Stephen Baker

Whither the ‘Hand of History’?: Northern Ireland Newspaper Coverage of the 2016 EU Referendum Campaign

The visit of high-profile British politicians to Northern Ireland during the 2016 EU referendum campaign might have, if only briefly, moved the region to the centre of the debate about the UK and EU, the two larger unions of which it is a peripheral member. As it happened, coverage of these events in the indigenous press was muted, largely confined to the inside pages and eliciting little editorial comment or political response. This chapter argues that this low-key coverage was symptomatic of a feeling that Northern Ireland was marginal to the outcome of the EU referendum, despite the potential consequences of Brexit for the region and its border with the Republic of Ireland. Accentuating that sense of marginality was the 2016 EU referendum appearing as a peculiarly English dispute: the driving force behind the Brexit campaign an emergent English nationalism. Given the bitterness and divisiveness of the debate, the dispute in Northern Ireland over constitutional issues and identity no longer looks so alien and parochial. Indeed, the region may have something to teach England about sovereignty and national allegiance.

“Victory Doesn’t always look the way other People Imagine It”

This chapter considers films and filmmaking in post-conflict Northern Ireland and argues that one striking feature of the new democratic dispensation in the region is the relative absence of a politically engaged cinema. This appears to have been forsaken for a more banal cinema, part of a determined cultural effort to interpolate the region within global capitalism and render it attractive to foreign investors and tourists. This has culminated in Northern Ireland’s new executive offering financial inducements to global corporations like HBO to use the region as a film location in the hope that such global exposure will reap an economic dividend. Examples of films that speak to Northern Ireland’s past or political present are rare. One example is Good Vibrations, a film about Terri Hooley, Belfast’s ‘Godfather of Punk’. While not a resolutely political film, it nevertheless, in some instances, offers an ‘alternative Ulster’; a rejection of sectarianism and an intriguing counterpoint to the capitalist pretentions of the Northern Ireland today. The chapter concludes with a warning that Northern Ireland’s claim to post-conflict status should not be seen as the occasion for a post-political cinema; that in this new dispensation there are residual and emergent political contests in the region that film can and should speak to.

Loyalism On Film and Out of Context

We knew full well that the media were short-changing us when it came to representing ‘our’ side of the story, but what was our side of the story? We couldn’t even explain it properly ourselves. And it’s still the same. There’s plenty of times people around here have refused to take part in cross-community meetings, not because we don’t want to sit down with Catholics, but because we don’t have the self-confidence to do so. Few of us can articulate our case the way they can theirs.1 Northern Ireland’s loyalists frequently lament what they perceive as their misrepresentation in the media, and in doing so they join the chorus of marginalised and oppressed sections in society that complain of being caricatured or ignored by the press, broadcasters and filmmakers. As Stuart Hall has pointed out with regards cultural representation generally, some people are always in a position to define, to set the agenda, to establish the terms of the conversation. Some others [are] … always on the margin, always responding to a question whose terms and conditions have been defined elsewhere: never ‘centred’. (1995: 5)

From Belfast to Bamako: Cinema in the Era of Capitalist Realism

All films are ideological, whether they are configured as purely entertainment, or thought to transcend the world of politics to engage with some universal truth. However, typically when we talk about ‘political cinema’, we are referring to films that engage with political issues explicitly, questioning power and/or contesting dominant perceptions of the world. For these films, the ‘triumph’ of global capitalism and free-market theory has presented particular challenges. First of all, cinema audiences are increasingly configured as consumers, pursuing pleasure and untrammelled entertainment. Second, the scope for political films is greatly reduced when ‘capitalist realism’ means that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism (Fisher, 2009: 2).