Why I wrote Belfast Girls.

  

As I write this post I’m nursing an injured lower back (don’t ask, something to do with cycling) while listening to the Joe Duffy show on the radio. A woman in Tipperary is describing her eviction from her farm. She owes ACC bank 1.5 million euro. The bank has sent in a team of heavy vehicles and diggers manned by a small army of eleven henchmen. There is also a plough. The plough is – as I write – digging up this woman’s land so that no oil, gas, electricity or water supplies reach her farm, and so that she and her animals will be starved out. This is exactly why I wrote my play, Belfast Girls, why I went to the Great Famine as a subject.

As early as 2009 I saw parallels between contemporary Irish society and the Famine: evictions and repossessions left, right and centre, Irish people being forced to emigrate and being left with no or little support from the people that run their society. During the Famine there was plenty of food and grain leaving Irish ports – this is documented fact. I consider that the draining of the Irish taxpayer in order to pay off the IMF/ECB bailouts, the banks, so that there is no other monies left to run society in a relatively ‘normal’ fashion (whereby aid might be offered to somebody like the woman on the radio who has ploughed her life savings into a farm that has depreciated due to no fault of hers but to the fault of many others – many of whom HAVE had bailouts in the form of NAMA), to be no different from shipping out grain at a time when the people are starving.

While 1848 was the ‘Year of Revolutions’ in Europe (where there were also famines), there was nothing even approaching 'revolution' in Ireland. In his History of Belfast (Blackstaff Press), Jonathan Bardon states

Ireland’s sole contribution to the ‘Year of Revolutions’ was the ‘Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch’, in which a small force of police, firing carbines from a farmhouse in Co. Tipperary, dispersed some fifty insurgents at the end of July.

It is not until after the Famine, in the 1860s, with the rise of the Young Irelanders, that groups of activists and pockets of resistance begin to emerge as a force to be reckoned with in Ireland. This is when the Irish people pledge in word, song and action that they will never allow the Famine to happen again on Irish soil. But I consider that we are letting it happen again, or at least a version of it.

Belfast Girls is a fictional story (based on factual records) about five young women who seek passage on a ship to Australia (where most of our current young emigrants are also headed). En route they discuss and analyse their plight and become radicalised. Via various discoveries, they come to the terrible conclusion that they have, most conveniently, been got rid of from a country they very much wanted to stay in.

Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as an allegory for the McCarthyism of the 1950s. I haven’t quite done that with Belfast Girls. The play is far too angry to be a cool and reasoned allegory; I wrote it because I cannot believe that now, in 2011, Ireland is once again failing its people. And failing them spectacularly. Except that now we do not have the landlords or Britain to blame; the fault is a lot closer to home.