Public Issue. The Vacuum

WHO ARE THE PUBLIC ?

POETRY READINGS FREEDOM OF INFORMATION CIVIL SERVICE PUBLIC DEBATE DISTRIBUTION DIVIS KEY POINT ORANGE STANDARD THE BBC DAILY BRIEF PUBLIC ACCESS MEETING THE PUBLIC REVIEWS

the vacuum

the vacuum % THE PUBLIC

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colin graham THE PUBLIC DEBATE

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here needs to be a public debate…’. Politics today, if you only hear its surfaces, can be characterised by the tinny sound of its own clichés. ‘Going forward’, derived from the melancholy dynamism of business-speak, is the most obvious. ‘The reality is ...’ is another phrase frequently used as if it were the rhetorical guarantee of ending a discussion once and for all. Where normal party politics are functioning in their own predictable ways, these clichés do their work. But ‘the reality is’ that the world is full of people trying, saying, doing, and trying to do, things that are very awkward.

For these uncertainties politics reserves the right to forget about them or not talk about them. If the issue just won’t go away, no matter how much you might pretend it’s not there, then the best tactic is to suggest that the time has come for a public debate.

A ‘public debate’ couldn’t sound more reasonable. To offer, suggest, or even facilitate a ‘public debate’ means that you trust democracy, that in a mature democracy you can assume that people are informed, and that collectively they can come to a decision, or more likely a ‘recommendation’. A ‘public debate’ even has that jolly aura of the posh school debating society, but one in which we’re all allowed to join in, no matter how uninformed, inarticulate and prejudiced we might be. The idea of the public debate carries with it too something of the ancient Greek forum. It implies a reinvigoration of citizenship. It is truly participative democracy, and generally points to a possible future world in which we’re all much nicer to each other.

It’s rare, however, that when someone asks for, or insists on, or notes the utter lack of a ‘public debate’, they actual intend for interested parties to get together in a

public building and thrash out a difficult issue. For politicians the ideal ‘public debate’ is a virtual one. In any case a politician asking for public debate usually doesn’t know what to do about something and a public debate is a way of buying

Ó A ‘public debate’ even has that jolly aura of the posh school debating society, but one in which we’re all allowed to join in... Ó time. More rarely, they know more or less what they are going to do, but they’re not going to do it just yet. If there is a ‘public debate’ then what was going to be done will be done anyway and the responsibility can placed on the public who had the debate, or didn’t take part in the debate when they should have done. (‘Well, we had a public debate/consultation on the issue …’).

A riskier political strategy is to try to use a ‘public debate’ to shape public opinion in order to get your own way.

Most often this has to be done with the help of a presentable scientist who can be relied on not to lose his or her temper when faced with people who call him or her a new Dr Frankenstein. The riskiest strategy of all, one which is only rarely played out, is to call for a public debate in the hope that your own unpopular or obscure point of view will be so revelatory that the ‘public’ will suffer a mass conversion to your cause. This borders on an altogether different usage of the notion of ‘public debate’, which is found in the faith which pressure groups and conspiracy theorists have in the idea. This mode is often identifiable because it is referred to as a ‘call’ for a public debate (the call is a curious idea in itself, a plea sent into the

public realm in a hopeful, SOS kind of way). This decodes as a recognition that no one, or not enough people anyway, are interested enough to have a public debate, and so the ‘call’ for a public debate itself has to stand in place of an actual public debate. The Flat Earth Society, for example, wants a public debate on the ‘fact’ that the earth is flat. You wouldn’t actually think that there is much to debate about this topic. Either it is or it isn’t – we couldn’t really all agree on a compromise positions that the earth is a gentle mound, but that maybe it’s sitting on something flat. UFO-hunters similarly love the idea of public debates, because they believe (and this is, to their credit, utopian) that if there was a genuine public debate we would all see that the truth, and aliens, were out there. Maybe we should combine the two debates. If the earth is flat can UFOs fly underneath it? ‘This house agrees that it would be impossible for aliens to fly underneath the gentle mound that is the earth because it’s probably sitting on something flat …’.

So ‘public debates’ are usually not

Ó The Flat Earth Society, for example, wants a public debate on the ‘fact’ that the earth is flat. Ó

public debates at all. Calls for public debates are attempts to ‘raise issues’, scare everyone, ‘set agendas’ or reveal the truth, according to your point of view.

Healthcare professionals are an important and distinct sub-group of public-debatecallers since they are people who know they have right (and the public) on their side but live in a perpetual state of bewilderment about how their government can get away with ignoring them.

Environmentalists are forever asking for public debates (on wind energy, cloning, incineration, nuclear power, and so on) because they believe that deep-down we all know that we are connected to Mother Earth.

In the UK one of the few instances of something like a real ‘public debate’ happened in 2003 when there was an organised public debate on GM foods (a bit late, but better than none at all).

The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee of the House of Commons thought the public debate was an ‘opportunity missed’. The government thought it was a ‘qualified success’. They were particularly pleased with the ‘narrowbut-deep’ group work which was done (I think that means a focus group).

But if there is a future for ‘public debates’ then it is probably contained in the recommendations of the Commons Committee (Paragraph 32): ‘To engage with the wider public, the debate needed to go into their living rooms, rather than be conducted in the village hall.’ And the government response noted that they had considered a special television programme on the issue but didn’t have time. So in the future we’ll put the two together in a now familiar format to create the Big Saturday Night Debate Show. It will end with Ant and Dec telling us to text Y for Yes or N for No to decide whether (and Ant will wink and Dec will give a wry look to camera) turning over food-producing pasture land to grow rape-seed oil for BMWs is a good thing.

Remember texts costs 50p. Next week, should there be an English Parliament?

We’ll have Billy Bragg playing live in the studio… Don’t forget to join us after the news for the results.

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daniel jewesbury THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION

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he right of citizens to access the documents and records held by public bodies came relatively late to the United Kingdom. The Freedom of Information Act was passed in 2000 for the UK as a whole, and a separate act was passed in 2002 to cover bodies answerable to the Scottish Executive.

The combined legislation didn’t come into force, however, until 2005, prior to which national sales of shredding machines reached unprecedented levels, with government departments under strict instructions henceforth to eat all paper communications after reading the contents. Initial cynicism was shown to be unfounded however, with public agencies proving their commitment to the release of information by leaving laptops, discs and USB drives in publicly accessible places for anyone to consult, on a regular basis.

Not all bodies have been quite so free and easy with their information hoard, however. In 2006 I made a number of FOI requests to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, asking for the disclosure of minutes and correspondence relating to the closure of the Ormeau Baths Gallery. How could I have known, as I embarked on this correspondence, that over the coming years it would flower over into a beautiful, meaningful, long-term relationship with the lead development agency for the arts in Northern Ireland?

How could I know the degree to which my own heart’s destiny would become inextricably intertwined with the doings of the very public body whose mission is to place the arts at the heart of our social, economic and creative life?

My initial forays into the world of Information Freedom were naive, even gauche, the timid first ventures of a débutante into a world whose very breadth and depth she can only guess. Eventually, gradually, putting aside my hesitations, I found my voice, faltering at first, growing in strength and clarity and gaining a confident timbre over the months and years. I came to learn that most elementary but most valuable of lessons: that mere information itself was worth nothing – it could be requested and provided with ease, but, the exchange completed, one was left no wiser, with only the vague, undefined apprehension that one had, somehow, inexplicably, asked the wrong question.

The whole transaction seemed somewhat tawdry. I had uncovered the central paradox of Freedom of Information: in order to find the information that one really wants, that mythical document that reveals, beyond doubt, the true intent of one’s correspondent, one must first discover what information there is. One

Ó T The Information may be Free, but that doesn’t mean that anyone wants you to have it. Ó must know what one is looking for before one has found it, and yet one must accept that the information one seeks will always be that whose existence one was utterly unaware of. This is the challenge one sets oneself as one puts those great and ominous words into an email: ‘Dear Sir or Madam, I write to you with a Freedom of Information request...’

So it was that in my first year of correspondence with the Arts Council, I uncovered only the inconsequential dross of public administration. However, as I learned that a serious researcher needs to return time and again to the fray and not be put off by discouragement, or rebuttal, I learned the second lesson of Freedom of Information: the Information may be Free, but that doesn’t mean that anyone wants you to have it.

Over the last two years, in the course of submitting ten requests, I have received three refusals. The first was on the fairly safe, standard grounds of commercial sensitivity. The second, however, explained that I had been refused for submitting a ‘vexatious’ request (‘We consider that the request can fairly be characterised as obsessive or manifestly unreasonable on the grounds that the request forms part of a pattern.

Although the requests are not for the same information, taken together they are considered to form evidence of a pattern of obsessive requests and therefore the most recent is considered vexatious’). This decision was appealed, and overturned.

I resubmitted my original request. It was refused, on the grounds that it was vexatious, again, but for different reasons (‘Your request is considered to be vexatious on the grounds that “you (or an organisation to which you belong,

such as a campaign group) have previously indicated an intention to cause the Arts Council of Northern Ireland the maximum inconvenience through making requests”.’).

The idea that a ‘pattern’ of requests might be considered ‘obsessive’ is strange, and not a little revealing, failing as it does to understand the paradox outlined above, that in order to establish the limits of a field of enquiry, a researcher will necessarily have to make a series of requests that focus progressively on the goal: the existence of a piece of useful information. In addition to my three refusals, I have twice been told that the Arts Council were taking legal advice with respect to my requests (the most recent instance concerns a request that is still outstanding). The first of these legal consultations (at what expense? Quick, draft a request...) followed the third of my refusals, and the resubmission (again) of the original request (first made in April 2007). The document that was the fruit of the legal consultation (and which was released in February 2008) was effectively a further evasion, listing a number of reasons why the Arts Council didn’t have to answer my questions.

What starts to become clear is that ‘Freedom of Information’ is in fact a kind of mental, tactical tug-of-war, with public bodies believing that they have been tasked not with facilitating the provision of

Ó The idea that a ‘pattern’ of requests might be considered ‘obsessive’ is strange, and not a little revealing... Ó information, but with its protection, at all costs, while the public use whatever meagre means may be at their disposal to counter the culture of non-disclosure and noncompliance.

Eventually, after more than a year, I got close to a sniff of what I’d been looking for: how much money had been spent, and on what, by the Arts Council, while they were running the Ormeau Baths Gallery, following its forced closure in February 2006. I had reached that place, often spoken of with reverence, and disbelief, by seasoned requesters: the point at which

‘just one more question’ would bring me to the Philosopher’s Stone of FOI, when ‘requests’ are magically turned into Information (with a capital I). What a poignant discovery to realise that, even when ‘one more question’ did indeed yield Information (and what Information!

That in 2006-07, £42,441.21 had been awarded, in contracts for publicity and marketing for OBG, to companies directed by a member of the board of the Arts Council!) – that this was not, in fact that it could never be the end of it. I had realised that there will always be – that there must always be – ‘just one more question’.

Freedom of Information, clearly, has profound limits. The formerly public utilities in the UK, the inheritors of huge regional monopolies that in many cases still face no competition, passed long ago into private ownership. No legislation can compel these private companies to disclose information to their clients, even though they are responsible for the provision of essential services: and even when their failures threaten lives and livelihoods, as was the case with Severn Water’s loss of service during the Tewkesbury floods of 2007.

Imperfect as the legislation, and its application, might be, it’s what we have, and it’s what we must use. I recently submitted a Freedom of Information request to Belfast City Council. Reading my Sunday Life recently (required reading for artists in Belfast on the Lord’s day, now that we can’t go and stare at the dinosaurs in the Museum), I discovered that the new ‘B’ logo adopted by the City Council was in fact not their first choice, and that the lion’s share of the £430,000 (count them) spent rebranding the city had actually gone towards a logo that was then vetoed by Lord Mayor Jim Rodgers, in front of ‘red-faced council bosses’ at a putative launch dinner in the Hilton Hotel. I think we have a right to see exactly what our rates were spent on, and what it could have been that the First Citizen found so unpalatable at that dinner: what was the Belfast that Rodgers was unable to Imagine? Perhaps we could start using the logo as the brand of an alternative (or ‘provisional’) city, one that exists in parallel to the real Belfast, but in which the arts flourish, and Information roams Free.

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jason mills ADVENTURES OF A DISTRIBUTION MANAGER

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bout a year ago, the publication you are reading got me into an altercation with the manager of a Dublin cafe. This occurred during the course of my semi-regular sojourn south to distribute it around the various cultural outlets of Temple Bar. At the venue in question I was told by a member of staff that the best place to leave copies for the public to pick up was at the end of a long corridor leading out onto the street, where a couple of other free arts and entertainment publications were already sitting. Having done this, I happened to be passing the same entrance again about an hour later and noticed that the pile of around 100 copies which I had left had mysteriously vanished. It seemed unlikely that the enthusiasm of the Dublin public for a ‘Walking’ themed Northern Irish paper would be so fervent that they would be snapping them up at a rate of almost one every 30 seconds, possibly even fighting tooth and nail in the street over the last copy, so I decided to investigate.

My enquiries at the caf café counter resulted in the following dialogue…

Me: Hello, I left some copies of a paper called The Vacuum at the end of the corridor. Have you seen them?

(I hold up one of a few copies I happen to be still carrying for him to see) Manager: Yes, I lifted them.

Me: Right. Why? Manager: You didn’t have permission to put them there.

Me: I asked the guy who was working here about an hour ago and he said to put them there.

Manager: He doesn’t have any authority.

You didn’t have my permission.

Me: Ok, well can I have them back if you don’t want them there?

Manager: In a minute, I’m busy.

(Manager walks off. 5 minutes later,

having been stood at the counter with my patience slowly ebbing...)

Me: Excuse me, can you just hand me the papers back, I can see them from here.

Manager: In a minute.

Me: You said that 5 minutes ago!

(Manager walks off again. 2 minutes later, still standing at the counter – the Manager clearly wishes me to remain here in silent contemplation of his awesome power within this domain. My growing agitation provokes a sudden outburst)….

Me: Tell you what, just stick them up your arse! (flinging my remaining few copies in general direction of Manager, I turn on my heel and walk out) Manager: (shouting) shouting No, you stick them up shouting) your arse!!

(As I look back over my shoulder I see that the Manager has caught one of the flying Vacuums and is violently ripping it in half, to the mild shock and no-doubt bewilderment of several customers).

Thankfully this is not a common occurrence, but the way in which the paper is distributed does raise some interesting questions about how people react to certain material and ideas within urban spaces. The Vacuum has met with disapproval in a number of establishments and institutions over the years. The principal of Methody College launched an investigation to find out why some of his pupils were walking around the school corridors with a paper entitled ‘Sex’. An attempt to have the ‘Prison’ issue made available to prisoners was blocked by the NI Prison Service due to an article on inmates’ inventions – a diagram of how to make a tattoo gun in the piece

was considered potentially harmful as it could be assembled and used as a weapon. Neither does the Belfast Health Trust consider the paper suitable for display in the reading or waiting rooms of its hospitals – the reason given was that it contains material which could be distressful to patients or visitors who are already in vulnerable situations.

One of the other channels via which The Vacuum reaches the public is libraries; bulk copies are sent to the headquarters of library boards across Northern Ireland and then circulated throughout their respective branches. Libraries themselves are an indispensable public resource, making literature and other forms of information available to all citizens at no cost. However, there are many instances when this information will conflict

Ó An attempt to have the ‘Prison’ issue made available to prisoners was blocked by the NI Prison Service due to an article on inmates’ inventions . Ó

with the ideas and sensibilities of some members of the public. For example, although the North-Eastern Education and Library Board’s Display Policy states that it has ‘an obligation to facilitate the flow of information and ideas… within the limits of the law’, it has deemed The Vacuum unsuitable for display in its branches due to what is referred to in the policy as ‘visually and verbally offensive material’.

This assessment appears to be based on the library’s perception of local community values (it serves the North’s Bible-belt – library HQ is in Ballymena). Articles which were singled out as examples by library staff were those which contained swear words, and one in which the author

imagined being chained naked outside Paisley’s church on the Ravenhill Road.

This is a clear example of censorship on the part of NEELB in an attempt to avoid the possibility of objections*. Indeed, the average Ballymena denizen appears easily offended – the same board has previously received complaints from its users about an Amnesty International display depicting international war zones, and from a parent whose child had borrowed an art book which included an illustration of Michelangelo’s David. In both cases staff had to speak to the complainants in order to justify the inclusion of the material in the library.

A recent academic study† of six UK library authorities found that, in addition to appeasement of local community values, censorship also occurred for a number of other reasons. These included adherence to the values of local councils (in one instance a Chair of the library committee prevented Gay News from being stocked), funding restrictions (it was found that in some cases certain types of material were likely to be chosen before others), the prevailing political climate, the personal views of the librarian, and the potentially negative impact they feel an item may have. Titles which were subject to restriction include The Satanic Verses, Madonna’s Sex, the film Child’s Play 3, books about euthanasia, Mein Kampf The Anarchist’s Cookbook, The International Kampf, Underground Directory, a biography of Peter Sutcliffe, and the women’s erotic fiction series Black Lace. Some were excluded or ‘deselected’ from the library collection, some were made available by request only and, in cases where complaints had * Since this article was submitted, and

following an appeal by The Vacuum, NEELB have agreed to hold one copy in each of their branches. † The Influence of Attitudes on Public Library Stock Management Practise’, Cole, Natalie (2000)

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been received, some were transferred to a different branch. This data seems to contradict the ethical codes of professional bodies such as the Library Association and The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, who state that citizens should have the right to access all publicly available expressions of knowledge and intellectual activity.

In Belfast Central Library the official policy is to maintain a very broad collection incorporating everything that mirrors the community in Northern Ireland, including all publications, pamphlets and ephemera. However, during the years of conflict this caused some difficulties in relation to political material; the library was under the authority of the City Council until 1974 and librarians sometimes felt that it was safer not to include certain items. Books about firearms were removed from shelves and if a request for one was received the borrower was required to have a certified letter from the police. Where general lending is concerned, the view of the Chief Librarian is that if a book or item is publicly available through a validated publisher or supplier then it should be stocked. In theory this means that rightwing material such as Holocaust denial and BNP literature would be stocked, although a search of the library catalogue yielded no results for a number of titles related to these. In fact most of the titles and subjects mentioned in the previous paragraph were not on display in Central Library, although copies were available in other libraries and could presumably be ordered in. Sex was available as reference only (‘Can you give me Sex?’ said the borrower to the librarian).

Only two of the titles, The Anarchist’s Cookbook and The International Underground Directory, which contain information on such topics as manufacturing explosives, phone hacking and setting up offshore bank accounts, were not available in any Northern Ireland public libraries. Strabane emerged as a surprising bastion of liberalism, with its inhabitants able to gorge themselves on gay erotica, pro-euthanasia literature and Marquis de Sade.

The stock management policies of libraries are inconsistent and contradictory by nature but provide a good example of what is considered permissible or otherwise in public space.

It highlights the friction between a right to freedom of speech and a right not to be offended. Words are often depicted as psychological weapons and the mediums of everyday communication are regulated in a belief that such action protects people from harm. Indeed, the Chairperson of the Belfast libraries committee Nelson McCausland told the editors of The Vacuum that he felt it was his duty to purge public libraries of ‘God’ and ‘Satan’ issues when they were published in 2004. Personally, I find the two cassettes of Nelson McCausland’s own singing that circulate in our library system an offense to any right thinking citizen. Of course, if I shared Mr. McCausland’s free and easy attitude to censorship that offense could be easily be remedied, by borrowing the tapes and recording a few Slayer tracks over them.

But we’ve not come to that yet, have we...

ffanny o’lentil THE POETRY READING

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here are few things in this world I hate more than poetry readings. On the frequent occasions I have to endure them, I sit with a polite smile fixed to my face and my mind wandering like a gap-year student with an American Express card.

In between wondering when it will all end and remembering, periodically, to renew my facial expression, a few thoughts repeat themselves with the regularity of on an old record: What is everyone else doing here? Are they really enjoying it or just pretending to? Or do they think it will be good for them?

As far as the latter motive is concerned, there is undoubtedly a wholesome quality to the audience of a poetry reading. At non-University readings this is usually because it is dominated by women over the age of 50. However, even when there’s a good tranch of 18-34 year olds present the air is heavy with the air of selfimprovement – or worse, an eagerness to be moved by finer feelings. Once at a reading in England given by an eminent Northern Irish poet, I suddenly realised that two girls sitting next to me had started to cry. I had half risen to my feet, cast a few warning glances behind me to signify that unstable elements were present, and asked in a stage whisper ‘My God, what’s happened?’ before I realised that they were responding to the poems they had just heard. ‘Really? Moved by a poetry reading? How remarkable’ I am hoping I did not say out loud, as I sat back down.

My antipathy has nothing, it should be said, to do with the quality of the work being read. Aside from the issue of my attention deficit, some of the poets I most enjoy reading in the comfort of my

own mind read their work aloud like the corniest old balls imaginable (perhaps they are aware of the demographic shifting the books?) while brilliantly witty writers can deadpan it like they’re announcing the football results. Worse, some (rare) poets who seem moving or engaging on stage, later turn out to be disappointing reads – and to segue from this in no way seamlessly to my own experience of giving poetry readings, I will confess that I have, at times, attempted to be funny while reading poems. If I flatter myself that occasionally I succeeded, let me stress again that this is merely because the entertainment bar has been set so unbelievably low. You only have to say

ÓT The entertainment bar has been set so unbelievably low. You only have to say ‘bum’ at a poetry reading for the audience to erupt like you’re a subversive comedy messiah. Ó ‘bum’ at a poetry reading for the audience to erupt like you’re a subversive comedy messiah. Having the element of surprise, making people laugh at these events is like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel – and on the subject of clichés, here are a few more the uninitiated should expect: the overlong introduction by the refined whisper-voiced woman concerning her workshops with disabled prisoners on the Outer Hebrides; the ‘down-to-earth’ bloke clutching the mic like he’s not

letting his rock and roll fantasy die; the humourous anecdote from the venerable (male) elder concerning capers with other venerable poetic (male) elders. I try to make the appropriate responses because I was reasonably well brought up and all, but I’m never too far from wiping my eye at the light relief and hooting out loud at the work of canonical genius.

The problem, as I see it, is the poetryreading public – or lack of it. Poetry being written from a sense of always to a sense of forever (another cliché), it attempts to expand its readership (probably naively) by appealing to the readership of All Eternity. As far as the present-day goes though, 15 minutes teaching in higher education would suggest that the majority of people are no longer really literate in poetry, and readings, so often the PR campaigns for the written word, attempt to bridge this gap between the forms and a readership who have largely forgotten how to read them by appealing to the accessibility or authority of the poetin-person. Hence the tendency towards corny, patrician bardic solemnity – the cartoon-face of The Poet – or (surprise!) likeable, over-explaining ordinariness. If the appetites poetry once catered for on a mass-scale are now catered for by other media (ones people actually understand), this may be why the audience of poetry readings feel like the already-converted, the desperate-to-write and the willing-tobe-entertained. At any rate, it feels like a strange way to spend an evening. I would much rather do it in private – or, if I’m honest, watch something good on TV.

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WHAT’S HE BUILDING IN THERE? divis key point

by Oscar Eckenstein

i have something of a fascination with abandoned buildings. The kind of places where the absence of humans has ushered in a gradual decay and reinstatement of the laws of nature, but where suggestions of the former occupants can be read in the detritus. The end of the British military campaign here has left behind a physical legacy in the form of disused bases and lookout posts, one of which sits on the summit of Divis mountain overlooking Belfast, 1575 feet above sea level. The MOD first leased the surrounding land in 1953 during the Cold War, purchased it in full in 1986, and sold it to the National Trust in 2004. It was closed to the public for over 50 years and used as a station for radio communications with other bases and individual troops across the Province, as well as for a training area and firing range.

Removing my bicycle from the back of the car, I cycle the mile or so from the National Trust carpark along the path

snaking through the heaths, bogs and grasslands which carpet the mountain. On approach to the summit it is necessary to dismount and push it the rest of the way up the steep slope to the base. To say that the security features are not welcoming is something of an understatement; the two chain-link fences topped with razor wire which form the perimeter accompanied by a big red ‘No Entry’ sign suggest that someone definitely does not want the public snooping around in there. Enclosed within this forbidding boundary are two radio masts (apparently still used by the emergency services), a pallid early 1970’s concrete fortification with a sloping roof, an unusual dometopped building which looks like it may have been used as a ground terminal for satellite transmissions, and a collection of outbuildings. The location offers spectacular views; to the front Belfast lies spread out far below and to the rear are Lough Neagh and the expanses of the Northern Irish countryside. This is the kind of 360 degree panorama that could enable someone with hi-tech surveillance equipment to determine how many people within a twenty mile radius preferred

Eastenders to Coronation Street.

The rugged terrain surrounding this peak is deserted aside from a few cows and the occasional walker in the distance.

Leaving my bike propped up against the front gate I pick my way around the rocky perimeter to take some photographs through the fencing. But what’s this?

At the back of the site a small section of both the outer and inner fencing has been crudely cut away and a reel of barbed wire moved aside by someone in order to gain access. With some apprehension I decide to crawl through. A boiler room and some other outbuildings have been broken into and various bits of debris lie strewn around the yard; empty drums and canisters, lengths of coaxial cable. A stretch of ground close to the perimeter looks like it could have been used as a helicopter landing pad. I push a fire exit

Ó But what’s this? At the back of the site a small section of fencing has been crudely cut away and a reel of barbed wire moved aside by someone in order to gain access. Ó door at the side of the central building with the sloping roof and find that it too has been forced open. The electricity obviously still works as there are lights on inside.

As I tread gingerly down the short, narrow corridor I half expect to find some British army version of Colonel Kurtz lurking in one of the rooms, a last

vestige of military presence, muttering dementedly about snails crawling along the edges of razors.

The only source of natural light on the ground floor is a small office with two tiny windows. There is also a communications room with part of the floor missing and cables and wires protruding from the walls where radio equipment would once have been attached. Opposite the kitchen is a canteen room where a large black box marked ‘Ammo’ sits; unsurprisingly it is empty. Upstairs are the soldier’s sleeping quarters consisting of eight tiny attic bedrooms, another smaller kitchen and a shared bathroom; a fire drill notice on the wall informs me that this was once home to the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment. It is easy to imagine how a case of cabin fever might set in after being stationed in these confined quarters for weeks on end; the sense of isolation mingling with some trepidation – according to the MOD there were a number of terrorist attacks on this base during the Troubles.

As I make my way back downstairs I suddenly hear voices outside. For some reason my first instinct is to hide, but then I realise that this is a ridiculous idea and decide to go back out the fire exit, fully expecting to have to explain to some representative of officialdom why I am trespassing on a derelict army base on top of a mountain. Instead I encounter two boys aged about 12 who are obviously familiar with the section of fencing through which I had entered myself. They stop in their tracks when they see me, then turn and run back the way they came. At this point it quickly dawns on me what is about to happen and I hurriedly make after them, climb through the fence and run, cross-country assault course style, around the other side of the perimeter to try and cut them off. However, they are too far ahead of me and I reach the front gate just in time to see them both sail off down the mountain path on my bike, which I had neglectfully failed to lock due to the remoteness of the location and the fact that I had initially only expected to be away from it for a couple of minutes. The walk back to the carpark is somewhat demoralising; if only the army had left behind a rifle and a few bullets in their ammo box I could at least have tried my hand at shooting the tyres out as they sped off.

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the vacuum issue 39 september 08

PRAVDA Published by Factotum airing your dirty laundry

the orange standard UNDERGROUND STATION ASSISTANT

Good aspects of working with the public on the Underground: space cadets - ffriendly drunk/spaced out customers who want to hug or get their picture taken with you. eye ye candy - London City has the full spectrum of all cultures/ages/sexes. The constant people-watching is vibrant, interesting and, on occasion, eventful.

Bad aspects of working with the public on the Underground: the he know-it-all - You’re asked for specific directions and answer accordingly.

(Bearing in mind the network allows for various routes) Joe Public then retorts with an alternative route, usually saying ‘isn’t it better to….’ the goldfish sh memory - You’re asked directions, you take the tube map in the customer’s hand to explain the route, only to find someone has clearly marked out the route of the journey already. mr. rude - when tthe Public enter the Tube they forget about the concept of patience and manners, it’s not just to staff but to fellow passengers also, everyone is in a rush. I could be on this one all day but it is one big RAT RACE. Mark Doren

PUBLIC ACCESS THE COURTS If you are at a loose end sometime perhaps you should treat yourself to a day out at the courts, observing the wheels of justice in motion.

Before entering the High Court you must pass through a security room and surrender any cameras or weapons you happen to be carrying. The main building dates from the 1920’s and its Portland

by Paddy Bloomer I thought the Orange Standard was a piece of scaffold when I was asked to review it.

Being quite excited about scaffolding at the minute I agreed. Now I find myself on a boat to France trying to conceal the nature of my reading material from a group of Louth livestock haulers sitting at the next table. They might mistake me for a fascist and throw me overboard if they knew I was reading the official organ of the Orange Order.

The front cover has biblical quotations and a man on a very well maintained Ford Dexta tractor. With his opulent beard you could be forgiven for thinking he is a relative of Richard West, one of the editors of this publication [the resemblance is entirely the fancy of the author - Ed] but he is in fact Mercer Ward, European Vintage Reversible Ploughing Champion and Orangeman. The paper tells us of other great achievements of Orangemen: one man has been awarded an MBE for services to the British pig industry. There is also reference to famous Orangemen in

stone exterior is laboriously kept free from bird shit by men with ladders and brushes.

Through the double doors is a reception desk where you can obtain a sheet listing the day’s sessions. Members of the public can freely attend cases in all court rooms apart from the Family and Matrimonial Courts.

The two main Divisions are the Queens Bench (deals with most types of civil action but especially contract and tort) and the Chancery Court (monetary and business matters – upon my visit it seemed that many of the day’s cases consisted of banks vs individuals). The Court Service seem keen to appease the public; a noticeboard lists improvements to services following complaints or suggestions – magnifying glasses in court rooms and magazines in the waiting areas were two such instances.

If you get bored there and want to see some proper criminals you can just pop over the road to the Magistrates Court where a selection of petty thieves and remorseless murderers will be available for your delectation. I opted to attend the trial of well-known performance artist Michael Stone in Courtroom 11, and sat in the public gallery a mere 10 feet behind him (he was seated in a glass security box flanked by two prison guards). A British Army technician

history. None of the names are familiar although one was a Prime Minister of Canada and another marched from Bangor to Newtownards. The Man From Del Monte doesn’t even get a mention.

The paper tells us of Orange men who have died recently. Unfortunately, I suspect more have also been born.

The Orange Order has unveiled a new cartoon super hero, he looks a bit like Bananaman but more Orange. The suggestion to call him Sash Gordon was out-voted. Instead he is called Diamond Dan. Why? Because of Dan Winter, who invented the Orange Order in his cottage one day, quite by accident, while trying to develop a bitter additive to stop birds from eating putty from his windows. scaffolding technical extra: a standard is a upright tube with sticky-out bits that’s good for children to climb up when they break in to building sites.

in the witness box was explaining how to construct a piece of art using pyrotechnic mix from fireworks, cardboard tubing, cling film, kitchen foil, tape and two different lengths of nails. This was one of several interactive pieces which Stone had attempted to exhibit at Stormont in 2006, as part of his epic, ongoing indictment of our artistic, political, and now legal, institutions.

Regarding restrictions on the public attending the courts, you are not permitted to take notes except if a special arrangement is made. If a case is subject to media reporting restrictions this does not necessarily mean that the public will be excluded from the courtroom. There is no restriction on the public repeating aloud what they heard in the proceedings – however, if they included details of the proceedings in any publication it could result in prosecution for contempt of court. The court can choose to totally exclude the public and press from proceedings under certain statutory and common law provisions (for example where a child or vulnerable adult is giving evidence in cases relating to a sexual offence, or for reasons of national security).

Jason Mills

9-11 Lombard Street Belfast. BT1 1RB 028 9033 0893 info@factotum.org.uk www.thevacuum.org.uk www.sorryday.com editors & design Stephen Hackett Richard West reviews editor Fionola Meredith proofing Jason Mills illustrations Duncan Ross cover Duncan Ross web editor Stephen Hull distribution Jason Mills distribution@factotum.org.uk advertising To advertise in the Vacuum or receive information about our advertising rates call 028 9033 0893 or email info@factotum.org.uk print run 15,000 Distribution: Northern Ireland and Dublin

All copyright remains with the authors.

Printer: Bangor Spectator This project is supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

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ian jewesbury REFLECTIONS ON A PUBLIC SERVICE CAREER

I

joined the Civil Service, in what was then the Ministry of Health, in 1966 and left it exactly 30 years later in 1996. They were 30 years in which it changed a lot and, though I haven’t been there to experience it myself, it has gone on changing since.

When I started I had very little idea of what I was getting myself into. No one in my family had been in the Civil Service and I didn’t know anyone else who had. The subject I had chosen to read at university, History, didn’t qualify me for anything in particular. In my last year my tutor made the mild suggestion that I might want to think about finding some way of earning a living, and perhaps I could have a go at the Civil Service exams.

So I did, and as I made my way through the successive stages of the process I began to get intrigued. In particular there was the part where you were given some papers about a policy problem (I think a real life one, but certainly realistic) and had to analyse it and put forward your own ideas for solving it. That seemed to be something that writing history essays had actually equipped me for. And the interviews, and the way the whole process was organised and run, gave you the distinct feeling that you were being looked at as a potential member of an elite – in which you would enjoy both prestige and intellectual stimulation. Seductive!

Also, this was the 1960s. A new Labour government had come to power after 13 years of Tory rule, and there was an air of excitement that now at last we were going to get reform and social justice driven from the centre. Remind you of anything?

So you could not only be important and have fun, but also be helping to make the world a better place. Wow! However idealistic we may have been it was still elitism which defined the Civil Service which I joined and which was a key element in its esprit de corps. In another way that was a fundamental flaw. The service had a rigid class structure with the administrative (university entrant), executive (A level) and clerical (roughly O level or GCSE) classes, along with the unfortunately named sub-clerical classes most of whom were later to fall victim to outsourcing (of course). Later I was

to become aware of the bitterness felt by some people who had worked their way up through the non-administrative classes at their exclusion from the magic circle – though there were always some who managed to break through the barrier.

The Civil Service of the 1960s and 70s was essentially the organisation caricatured

by Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn in Yes Minister which made its appearance in 1980.

The irony is that it actually appeared just at the moment when the relationship it depicted between Ministers and civil servants was changing decisively - but more of that later. As a caricature the series was unflattering (as well as very funny).

A fundamental truth it reflected was that the political game is something played just as much by civil servants as by politicians.

Of course Sir Humphrey in the stories is

Ó A fundamental truth it reflected was that the political game is something played just as much by civil servants as by politicians. Ó

always trying to stop Jim Hacker changing anything, and usually succeeding. In reality it was (and is) more subtle. As a civil servant you may have different goals at different times, but one objective that doesn’t change is to keep your bit of the government machine working smoothly.

The goals which the machine exists to serve are those (really or apparently) set

by Ministers. So you are working to their agenda, and you can’t do that properly just by having the agenda written down.

You have got to get inside the mind of the Minister. This has always been one of the most challenging and fascinating parts of the role. You know you’ve done a good job when the Minister recognises your policy paper as exactly what he/she would have written him or herself. This would be equally true if, on the cynical Yes Minister model, you were serving up an established Civil Service policy and were setting out to con the Minister that it was what he or she had thought of. Indeed when Jim Hacker arrived in office in the very first

episode he was greeted by Sir Humphrey with a sheaf of plans for implementing the policies the new Government had set out in its manifesto. The joke of course was that these were all things the Civil Service wanted to do, just dressed up in the language of the new political bosses.

Of course, like all good caricatures that one has an element of truth. But I never really saw the relationship with Ministers as one in which the Civil Service was trying to control them. In the Ministry of Health I joined in the 1960s there were a lot of people who supported the aims of the new Labour Government – both senior people who had been in at the start of the NHS in the 1940s, and newcomers like myself whose ideas reflected the left wing climate of the time. So there was some real enthusiasm for making the Labour agenda a success. So far as the personal qualities of Ministers were concerned, civil servants have always liked Ministers who are seen as strong and knowing their own minds and hated those who vacillate. The latter also tend to be the ones who, because they feel insecure, lose their tempers and bully their civil servants and are therefore doubly detested. Sorry, but discretion still won’t allow me to name names (though over a pint all things are possible) but I will say that I encountered both extremes in both governing parties. So there is absolutely no correlation between political party and the ability of Ministers to work

Ó Political advisers were brought in and policy units formed with the job of making sure that what got put into action was the red meat of Thatcherite policy and not some Civil Service fudge. Ó

with the Civil Service, or vice versa.

I’ve already touched on the sea change in the 1980s. Of course what started that off was the return of the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher. For the Civil Service what changed radically was not the scaling down of the public sector

and the primacy given to market forces, but the relationship between Ministers and officials. Thatcher arrived at the end of a turbulent decade in which the balance of power had see-sawed and there had been frenzied political activity without, in the Thatcherite view, much real change.

Part of this analysis was that, even if civil servants did not deliberately set out to thwart Ministers, Ministerial policies inevitably got modified and watered down in the process of being implemented by civil servants. The devil as they saw it was in the detail, and political advisers were brought in and policy units formed with the job of making sure that what got put into action was the red meat of Thatcherite policy and not some Civil Service fudge.

For me what was just as interesting about this period (having got over my initial shock and horror at finding myself in thrall to these right wing demons) was the fact that it was actually the Civil Service machine which delivered the Thatcher agenda. No doubt there was some footdragging, and no doubt there were some officials who needed the political terriers yapping at their heels to keep them on the Right path. But many of my colleagues were busy carrying out the Tory programme – and taking it even further than the Thatcherites had imagined – with just as much enthusiasm as any disciple of Sir Keith Joseph. And reader, I have to confess that in my modest way, and for some of the time, I was one of them.

Because a civil servant is before everything else a technician, and if you find yourself caught up in a vast and complex issue like the creation of an internal market for healthcare the intellectual challenge of trying to make sense of it, and make it work, is irresistible. Besides (you may reason to yourself if you feel the odd twinge of conscience) I can’t stop it happening, and if it’s going to happen it’s better all round – better for patients, better for NHS staff – that it works properly.

Up to now I’ve been looking mainly at how power in the Government organisation is shared between Ministers and civil servants. Much of what can be said about this belongs to a more general debate about political power, for which

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Machiavelli is probably as good a text as any. But having mentioned conscience, that’s the issue on which I want to end.

Whether as a civil servant you mortgage your conscience, and the rights and wrongs of that, is a delicate issue. You can argue that in a democracy the official is doing what he or she should do by carrying out the popular will as articulated by the

Ó Whether as a civil servant you mortgage your conscience, and the rights and wrongs of that, is a delicate issue. Ó elected government, and if the official feels their conscience violated that’s their problem. This is a core dilemma of political philosophy, and not a subject I expect to advance much in a few sentences.

Civil servants briefing Ministers for Parliamentary or press appearances have always slanted the arguments to favour one case and always will. You can argue that that’s fair because politics is an adversarial business, and you can leave it to the opposition to make their own case.

I think it’s a bit different if the case involves information which is only available to the Government side. The draft of the notorious Iraq dossier of 2002 contained the statement that ‘Saddam is prepared to use chemical and biological weapons if he believes his regime is under threat’. Tony Blair’s top civil servant at 10 Downing Street, Jonathan Powell, said in an email that this statement was ‘a bit of a problem’ because ‘it backs up the argument that there is no cbw threat and we will only create one if we attack him.’ So the words ‘if he believes his regime is under threat’ were taken out. That wasn’t the only change made at No. 10’s insistence, and their sum effect was that a document which purported to

Ó It’s easy to see how the Civil Service habit of putting the best gloss on Ministers’ case can lead you across the line between truth and falsehood. Ó be a piece of objective evidence had been slanted to make a particular case. Everyone knows what happened next.

I hope that if I had been in Powell’s shoes I would not have done the same as he. But it’s easy to see how the Civil Service habit of putting the best gloss on Ministers’ case can lead you across the line between truth and falsehood. With the ever-increasing concentration of political power at the centre the ethics which should govern Civil Service conduct in these areas need to be articulated and respected. Ethics? There’s a challenge for Sir Humphrey.

As every good girl should, I followed my granny’s advice and spent 3 years dispensing legal advice, first as an adviser with Citizens Advice Bureau and then as a trainee solicitor (before escaping the general public to become an in-house lawyer). But this much I learned about How to Spot a Nutter:

HOW TO SPOT A NUTTER My granny used to run a newsagents shop. She was firmly of the view that everyone should have to work with the public at some point in their lives, to find out how barking mad they are.

PUBLIC ACCESS THE PLANNING SERVICE ‘The Planning Service will continue to examine ways of improving public consultation and participation’. planning policy statement 1: page 6 Public Participation (March 1998).

Every Friday in the classified section of our two leading local newspapers a notice, taken out by the Department of the Environment, lists recently submitted planning applications.

App No.

Location

Proposal

2222F

My Neigbour

Iconic Kitchen Extension

The Planning Order (NI) 1991 requires that all buildings submitted for approval must be publicly advertised to inform the

1. Beware the person bearing several grubby plastic bags. They will be filled with several years’ worth of (generally pointless and unfathomable) correspondence, in no particular order, and will be covered with coffee (or worse, unidentifiable) stains. Said person will probably also smell.

2. Beware the writer of letters with RanDoM CapitALisation, and overly enthusiastic punctuation!!! They have an axe to grind (and have normally spent many, many years grinding it, and now want you to grind it with them). greater public and to allow a say in the future of the built environment. There are six divisional and two sub divisional planning offices in Northern Ireland where these plans can be viewed.

In Belfast the Planning Service is situated on the first floor of Bedford House, 16-22 Bedford Street (behind the City Hall). Appropriately located opposite Windsor House, the tallest building in Ireland, and adjacent to a derelict sandstone building, the former Headquarters of the Ewarts Linen Empire, the building is remarkably accessible.

Entering through the untouchable revolving doors the security staff are always friendly and welcoming. The simple words – Planning Service – gains access to the building, no visitor book to fill in or dog tag to hang round your neck. There are often sweets on the granite counter. Stairs lead to the first floor but don’t be fooled – there is what’s called a mezzanine level (interesting planning term) and four flights are needed to gain access to the first floor (a lift is also available). Passing through a lobby, double doors lead to the public section of the Planning Service.

An oak reception desk is surrounded by a number of seats with low level informal tables for viewing plans and documents. Two small meeting rooms are located to the left of the reception desk. Red carpets give the area a subdued atmosphere. The secret of quick access to the desired planning information is to be armed with the application number as listed in the newspaper. The simple words to the friendly receptionist, ‘I would like to see Planning Application Number 2222F’, and within minutes you will be

3. But most of all beware the writer of letters in green ink. Green ink is a dead giveaway for the truly deranged, not least because they stopped selling biros with green ink about 20 years ago, so it’s obviously been stockpiled solely for the purpose of writing deranged letters.

The most deranged letter I ever received was written in green ink, with random capitalisation and excessive punctuation, but was also written in a spiral formation so that you had to turn the page around and around in order to read it. That’s when you know it’s time to go ex-directory.

Celia Argento

in possession of a blue cardboard file containing the documents. The file will consist of the standard application forms together with drawings illustrating the proposal. Depending on the size of the application these can vary from a simple location plan and one sheet of plans and elevations to larger schemes consisting of perhaps 20 drawings. The Planning Service clearly states in their Friday Notice that ‘during the early stage of processing the application file will contain little more information than the public register’.

What is often more revealing is to view the application file after some months when it will include all representations submitted, consultations, objections and notes of meetings held regarding the application. To do so as stated in the weekly ad, ‘you must contact 028 90252 831 for an appointment when you will be accompanied at all times by an attendant from the Planning Service.’

Leaving the building and, empowered with our neighbours’ intentions we glimpse again the tallest building in Ireland and the derelict sandstone.

Declan Hill

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WHO ARE THE PUBLIC? an interview with the philosopher alastair hannay RICHARD WEST:

Where does the idea of the Public originate? alastair hannay: Well, the idea is one thing and the word another. The latter comes from Roman times and the idea of res publica, public things, or property in which everyone shared and had an investment in (including gladiatorial spectacles). But our sense of the Public is of a composition of individuals to each of whom the state is somehow accountable, something the Romans hadn’t thought of. True, Roman citizens had certain rights and privileges, but they were all and always at the beck and call of the state itself. The idea we have of the Public as an aggregation of individuals who can make demands of the state is quite new. It began among those European intellectuals whose anti-monarchistic ideas were put to use in forming the political framework of the experimental settler-nation known to us as the USA. The notion of res publica was taken over and translated into ‘commonwealth’. It referred now to the means (organisation, material, funds etc.) needed to ensure harmonious outcomes of disparate activities as well as to protect the rights of the individual, and, further along, the protective means themselves.

Thus our idea of the Public is in origin theoretical, organisational, and idealistic.

It comes with the idea of a political corporation in which individual members are responsible to res publica (through their representatives) for maintaining their shared way of life. It implies that in some way the people are the state. The less they are so, the more they revert to becoming just ‘the people’.

Is this the same as the idea of Democracy or is it a kind of forerunner for modern Democracy?

Yes, it’s the idea all right. That we

govern ourselves through our chosen representatives is certainly the way we distinguish our societies as democratic.

But if we pay attention to how we nowadays talk about the Public, we see that this idea has very little to do with the ideal just described. According to that it was their controlling interest in the commonwealth, their conscious participation in what they shared, that earned the People the title of the Public. It implied a conscious and active engagement, as though looking after your own public interests was something that occupied you as much as your private affairs. But it’s doubtful whether there ever was such a situation. Mostly people rely on their elected representatives and a well-trained bureaucracy to look after these things. That’s why today what we

Ó T Today what we mostly mean by the Public is simply all those anonymous individuals ‘out there’ doing their own private things. Ó mostly mean by the Public is simply all those anonymous individuals ‘out there’ doing their own private things. Once the well-intentioned idea of Democracy hits the fan of psychological as well as organisational reality, it and the words defining it change their hue. The fact that we now conceive the Public as little more than an aggregation of anybodies whose main concern is to pursue their own private interests is perhaps the most significant of those changes. The curious thing is that this state of affairs may be part of the original intention, that is, that democratic arrangements are designed to allow citizens to cultivate their own privacies, to be able within limits to live their own dreams. A strong current in

western democracies, especially the USA, sees the main role of government as that of protecting privacy or privacies. When governments appeal to the Public, it is usually to plead support for their policies and secure re-election or else alert it to outside dangers. Instead of an active arm in government itself, the Public has become a kind of sleeping audience to be aroused from its private slumbers when the situation calls for its attention to public affairs. Maybe it was not meant to be like that, but it probably had to become so.

Is it implicit then that the Public is rational while the People are not?

Well, that’s probably what politicians want the People to believe when they appeal to the Public’s opinion for support.

But both are abstract ideas. Think how the expressions themselves are used. A head of state (or anyone who can speak for the nation) can say things like ‘The people of Ruritania thank you for your generous gift to our country’. A new-year television talk to the nation is addressed to the People not to the Public. To thank the public is usually to thank a public, an audience, in the case of rock stars their fans. To talk of the Public is to abstract from all the particular audiences on which the infinitely varied interests of the People focus. As before, this idea of The public was born of an ideal of democratic participation in government. It assumed a common interest in this participation above all the others. But the larger the society the more distant and attenuated the participation. Nevertheless, since Public Opinion counts for political (and on occasion national) survival in a democratic society, there is an interest in portraying it as sensitive and rational. In effect it sometimes is, though that takes time and often requires the Press to change its mind, as now in the USA regarding the invasion

of Iraq. Public Opinion is often just as much what the Press decides to say it is as a report of what people (in the plural) actually feel and think. Still, without the Press or Media it is hard for a nation’s members (or abstractly the People) to be

Ó Public Opinion is often just as much what the Press decides to say it is as a report of what people actually feel and think think. Ó heard at all, and thus have the government as their audience, which is what the whole idea of the Public was once about..

We have a group of notions like ‘the public interest’ or ‘public service’. Are these artifacts of the old ‘commonwealth’ idea that are now disappearing and, if so what are the consequences of this?

I suppose so. Something is in the public interest when it affects the well-being of citzens as such. To be in public service or hold public office is to have responsibility for a system that protects citizens’ rights.

These include the provision of public spaces and amenities such as public parks and beaches, and for the less well-off public housing. The licensed sale of liquor in ‘public houses’ may also be considered an amenity, though the licensing also implies some protection of the rights of the public at large. All such uses of ‘public’ seem to stem from the idea of a common ‘wealth’ or ‘weal’, a manner of well-being in which everyone shared, and for which in ideal democratic societies everyone shares responsibility. In our present societies ‘the public’ tends to mean more like ‘rightscarrying clients of the state’. Perhaps this is what is meant when journalists and others talk of ‘members of the public’?

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Almost like being subscribers to a healthcare insurance scheme.

those guarantees. But then calling them that gives them a natural appeal.

Has the Public, as a concept been changed by the advent of things like opinion polls, focus groups and surveys?

It would seem that the idea of the Public and public service has a very different emphasis in different places in the world, for example in the US, Scandinavia or China. What is your perspective on these differences living in Norway?

This isn’t really my area, but I note that focus groups originated as interviews designed to evaluate audience response to radio programmes. Polls and surveys aim at evaluating markets, though also at finding, creating and cultivating them. They are presented to people not only as the way things are but as the way they themselves think. Political

Ó Political polls tend to tell us the way the wind is blowing as if politics were a branch of meteorology meteorology. Ó polls tend to tell us the way the wind is blowing as if politics were a branch of meteorology. Polls are presented for our daily entertainment, or passing curiosity, and website surveys tells us such interesting things as what so and so many people would do if they won the lottery.

‘Clientele’ and ‘audience’ are the key terms here, and with them the idea that the Public, as John Dewey noted, is no longer; it exists only in the shape of what he called ‘too much public’, which really amounts to saying that there are too many worlds of interest for us to be able to talk of one public as being the public.

So does the common weal matter less than it used to?

It matters to us when the system that holds our private lives and its guarantees is under threat. (9/11, Homeland Security and all that.) Mostly the guarantees (clean water, welfare, various safety nets for the unfortunate) are taken for granted, so that people can focus on their private weal. Many devote quite a lot of their personal lives to a common weal locally, but nationally the default position is that there is little sense of it. Our private prosperities are what concern us. Nowadays privacy extends far beyond our front door, it invades public space. Think of the ubiquitous mobile telephone instead of the more or less sound-insulated kiosk. We treasure our privacies and take them everywhere. When abroad we even expect our governments to take care of us when weal turns to woe (tsunamis, air-crashes, imprisonment for criminal offences). It’s not all that surprising. Our whole system is based on the idea of protected privacies. Perhaps its architects assumed an innate sense of common responsibilities, or thought that the democratic arrangement would foster it. Instead public service has become another career opportunity.

However, that a sense of the common weal mattering is still there to be invoked is indicated in the prestige that a career in public service still possesses, and in the kinds of words used by those who would represent the public and take care of

We might just as well call the beneficiaries of services provided by a government and its local authorities its ‘citizens’.

By avoiding the somewhat mystical ‘the Public’ we can more easily convey that public services are services provided for anyone, just in the way public spaces are. That we call a space public means in practice simply that it isn’t private; anyone can use it (though not just for anything). What we call ‘the Public’ is not a thing, it is just anyone, you and I. ‘Citizens’, however, adds to this the idea of all these anyones having rights (either by birth or by becoming nationals). On the other hand, there seems to me to be a kind of limitation on calling a nation’s population its ‘public’, even if public services are provided. To arrive at the idea

SALES In my various sales roles over the years, the most remarkable and irritating experiences were surely brought to me by my time in Marks and Spencer’s.

For my sins, for a year and half I found

Ó Nowadays privacy extends far beyond our front door, it invades public space. Think of the ubiquitous mobile telephone instead of the more or less soundinsulated kiosk kiosk. Ó

of a population forming a Public (to be seen from within the population as the Public), in any sense other than the empty one just mentioned, we have somehow to represent a nation’s population as able to be engaged collectively in matters of its own interests, and able to be addressed collectively in this light. In times like the present, with its circus leading up to the presidential election, the USA looks as if its population formed a public but as a rule it doesn’t do that. In a much smaller nation like Norway, with a population not much larger than Ireland’s, or that of Los Angeles for that matter, it may be easier to get a continuing sense of there being the Public. In China there is little if any possibility of this sense, similarly with India, Pakistan, Iraq, and certainly Afghanistan, though no doubt all for rather different reasons. Does this then mean that being able to refer to the Public is in principle a good thing? Not necessarily. Think of Nazi Germany. It may even be a sign of political health that those occasions are rare when we are led to think of ourselves as members of the Public in any other than the trivial sense.

PUBLIC ACCESS THE PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE People use public information to research a variety of topics – for example, to trace the history of a property or to look for an old court record or because they are interested in family history or local history. As they belong to the public domain, anyone can access public information collections.

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) located in Balmoral holds the largest collection of documents relating to Northern Ireland. These records cover a period from around 1600 (with a few dating back as far as the early 13th century) to the present day. The term ‘public record’ generally refers to any document created by an ‘official’ source. Public records can be further sub-divided into ‘departmental’ (previously ministry) records and records of ‘non-departmental’ public organisations. Some examples of ‘departmental’ records include Ministry

myself burdened with the unenviable task of helping affluent old bags to coordinate made-to-order furniture, sofas, kitchens, curtains and the likes, with the colour scheme that they already had at home. I must admit that as time went on, the amount of patronizing, sneering and downright snobbishness I encountered from these spoilt rotten home-makers (several of whom we actually caught shoplifting; a cry for attention that is more common than you would think) made me wish to take some liberties with their orders. So, in short, any old bag that gave me any shit would receive a sofa the wrong colour, some curtains the wrong length and so on. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand the job for very long anyways, so I guess it was probably a cry for attention of my own, in the hope that something would result in me moving on to pastures new.

Paul Moore

of Home Affairs, Department of the Environment, Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister and so on. ‘Non departmental’ public organisations are for example schools, coroners’s court, crown court etc. On top of the public records, PRONI holds a large amount of privately deposited archives such as business records, church registers, solicitors archives etc.

There are other institutions providing public records outside PRONI. The General Register Office of Northern Ireland (GRONI) is responsible for and provides birth, marriage and death Registers from 1864 to the present day. Adoption records however are held in the custody of the Northern Ireland Court Service. Details of (registered) property ownership in Northern Ireland may be found at the Land Registery Office in Belfast.

The public library service of Northern Ireland also holds a variety of resources and collections including official reports and governmental publications.

That something is ‘public’ does not automatically entail public access.

If there is open access to public information, public buildings, however, are not all freely open to the public.

To visit the Parliament Buildings at Stormont for example, prior arrangements have to be made, and an MLA has to sponsor the tour. Accessing public information is normally free of charge, however it is necessary to pay for certain services or to obtain copies of documents such as birth certificates.

‘Public’ information is not always ‘free’ information.

Liam O’Rourke

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michael begg FENDING OFF THE PUBLIC the bbc daily brief

T

he BBC. it’s the best, we love it, and it’s ours. And it loves us too – oh yes, it only wants the best for us. But does it really? It seems, these days, that if it’s not actually swindling us out of our pocket money by persuading us to call its quid-a-second votelines for made-up competitions, then it’s pissing away its allowance on freebies for its staff (did you know, for example, that the Beeb sent four times the number of people in the whole UK team to the Olympics in China? And they all went in taxis.

It’s true. There are no black cabs left in west London. They’re all in Beijing – with their meters still running). And because the BBC are taking the piss so comprehensively, they have to make sure their well-fed arses are covered or they’ll get letter bombs from Daily Mail readers.

So they put together a ‘Daily Brief’ for the poor buggers who staff the phones (not the voteline phones, of course – they’ve got bank tellers on the end of them) and shove it under their noses on the way out to The Ivy with a handful of licence fee.

You can imagine a lot of the sort of thing that’s in this Daily Brief. With six television channels, a dozen or so national radio stations and more local and foreign language services than Rod Stewart’s had hot dinner ladies, the BBC’s bound to have the occasional correction or update to make. The snooker might over-run and Top Gear will be on 5 minutes later than billed; the Haydn Piano Trio (Gypsy Rondo) is performed by the Ondine Trio and not the Kungsbacka Trio; Gary Glitter’s appearance on Jackanory has been postponed – you get the picture. But it’s funny to see what else the BBC seems concerned enough about to keep its people primed to respond on.

For example, is it really necessary to make all staff aware that The Passion will be stripped across Easter week on BBC One, drawing to a dramatic climax on Easter Sunday’? Hasn’t that pretty much always been the scheduling of events? Or is this just testament to the multiculturality of the modern BBC, with no presumptions made about anyone’s knowledge of the major Christian festivals? Certainly, ecumenical sensibilities seem to be to the fore in their food programming, with the ‘Line Against Enquiry’ for their dropping of the repeat

of the previous year’s Nigella’s Christmas Kitchen: ‘We had scheduled Nigella’s Christmas 2006 special but as the last episode in the current series includes Christmas recipes, we subsequently felt there was no need to the show last year’s programme’. Just in case of accusations of anti-Semitism, I suppose.

Also, when you see these Daily Briefs, you realise just how much violence the BBC put in their programmes. Last December they broadcast a compendium of brutality, including an STI nurse in Casualty becoming ‘so infuriated by everyone and everything in the hospital he brings a crossbow into reception area and shoots twice’, a bear on Wildlife on Two getting trapped on the 7th floor of a hotel and being shot by police, and treble-figure bodycount Pulp Fiction being shown on Christmas Day. The hilarious ‘line’ taken on the last of these was that they ‘wanted to offer viewers an alternative seasonal fare’. No wonder Jonathan Creek star Alan Davies bit into a homeless man’s ear after going on a massive booze bender’, as the brief warns staff to expect calls about. He probably nipped out for a roll of wrapping paper, but made the mistake of watching the hideous brutality of the All-Star Weakest Link Yuletide Special beforehand.

As well as violence, there’s the general charmlessness of some of there programmes to mitigate on a daily basis. Consider the following ‘heads up’ regarding the EastEnders Christmas episode: ‘When Shirley buys Heather a motorised slimming machine, Heather tells Shirley she doesn’t like things that vibrate.

Shirley says something along the lines that: “Unfortunately, with a face like yours, that’s a definite disadvantage”.

After their Christmas dinner, Shirley conjures up an enormous belch, then Heather lifts up her rather ample backside and lets rip with a sizeable fart.’

A ‘line to take’ is not offered on this occasion, although I can’t help thinking they could have improved things no end by sparing the confused bear and having Shirley and Heather shot instead.

Then of course there’s the constant swatting away of the corruption allegations that plague our Beeb like so many flies

round the gigantic arse of a sweatily lumbering wildebeest. And it would seem the hapless punkah wallahs will have their work cut out, if the usual list of possible controversies is anything to go by. First up is a warning that the Mirror is running a story on fraud at the very heart of the National Lottery – apparently the button you see the week’s meticulously selected Dlister pressing to release the lucky balls on the BBC One show is a DUMMY, with the nation’s favourite bingo machine actually being activated by a qualified professional offstage. Rocked to its foundations, the Corporation can only put out a holding response while a team of the country’s top physics brains assess the implications of the Copenhagen Interpretation for the situation.

Further down the brief, another blow whacks the integrity of the nation’s favourite purveyor of drivelling light entertainment when it is revealed that NINETEEN callers complained of experiencing voting difficulties during the previous Saturday’s Strictly Come Dancing.

And it’s not just the thrashing statistical collapse that this throws the whole competition into; it’s also the missing £4.75 in automated donations to Children In Need that this represents. That’s two feet of an African village water pipe, or nearly 3 nanoseconds of Terry Wogan’s appearance fees.

The tallest order of the brief, however, lies in defending that fondly perpetuated tradition of year-end totting-up of Great British failure that is the BBC Sports Personality of the Year. For not only has this beacon of for-the-love-of-the-game fairplay in a sporting world ever more mired in filthy corporate cashola gone and got itself a two-year sponsorship deal with foul squash-pushers Robinsons; and not only has it come to light that the winner (ace Welsh countenance-flattener Joe Calzaghe) was strangely able to pick up his winner’s trophy from the reception deposit box of his Las Vegas hotel minutes after the voting had closed in the UK; but the shortlist included TWO players from the bloody England bloody Rugby team.

Now that’s just plain indefensible.

BELFAST CITY COUNCIL Members of the public are able to attend monthly meetings of the full Council by request, but not meetings of the various committees and sub-committees.

The committees within the council are Development, Health and Environmental Services, Parks and Leisure, Licensing, Policy and Resources, and Town Planning.

They will normally meet once a month but it is common for special meetings to arise on top of these. The only instance when a member of the public would be able to attend is if they had an objection to a particular application, they could request to go and state their case to the relevant committee. However, they would not be permitted to stay for the rest of the meeting while the committee debated and voted on the matter. Minutes from committee meetings are posted on the Belfast City Council website, but only once they have been approved and adopted at the next meeting of the full Council.

In order to attend full Council meetings a member of the public would have to send a written request to their local councillor. That councillor will then arrange to sign the person in to the meeting where they may sit in the public gallery. The reason the public would wish to attend these meetings is if they have an interest in a certain topic which is going to be discussed. However, this is something of a Catch-22 - the Council itself is unable to provide information on which topics will come up prior to the meetings. Neither can a member of the public check the minutes of the various committee meetings from that month in order to find out which topics have been discussed and could subsequently come up at the full Council meeting - these are only published online after they have been approved and adopted at the full Council meeting which that member of the public may wish to attend.

Therefore, it is necessary to check the local press for planning, licensing applications etc, employ some guesswork at whether something of relevance will come up, and be prepared to waste your time if it doesn’t.

In addition, space for the public at Council meetings is very limited – in the City Hall the public gallery holds around 30 people. As the City Hall is currently closed for refurbishment the Council chamber has moved to Adelaide Exchange, where even fewer people can be accommodated.

Jason Mills

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NI WAGS BBC northern ireland

NI WAGS BBC NORTHERN IRELAND MAY -JUNE 08 A YEAR IN THE PROVINCE: BEING THE MEMOIR OF JESÚS SÁNCHEZ VENTURA. CHRISTOPHER MARSH LONDON: BEAUTIFUL BOOKS, isbn: 9781905636325 £12.99 PUMPGIRL WRITTEN BY ABBIE SPALLEN DIRECTED BY ANDREW FLYNN A LYRIC THEATRE PRODUCTION AT THE DRAMA CENTRE AT QUEEN’S 3 SEPTEMBER 08 THE PARKER PROJECT SPOKESONG AND PENTECOST LYRIC THEATRE AT THE NORTHERN BANK BUILDING, WARING STREET DIRECTED BY LYNNE PARKER MAY 08 WASTE WEEK RECYCLED ART 2ND-8TH JUNE, VARIOUS LOCATIONS ACROSS BELFAST

Ah, Wags. Those dinky dollies hanging on the arms of their sportsmen partners, fulfilling a function akin to a mobile phone charm – glittery and pointless. In this six part series, viewers were introduced to our own homegrown Wags and their ‘frothy, glossy, high spending lifestyles… [that are] the envy of women up and down the country’. Cue many shots of popping champagne corks and those horrid, scaldy and emaciated pooches that are the must-have accessory of any Wag. After an effortful hike around Wag-world – fashion shows, shopping trips to Las Vegas, charity auctions, hairdressers in Armagh – the final show was a ‘wedding wagathon’ where we followed Ydele ‘on her journey as she upgrades her Wag status’ (that is, gets hitched to her bloke, do keep up with the patois), as narrator Christine Bleakley confided in her sunny, irony-free bray.

Now me, I wish I was Zara, the 22 year old model girlfriend of – wait for it – former Bohemians and now Lisburn Distillery footballer Chris Kingsberry. It would be like a holiday from my brain.

If I was her, I could spend all day with not a thought in my head apart from the acquisitive ones about ultra-expensive wedding gowns: ‘The one I seen worked out at £15,000’.

The envy could be quite hard to contain at times. For instance, the moment when ‘former Northern Ireland football international and TV pundit’ Gerry Armstrong formally proposed to girlfriend Debby on the pitch in the presence of elderly DJ Alan Simpson, who enthused, ‘you’ve scored at Windsor Park!’. Was that really the way Debby imagined it in her dreams? A baying crowd, the sparkler slid on to her finger as a perma-tanned man with funny hair supplied dubious innuendo in the background? Still, there was always the Cultra wedding reception to look forward to, where ‘the VIP guest list was like the who’s who of Northern Ireland’ according to Christine, as the camera zoomed in on Jackie Fullerton’s florid mush.

The only respite from the unremitting nausea brought on by this paean to vacuity was the odd moment of unintentional humour. As Lisa Harrison (blonde hair, discontented mouth) showed off in classic Wag style about the exquisitely luxurious pre-Christmas Dublin hotel break she shared with Mark Kershaw, ‘A1 Team Ireland’s Chief Executive’ – complete with a breakfast specially prepared by the chef – the camera cut away to a shot of decidedly cheap-looking, uncooked sausages being carelessly slapped into a baking tray.

Yummy – and a delicate precursor to Mark’s ensuing wedding proposal. Any comment to add there, Alan?

And there was another incredulous giggle moment courtesy of Lisa, as the cost of weddings came under discussion. ‘The money spent on some of them is absolutely obnoxious,’ she said earnestly, gold chandelier earrings swaying, ‘but obviously well worth it if you can afford that type of wedding.’ Understand this – only the

classiest obnoxiousness will do for the true Wag. But it’s not all diamonds and daiquiris.

The foetid odour of disappointment and loss can occasionally assail the scented shores of Wag-world. Like when a cricketing injury to Andrew’s big toe raised the possibility that magazine deals in advance of his wedding to Ydele – and their attendant photo-shoots – could be scuppered. I mean, shit! This is serious, people. All those tireless shots of the happy pair leaping around together in contrasting pastel-coloured leisurewear could be undone by the bloody excrescence on Andrew’s foot. In fact, Andrew’s ugly foot-rot was a bit like the bad fairy in wedding fables, threatening to sully the shimmering, micro-managed perfection of the Big Day. Luckily, it was airbrushed into submission just in time.

Watching NI Wags was like being waterboarded with pink champagne. The only real thing was Andrew’s putrid toe.

Could it have its own series in the next commissioning round?

issues and addressing the symptoms: the communities find increasingly nonviolent but inventive ways of harassing each other (an automatic bowling machine rains cricket balls onto a republican estate, giraffes are released from the zoo into a loyalist estate). At the end Jesús returns to Andalusia neither sadder nor wiser, but with his sex life enlivened by occasional Ulster-erotic role-play (for those who want to try it at home, it involves simulated drizzle and swearing in a thick Belfast accent, so it does).

If you want a novel with yummy mummies, Uni loonies, social workers, lots of shirkers, political correctness, academic fecklessness, celebrity culture, journalistic vultures, Ulster fries, several lies, Spanish émigrés, childish tearaways, con artists and perhaps a few too many lists like this, then A Year in the Province will happily enliven what’s left of your rainsodden summer.

Pelham Locough

Bitsy Sonomabiche PUMPGIRL Abbie Spallen lyric theatre A YEAR IN THE PROVINCE christopher marsh We’ve not had many comedies about Northern Ireland partly because comedy is much harder than tragedy. That’s why there are so many more serious writers than truly great comic writers: Dostoevsky could get lost in the crowd, while P.G. Wodehouse stands almost alone. So it’s good to be able to welcome a novel which refuses to take the North at its own, overly-serious estimation.

Christopher Marsh’s A Year in the Province has a brilliant set-up: instead of some middle-class Englishman ‘discovering’ the peasantry of an exotic, but EasyJet accessible and sunny European hinterland, as in Peter Mayles and his copyists (no bad but money-making idea ever goes uncopied), Marsh delivers a hapless Andalusian to Belfast. The parody of Mayles et al is belated, but there is a wealth of comic inventiveness here: it is a satire of ‘Norn Irn’, both in its Troubles guise and in terms of various aspects of its social and linguistic life; it’s a campus novel (several Queen’s academics will be poring over it anxiously); and it’s a comedy of manners.

There is a plot, in fact there are several plots, but none is allowed to interfere with the jokes. Jesús Sánchez Ventura’s narration shows that he is over-confident about his fluency in English, and his torturing of cliché and misunderstanding of idiom supplies many jokes. Like any innocent abroad, he becomes entangled in numerous embarrassing and complicated personal situations while managing to solve public problems almost without effort: Orange marches continue along traditional but controversial routes through purpose-built tunnels; violence can be solved by ignoring the underlying

‘I can’t stand women drivers; they can’t drive for shite,’ announces Pumpgirl, a gormless grin stretched wide across her vulnerable, childish face. With her love of the smell of petrol (like cherries crushed in vinegar), cropped hair, blue overalls and androgynous swagger, Abbie Spallen’s funny wee garage attendant is the central curiosity that makes this play more than just another rural miserabilist fantasy. It’s set in darkest Co Armagh, where cars are cyars, people go around with salad cream in their moustaches, and a distinct lack of opportunities (both economic and inter-personal) might drive a person to make odd choices in life. As Sinead – wife of stinky petrol-head Hammy – observes ‘when you’ve had cider all your life and someone offers you Asti Spumante, you could convince yourself you’re drinking champagne.’ That was a propos of a sexual encounter with one of Hammy’s equally grotesque pals – a surprisingly satisfying and epiphanic moment for Sinead – but one that eventually contributes to the squalor and horror of the play’s closing scenes.

Sinead (Maggie Hayes) gets many of these sharp rustic-philosopher lines, which is fortunate, because her character – the frustrated yet articulate housewife, constantly changing pillowcases stained with Hammy’s beery drool – is a rather familiar one, and the quips liven things up. We’ve seen the likes of Hammy (Stuart Graham) before too – a strutting, shouty, half-sentient philanderer with an abiding fondness for Glen Campbell.

It’s Pumpgirl (Samantha Heaney) herself who makes everything fresh and rough and new. And as far as she is concerned, Hammy is ‘pure class’ – an infatuation that leads her into dark places, far from the

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chirpy banter of her garage workplace.

The harsh, compelling quality of the writing – and the dynamism of its delivery – is vital to the success of this play.

There are only three characters on stage – Pumpgirl herself, Hammy and Sinead; the set is a model of stark simplicity; and there is no dialogue between the characters, merely a series of interlocking monologues. According to Spallen, this is because it made Pumpgirl a cheap show to put together. Whatever the reason, if you’re going strip it back that far, the words have to do all the work – and, in this production, they do. The whole thing is set up like a grim triptych: each person locked in their own little claustrophobic space, choking on disappointment and guilt and longing. Yes, there are times that you dearly want to see the characters lift their eyes from those all-consuming monologues and actually speak to each other, but the spareness really makes this play come alive. The fact that one of the characters – Shawshank, named thus after his claims of born-again redemption resulted in early release from prison; as Hammy puts it, ‘in the film, they had to crawl through miles of shite to get free, this guy just had to talk a mile of shite’ – plays such a vivid role in the drama, yet only exists in the minds of the actors and audience, is testament to that clever storytelling.

I never thought to see a play that could successfully set a moment of poignant personal loss in the Buttercrane Shopping Centre in Newry, amid the Claddagh rings and official Manchester United jewellery, but Pumpgirl does it. That’s an achievement in itself.

Fionola Meredith

THE PARKER PROJECT spokesong and pentecost lyric theatre The Lyric’s ‘Parker Project’ was the contemporaneous production and crosscasting of these two Stewart Parker plays, and audiences could watch them on alternative evenings or both on the same day. Each was directed by Lynne Parker, founder and Artistic Director of Rough Magic Theatre company, and incidentally Stewart Parker’s niece. The plays ran as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, and constituted the first of many ‘site-specific’ productions by the Lyric while the new theatre is built. The plays bookend Parker’s stage writing career; Spokesong was his first produced play in 1975, and Pentecost his last, produced in 1987 before his death the following year.

Beyond this simple question of chronological first and last, the plays can be considered to belong together for other reasons. They are both set in 1974 and they can each be considered a sustained reflection on the paradoxical and characteristic ‘development’ of Belfast (and by extension Northern Ireland) in

the early 70s by the twin vehicles of violent conflict (the bombed buildings, the mass movement of people, the segregation) and town planning. In Spokesong the action is set in Frank’s bicycle shop, which is under threat from both the paramilitaries because he refuses to pay protection money, and from the planners who can see the future only in terms of what is needed for cars. In Pentecost the play unfolds in the only remaining house in a street demolished to make way for new building, where the characters shelter from the violence of those enforcing the curfews of the Loyalist Workers’ Strike. The theme of development, of what is casually thrown away in the clamour for the new or the politically correct, is underscored by the presence of characters from the past in each of the plays, all of them so intimately emotionally connected to the very fabric of the buildings where the play is set that they move in and out of the action as authentic real characters rather than spectral visitors.

To the extent that the plays can be regarded as a commentary on the same principal theme, and to the extent that the later play might be regarded as a commentary on the first, it is interesting to see them produced and performed together. The first is a young man’s view, in the first flush of reflection on what must have been a catastrophic period of social degeneration into violent conflict, the second is the retrospection of a more mature commentator; the contrast between the emotional tone of each is stark.

Spokesong, for all the elements of viciousness which are here, is an optimistic piece. Violence, whether familial or social, is ever-present as a theme emerging and retreating, and yet the layering of the play is such that violence doesn’t dominate the other themes of movement of all kinds, from the bicycle to the car, from one generation to the next, from stability to chaos, from loneliness to love, and also – here the formal wonder of the play emerges – from seriousness to comedy. There are clowns where clowns have no right to be, people sing when they shouldn’t. And what clowns, what songs. It is utterly charming, redemptive and affirming, even in the face of the crushing march of progress, politics and corruption. A great deal of this charm, the emotional heart of the play, was due to the rough magic generated by the contrast between Dan Gordon’s instinctive acting style, marked here by a strange weariness, with the sheen and polish of the other performers, amongst whom Marty Rea’s performance stood out in absolute virtuosity.

In Pentecost, the later play, the complexities had been pared down to the more familiar divisions of Catholic/ Protestant, Nationalist/Unionist. The characters all had a certain knowingness, a far too well developed capacity to articulate the complexities of their own relationships to identity and change, mirrored in the actors’ ability to far too well achieve their characters. The heart of the play here lay with Lily, beautifully brought to life by Eleanor Methven who,

in a sublime theatrical moment, wordlessly conjured the joy and despair of sex and love with a strangled trembling blush; the irony being that Lily was the ghost, the already-dead, the missing heart. The play seemed a much more serious and selfconscious attempt to ‘deal with’ issues, which dated it in the double sense that any such pedagogic project might find contemporary resonance but could only be expected to appear jaded twenty years on, and in its implicit supposition that social redemption lay in the achievement of honest and reasonable dialogue between the well meaning middle classes on either side. As we know, the breakthrough was in politics’ reinvention of itself in a form more sophisticated than was imagined possible in 1987, rather than in the victory of (educated) common sense over politics. The ostensible resolution of the play in an affirmation of intent towards the future seemed a statement of political intent, rather than a convincing dramatic conclusion.

All in all then, a mixed bag. The incidental thematics of Spokesong gave it a force and freshness that endures today while the concentrated focus of Pentecost now seems heavy-handed and dated. The wonderful production values in each served in the first case to frame and show off the complexities to their best advantage and to let the play sing, while in the second they demonstrated the linearity and technical construction – but also the lack of heart.

Eugene McNamee

serves as the paper and cardboard recycling receptacle for 20 flats, and where the nearest recycling facility (Ormeau) was recently closed for over a year.

At the bottom of the Newtownards Road facing Short Strand was a similarly constructed but more visually impressive structure called WEEE World Altogether, which was originally exhibited in the grounds of City Hall at last year’s Waste Fair.

The rather poor title was a reference to a European directive covering Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment. It was a globular mass of discarded electrical appliances including televisions, phones, speakers, vacuum cleaners, washing machines and irons, all held together with screws. The legs comprised thin steel frames with circuit boards attached and electrical cable wrapped around the feet.

Resembling some kind of sinister spherical robot from a sci-fi film, it also looked like it could run at high speeds, firing lasers

WASTE WEEK RECYCLED ART various locations, belfast In June, five temporary public art installations comprising waste materials appeared around the city, one in each of the four main geographical regions and one at the City Hall. Beside each was a sign declaring ‘Waste Is Not Rubbish’. This was a key part of Belfast City Council’s annual Waste Week, organised in order to ‘encourage people to think about how they can help the environment’. I decided to do my bit by driving around town belching out carbon in order to contemplate the results of their commissions.

A Pod of Shame stood outside City Hall, built from plastic household items including a variety of kid’s toys on wheels, consoles and clocks. It bore the slogan ‘Waste – Who’s Responsible?’ and an arrow invited you to step inside the pod and turn to your right to find out. As I did so I expected to peer into a room in some other dimension where a smorgasbord of public servants and members of the public were engaged in a bitter game of fingerpointing. Instead I was confronted with my own reflection in a six-foot mirror – it’s all my fault! I almost broke down and wept with the ignominy of it all but then remembered that I live in an area where a container measuring about one cubic foot

from its frontal TV screens and emitting painful high-frequency sounds from its speakers. Had this edifice appeared here years ago the people of the Short Strand would surely have suspected it to be some kind of hi-tech BritBot. Heading north to Carlisle Circus I found an aesthetically dubious 12ft fish consisting of a metal frame and wire mesh encasing hundreds of plastic 750ml bottles, with two larger cylinders for eyes.

A fish public art sculpture in Belfast is not a particularly new idea, although I’d quite like to see an aquatic deathmatch in the Lagan between this newcomer and the original Big Fish. Realistically, the recycling fish would probably only be able to inflict minimal damage – perhaps a few flesh wounds to the ceramic tiles of its opponent. It would be only a matter of

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time before its thin steel frame was bent out of shape beneath the weight of the superior beast, its wire stomach collapsing and spewing plastic guts all over the river.

West Belfast had Strange Fruit at the Kennedy Way roundabout, a tree whose trunk consists of strips of tyres, with balls of shoes hung from its rubber branches.

Somewhat confusingly, there were also soles of shoes attached to the trunk, leading upwards in a walking pattern, perhaps suggestive of some form of deevolution whereby we eventually all have to return to the trees in order to escape the mass of landfill covering our previous habitats. This piece was well constructed and eye-catching, although the ‘Waste Is Not Rubbish’ sign which accompanied the others appeared to have gone AWOL, so people unaware that it was Waste Week may have missed the context. Indeed, as I was busy trying to get a good photograph of it an elderly man carrying a shopping bag informed me that it was ‘foolish looking’ and could cause accidents on the roundabout by distracting drivers.

more directly accessible to pedestrians – for instance, the City Hall piece, although one of the less impressive, received a lot of attention. But perhaps the Council was worried about the level of interactive participation this would encourage: people climbing on top of the fish, dragging the tyres off to a bonfire site or liberating the sci-fi pod of some of its armour to try their luck in Cash Converters.

Jason Mills

WAITRESSING AT RAMADA HOTEL Here is to the public… and hours I whiled away, beside the bins, in contemplation of their rodent lodgers.

To the Belvoir millies who spied with me, as we swapped cigarettes perched on cola crates, merrily defacing their corporate crests.

And cups of tea.

COMMERCIAL DJING

Finally, Stranmillis roundabout hosted Waste Age, a fossilised dinosaur supposedly unearthed in Belfast a hundred years from now, with VHS players and mobile phones for bones. There was evidence of guerrilla archaeology at this site: some of the ‘bones’ had been unceremoniously excavated. Unfortunately this had the secondary effect of removing bits of the thin layer of red clay which encased the beast, thus revealing the shoddy bulk of yellow polystyrene beneath. This made it look cheap.

Overall, the concept of this public relations initiative was positive, drawing people’s attention to the joys of recycling.

However, the positioning of the pieces was a problem – all but those at City Hall and Stranmillis were in relatively inaccessible places, in the middle of busy junctions where few people were likely to walk directly past them. Are motorists supposed to be the main target audience?

Driving past in a car whilst trying to negotiate traffic doesn’t really lend itself to consideration of how an installation has been put together or what it is supposed to signify.

The installations would have been better suited to locations where they were

A a discerning music lover into vaguely As obscure sounds from all over the globe, it was with a heavy heart I turned to the world of the commercial DJ, with money admittedly being the driving factor.

I’m under no illusions that the general public aren’t to be trusted for their tastes, even if there is the occasional anomaly like Ting Tings getting to number one. But the wedding DJ has to endure ignorance that is mind-blowing.

Luckily the advent of superstar DJs and the merciless caricature of DJing by comedians like Peter Kay mean that usually a DJ no longer requires a mic.

This comes as a great shock to people who don’t get out very often ‘What kind of DJ doesn’t have a mic?’. Many irate punters then ask if you can turn down the music and shout their greetings to the drunken hen party in the corner!

Another perplexing request is often from drunk females ‘Can you not put on something we can dance to?’ which sounds reasonable enough except the very song they are complaining about is James Brown or Stevie Wonder, acknowledged as the funkiest and danceinducing music of all time. What they really mean of course is ‘Can you play Beyonce or Shakira?’ which ironically they CAN’T dance to, instead proceeding to mimic an inebriated rhythm-less pole dancer. Nor would one ever expect a seething punter to be waiting outside the venue afterwards with fists clenched and spitting ‘You said you’d play Elvis and you didn’t!’ Indeed the public can make this most mundane of jobs a dangerous and unrewarding occupation.

Phil Woolsey

To anyone who gave tray spinning a go, or helped me hoover up the evidence of competitive glass collecting: My record = 21 Beaten by a whopping 42 But he was a he, and I am a she, Or so I rationalise to protect my ego.

To the Polish night porters Who I could never beat at pool.

Experts in espionage, They were never bored.

When my lovely waitress and I had clocked out we could hide with them all night if we took adequate steps to conceal our presence, maintaining strict sobriety, lest we blow our cover..

Escape before the breakfast shift arrived was imperative.

Some managers believed our missions to be evidence of their lack of control.

The boss might scowl at them. They feared us.

We could have got the cold shoulder for at least a week!

I suppose I should mention the customers, who were often better with me than I was with them.

I liked the ones who had to stay for a long time.

They wanted beans on toast when they came into the restaurant, not crab ravioli in white wine goop.

They might have gone mad if it wasn’t for us.

Rosy Apples

Factotum & The Black Box present

ROOM 1 MALA (Digital Mystikz) PLUS DJ’S DEADMAN, NEZ & STUART WATSON

ROOM 2 OTTER An evening of reggae, jungle & metal

Saturday 11th October The Black Box 9pm – 2am.

Admission £8.