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| Not everything I saw on TV was so benign |
It is 2017. We are living in interesting times. We wonder how history will judge us. The whole
world is crazy, and here in Northern Ireland, where we are good at crazy, where
our very existence, clinging to the edge of the UK, the edge of Ireland, the edge
of Europe, is somehow preposterous, political scandal and the breakdown of
power-sharing lead to a snap election.
I am enraged. I am bruised
by years of voting and never getting what I voted for. I am saddened that every
election in Northern Ireland seems to polarise us more. I want to hide until
it’s over and then hide some more. I want to tell myself not to look at the
screen.
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| SF using 1918 posters |
But funnily enough I am
writing a novel about the election of December 1918. When women in Britain
voted for the first time in parliamentary elections, and, in Ireland, when Sinn
Fein won the landslide that led – after another bloody war – to an independent
Ireland and eventual partition. The novel is for teens, and it’s been hard to make
the election exciting. Suffragettes are
exciting, but that was an earlier story. My heroine lives in rural Ireland, and
her desire to change the world is hampered by that, as well as by the fact that
everyone tells her the battle has been won. I love my heroine, Stella, who is
braver than I. I love her determination and fighting spirit and how she grows
to understand that yes, she can change the world, but not alone, and not overnight.
It’s strange, perhaps, to be
influenced by a fictional character of one’s own invention, but that’s what happened
to me when it was announced that there would be NI Assembly elections on 2
March, only ten months after we had last gone to the polls. I’d recently joined the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, the
progressive, non-sectarian party I’d always voted for, and had met the local
association, a diverse lot of people who embodied the desire for a new, modern
Northern Ireland. But was I prepared to get properly
involved? To tramp the streets, knock on doors, give out leaflets, ask for
their votes for our candidate? To risk doors slammed in my face? I would speak
on a stage in front of a thousand people more happily than I would knock a
stranger’s door.
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| Winifred Carney, my heroine's heroine |
Stella
would do it, I thought, and I signed up. As I canvassed in the February frosts
and rainstorms, I thought of the women who had fought for my right to do this.
I remembered Stella’s heroine, the republic socialist and suffragist Winfred
Carney, who stood in 1918, in an east Belfast ward she had no hope of winning.
Our candidate did
brilliantly. There were five seats available and it was a close fight between
him and a bigger party for that last seat. Turnout in our constituency was up
by more points than in any other. For a few hours, there was the cruelty of
hope, and even when it was dashed, we can say that we moved things forward.
Now the election is over and
the result is, depending on how you look at it, a depressing reaffirmation of
the status quo of division and suspicion; or the opportunity for real progress.
Only time will tell. The election of 2017 might turn out to be as significant
as that of 1918, or it might not.
Once again I have been aware
of living through history. But this time I learned that being engaged feels
much better than being merely enraged. Deeds, not words, as the suffragettes would have reminded me.
