Laura
As someone who is Liverpool Irish, it’s a cultural touchpoint each year to work on Liverpool Irish Festival and see how the music industry is doing. Post referendum, being Irish in the UK feels forever changed.
I wrote this for BidoLito! a couple of years ago about Irish culture and whether we’re focusing on the old or the new.
Bido Lito Final Say – the old versus the new
Self-identity: traditional vanguard or contemporary new wave? This year’s Liverpool Irish Festival considers both, today.
A tension rankles between the traditional vanguard and today’s ‘new wave’. Reflected in culture, multiple understandings of history and our communication choices, the struggle to understand generations before and after our own is often at the root of why we create: to tell our story. In the centenary year of the Easter Rising and the year of Brexit – two defining and connected moments shaping Ireland, Britain and Europe – the tension between new and old is of the zeitgeist.
Tension isn’t necessarily negative. It can be the propellant needed to push beliefs and society forward, to making new ground and moving past outdated thought. Consider last year’s majority vote supporting gay marriage in the Republic of Ireland – a powerfully progressive statement that would have been wholly unimaginable at the time of the Eater Rising. It demonstrates that we can take something traditional – marriage – and inject it with a contemporary spark – equality! – to create something new, showing that tension can create something warm, friendly and downright convivial. We need to celebrate these stories to keep moving forward.
So, what is ‘a story’? Literally, a story is “a narrative designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the receiver”. Stories allow us to understand personal positions, picture individual environments and reflect and share our histories, differences and similarities. They state our identities. Post-Brexit, our stories could be more important than ever, which informs what 2016’s Liverpool Irish Festival is about: bringing Liverpool and Ireland closer together. What could be more convivial than that?
The Everyman’s Street Café will provide the social hub for the festival this year, providing a small library of Irish materials and a space for people to meet, talk about the festival events and make friends. The event holds multiple stories ripe for sharing, discussing and reconsidering. One hundred years since James Joyce’s landmark tome A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, the Ambassador to Ireland, Dan Mulhall, Professor Frank Shovlin of the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies, and other academics will discuss its significance and legacy. Scadán – a new Irish story and production from Liverpool and Irish writers, actors and producers – explores five female stories on an Irish island, 100 years ago.