 1970s. Like any Northern Irish person of around 60, Mr McGarry has memories that are both dark and farcical. The son of a Catholic surgeon, he recalls the Protestant gang that tried to burn his family home but could not, to judge by a scribbled slogan, spell the name of their own religion correctly.

Whereas “Derry Girls” is safely set in the recent past, “Give My Head Peace” does its best to remain topical. In the latest stage version, which has played to packed houses in 14 venues across the north of Ireland, Da makes his loyalist friends furiously jealous by brandishing an invitation to the coronation of King Charles. The cast includes a fire-breathing, trigger-happy Protestant cleric called Pastor Begbie—played, as it happens, by the actor Paddy Jenkins, who appears as a Catholic priest in “An Irish Goodbye”. (Devotion to the stage show, which was being performed in the small town of Downpatrick, meant Mr Jenkins missed the Oscars ceremony.)

A laughing matter

The comedy was first commissioned by the BBC in 1998. But it hasn’t dated, Mr McGarry maintains: “In a place where most schools and neighbourhoods remain segregated, and most people vote in accordance with their religious background, it’s still topical to say sectarianism is stupid.” Away from the stage he makes that point by campaigning for mixed-community schools and supporting the humanist movement.

For another attempt to laugh sectarianism out of existence, turn to the Dundonald Liberation Army (dla), consisting of two amiably boneheaded warriors bent on freeing the Belfast suburb of Dundonald from the nearby town of Lisburn (into which, in real life, it has been incorporated). Having built up a big following on Facebook, the doughty guerrillas will make their third appearance on the Belfast stage in June. The DLA’s commander is played by Matthew McElhinney, an energetic young actor-director whose many contributions to Belfast theatre have included a turn in “Three’s a Shroud”, a hilarious skit on Catholic and Protestant undertakers.

The DLA’s style—bling, fake tan, ostentatious facial hair—is unmistakably that of loyalist criminal godfathers. Their performances have attracted working-class Protestant men who might not normally be theatre-goers. Yet at times the dotty rhetoric is reminiscent of Irish nationalism. Stephen Large, creator of both the DLA and “Three’s a Shroud”, insists he is an “equal-opportunity offender”, who tries to show proper disrespect for all sides.

Meanwhile, on Derry’s storied walls, which loom large in Protestant memory because of a Catholic siege in 1689, the balance teeters between hope and historical obsession. This year an Anglican cleric—working with Mr Burgess, the playwright, who is Presbyterian—is using the fortifications to stage an Easter passion play. But, as is usual with public events in the city these days, people of all faiths and none are helping out.

For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Alone together"

What America gets wrong about gender medicine

From the April 8th 2023 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

How to make money from the Bible

Donald Trump has entered a competitive and unusual market

Could your marriage survive a shipwreck?

“Maurice and Maralyn”, a new book about a couple stranded almost four months at sea, makes you wonder


What lies behind Beyoncé’s country turn?

The star singer has always been a canny interpreter of musical trends