 I'm very delighted now to introduce to the stage a special guest for this afternoon, his Excellency, the Irish Ambassador in London, Martin Fraser, to say a few words. Hello everybody and thank you all so much for coming to this wonderful occasion in the British Library, a celebration of Irish writing. As ambassador it's a great privilege for me to be here to welcome you all, to welcome the panel that you're about to hear from and very quickly. I'm not going to talk for too long, don't worry. But also all the writers and all the creative people and all the people who help them, support them through publishing them, reading them, talking about them, listening to them. All the people that help us here in London, in the UK and indeed at home as well. Irish writing is a team of Irish ambassadors. Wherever you go in the world Irish writing, Irish literature, Irish writers are known all over the world. They've had a huge impact all over the world and it has a huge impact in London and in Britain as well. And of course we share a common language, albeit the Irish clearly shares a bit better than some others maybe, I don't know. I think I'm paraphrasing somebody badly, but the links between Ireland and Britain of course, which are at the heart of what we do in the Irish Embassy, trying to promote friendship and peace and prosperity in these islands, working together. It's very much encapsulated by the links between the two islands expressed in literature and in writing. And indeed some of the more challenging things as well and I'm delighted to hear earlier on there was discussion of Northern Ireland, Ulster. The six counties, the nine counties, the north of Ireland and a few other places, which are all remarkably similar but somehow different. And you know it's great to see so much emphasis now on Northern Ireland writing as well and Northern Ireland writers. And again you hear some of that already and will later on. I remember when I was being taught economics, which is a non-fiction discipline, my lecture, well, is it? Anyway, there's a lot of economic fiction and I'm the ambassador, I mustn't digress. But I remember my lecture saying to me that if you want to understand something you should really read fiction. And in many ways the blossoming of fiction about Ireland, particularly about Northern Ireland I think is a wonderful thing in recent years. And the blossoming of fiction about a new, diverse, open, mainly tolerant but nonetheless changing and challenged country that Ireland is, is a wonderful thing as well. And I'm delighted the programme today reflects that and programme tomorrow as well. I'd like to thank our colleagues in the British Library for hosting us, the Court of International Literature Festival, the Doyle Hotels who have helped out and everybody else who is associated with this wonderful weekend. And I'd like to thank you all for coming and I hope you enjoyed your history even. Thank you. Thank you, ambassadors. I would also like to acknowledge the amazing support of the embassy throughout this whole project and also Culture Ireland for their terrific support. And now our next panel, Ireland today will be hosted by Patrick Frayne, who many of you would have heard from earlier on talking about the essay. He is, of course, a very popular essayist writer, a columnist of the Irish Times, notably. And we're delighted that he's going to be hosting with us, Wendy Erskine, Emily Pine and Swerd Al Dada. And we also have the wonderful Emma Dabbury, who was the sole, unfortunately, victim of the train strike today. And she is going to be here on the big screen all the way from Bargate where she was stranded today. But very much here in spirit, if not in body, and she'll be participating just in the same way in the conversation. So please welcome our panel. Hi, everyone. I'm Patrick. The subject today is the very small topic, Ireland today, a writer's view, which could go in any direction, but I've got a very able panel here. Swerd Al Dada, who's memoir of her journey from Syria to Ireland to New York to Ireland again, was recently nominated for an Irish Book Award. She's also a data scientist who's worked on migration subjects with UNICEF. Wendy Erskine, Belfast-based author of two excellent collections of short stories, Leet Home and Dance Move, which came out very recently. Very much set in East Belfast. She's also an English teacher. Eibley Pyein, author of the essay collection Notes to Self, and more recently the novel Ruth and Penn. She's also a professor of modern drama and UCD. And all the way over in Marrage, Emma Dabbury, the author, of Don't Touch My Hair and What White People Can Do Next from Allyship to Coalition. She's also an academic and a broadcaster. I'm kind of telling you all their other jobs because when we were kind of talking about this before, Wendy said to me that she didn't think a writer's view is any more interesting than an electrician's or a nurse's view. And I kind of think she's right. And I think in the past a panel like this talking about Ireland today, like 20 or 30 years ago, I think it would have been probably four white male Catholic writers. And the reality now is Ireland's a more pluralistic place. The writing scene is much more diverse. And I think one of the consequences of that are people are much more rightly concerned with the idea that they can't speak for everyone. Whereas I believe Yeats always thought he could speak for everyone. Actually, I'd like to maybe start by talking about that. Emily, you constantly are looking at Irish fiction as a professor of literature. Do you think that the role of Irish writing has kind of changed in that respect, that you're no longer meant to be pontificating from the mountain? I don't know about the pontification, but I do think that, and we were talking about this earlier as well, I do think that the role over the past, say, 30 years has been to lead some of the changes that you're talking about, certainly in terms of changing the idea of Ireland. And so I have been teaching for several years, God actually about 10 years now, and I started out by teaching plays that were set in Magdalen laundries, and then plays about the industrial schools, and then plays about violence against women in Ireland, and other kind of really cheerful topics like that. But noticing how so that first play, Patricia Burke Brogan's play, Eclipse, is from 1990, could not get produced in Ireland, could not get a production in Ireland, and we could say the same about there was no information about abortion, it couldn't travel all of the ways in which people's lives were circumscribed 30 years ago that they aren't now, and how important it was at that time, but also my students, for as much as those things have changed, and the last laundry closed in Ireland in 1996, and we've had both UN reports and a national report, and there's a compensation scheme and so on. Those plays I still teach because that history is still not on the national curriculum in schools. So that's that thing of the work that literature still has to do, and culture still has to do to fill a gap in how people learn and how people know about this Ireland, both past and present. On that subject, Wendy, are you conscious when you're writing stories set in a very particular place, and a very particular time, that you have any sort of political or social responsibility, or is that like throwing too much weight on one writer? I think if you're a writer, I think if you're any kind of artist, that your commitment should just be basically to whatever your particular artistic project or vision is, and that could well be that you want to present a particular social, political, media that you want to make some sort of point, but it could equally be not that whatsoever, and you may wish to write something that is totally divorced from that particular aspect, and that's okay too. In terms of me, I write about quite a circumscribed area, a few streets basically in East Belfast, and really that wasn't anything super schematic, it was really just that I didn't want to do too much research, and this area presented itself to me very, very conveniently. But at the same time, for me, what I do want to reflect, I want to write about class quite significantly, I want to look at the relationship between people's environment and who they are as individuals, those are important things to me. Would I want to criticise someone who didn't want to do what I do? Absolutely not. At the same time though as well, what I'm also hoping with what I do, is that also as it moves beyond local colour literature, I had somebody ask me one time, do you think you'll ever be able to move beyond East Belfast? I find that a strange thing to say, because nobody's going to say to somebody, do you think you'll be able to move beyond New York, will you be able to move beyond London? I don't think there's going to be more complexity of experience somewhere elsewhere. So that's what I'm happy doing. In the context of this actually, it's called Ireland today. That kind of glasses over the fact there's loads of different Ireland's, in a metaphorical sense, but also in a very real sense, there's two different Ireland's, and you're part of one different political bloc up there. It's a terrible thing to say, sorry. But what's your thinking of that? When you hear a title like that, do you feel you're being subsumed into a greater Irish identity that doesn't reflect to you, or do you feel that that's relevant to you? I probably feel both, Patrick. I kind of feel that it's relevant to me. I'm published by Stinging Fly in Dublin, and I would really wonder if Stinging Fly hadn't published me if anybody else would necessarily. So I feel part of that. I'm also quite aware, as well, that these events have to be given some title, one way or another. I end up in quite a lot of alternative Ulster events, which involve three, four writers from Ulster, who maybe have very little in common in terms of what they write about, or in terms of their perspective, but because they're from geographically the same area, they get put together. So I suppose both, really. On the kind of subject of who you are is kind of undiversable from what you write in some way. So at your memoir, it's your story, but there's always going to be political implications to that. When you were writing it, what were you trying to do? Are you conscious that there's some sort of responsibility to reflect the experience of Syrian people who've had to leave, or do you just write your story? I think it started that I wrote it because I wanted to process what I went through. So that was the main reason. And I was angry, depressed, frustrated, and whenever I opened the news, I wouldn't see my story. I would see a million other stories that don't tell the real narrative. So I wanted to change that narrative. I processed the trauma and I wanted to change that narrative and tell a different story, the real story. And the media was only focusing on one small side of that story. And I started writing this book, and I didn't have the intention to go through the political details because you really need an expert in that domain to be able to analyse what happened in Syria. It's way too complicated to put it on an author to write about what happened because it is complicated. And you'll never be able to tell the real story. Everyone will have a different side of that story, especially when it comes to politics. So that wasn't the main focus of it. I wanted to write about the country, the home that I had before the war, and the aftermath of the war on humans, and human stories and lives. So war is just a small chapter of the book, but it's before and after that matters that I wanted to put out there. One of the things that I was kind of... It's a very moving book in general, but one of the things I was kind of interested in is that you said that the only things you knew about Ireland before you started your journey here was from Cecilia Hearn on those? Yes. Right? Which is kind of the roller... It's interesting because it wraps into the roller writing as a way of transmitting identity in place, but could you talk a bit about that? Were you disappointed, impressed by how accurate she was? Actually, yes. So I started reading... The first Irish author I read was Cecilia Hearn, and it was her second book, I think, where rainbows, and I just... I remember browsing it in the bookshop, and I liked that it was written in messages and letters, and I was fond of that way of communicating. So I picked that book up, and I read everything afterwards. And I loved her style, and I'm trying to... I was, I think, 17 years old when I started reading to Cecilia Hearn, and I never thought in million years that I would end up in Ireland, actually. The first thing I did when I settled back in Ireland, settled in Ireland, I went to a bookshop, and I bought that same book because obviously I left that book behind in Syria, so I went and bought her new book from Ireland, and I have it in my bookshelf at home. So I forgot what the question was. I was just intrigued by the idea of a book being a connecting point to a place, and even a book that has no official, a sensible political connection to anything can have a political meaning in a weird way. I'm conscious we've left our mole and our own over on the screen, so I wanted to ask you about... Since you moved to the UK, so when you were growing up in Ireland, Ireland was a very homogenous place, and I was curious about how, since you've moved to the UK, your perception of Ireland and where it is politically and socially has changed. Yeah, it's phenomenal, actually. So I left Ireland, I left Dublin in 1998, and when I left, it was still like a very socially conservative place. It was still extremely homogenous, although that had started to change in the past maybe about two to three years before I left, I started to actually be able to see that it was becoming more diverse, but this was the very, very early stages of that. It is fascinating in that when I was leaving Dublin to come to London, London seemed like this place where... It was so much more freedom, and it just felt so much more socially progressive, and Ireland and Dublin felt like the antithesis of that, and over the years that have passed, the decades that have passed since then, it's like there's been almost this complete reversal. Actually, Ireland seems far more of a beacon of the amount of things that have transformed in the country to transform it from that place that I'm describing that I left, and the way things have so badly deteriorated in this country. It's just remarkable. It feels like there has been this huge reversal. In terms of transference of positions, and then in terms of... Was there another part to the question? I feel like you asked me. Just how your perspective has changed, but also the fact that Ireland would have been a very homogenous, white, non-diverse society, and you were moving to one that wasn't. Did that... Was that something that had an impact on how you thought about the place? Or had you all those thoughts already? Obviously, you had some version of them already. Sorry, did what have an impact? The change from a place that was very homogenous at the time to a place that was much more multicultural. I remember having a real sense of being like... Well, if Ireland kind of had more... If I wasn't such an anomaly there and didn't feel like such a freak there, I was like... Basically, I was like, if Ireland had black people, I would just stay there. Then I left, and I kind of left around the time that development started to happen. It was really like... The timing was quite interesting. But I remember a few years ago looking home, thinking about home and being a bit like, oh, what am I doing here? I'm just like... A lot of the things I felt that had pushed me into leaving were no longer... Were no longer so pronounced. And I had a real sense of feeling like I should actually be... I should actually be back at home. And when lockdown happened, and so I left London basically like a year ago, and during lockdown, we decided to leave London, and I was ready to go anyway. I really, really, really, really wanted to move back to Dublin, and it was looking like that's what we were going to do for a while. But then, and I'm sure we'll get to this with later questions, but I'll just flag it now. The cost of houses in Dublin is so prohibitively expensive that moving back to Dublin for me was like completely out of the question. So I... So we did leave London, but we didn't... I haven't gone home, I'm still in the UK in Margate, which is beautiful, and I'm obsessed with Margate, actually. However, I do have... I say a constant. I actually do have a constant sense of longing for Ireland, but I feel that's kind of like... I don't know, I'm going to say that's... That is quite a common characteristic, I think, of migration. I was about to say that's probably how everyone feels, but I don't imagine it is how everyone feels, but I know it is... It's not unusual to feel that way. But then that sense of longing, but then being like... I don't know, what would it look like to live there again? It's such a different place to the place that I left. I feel absolutely formed by Dublin. I feel so rooted in being a Dubliner. But to fully live there permanently again, it's nerve-wracking. I don't know. If I could have afforded a house, I would have done it. I didn't have... I think there's an appetite to talk about housing, so we might get onto that in a little bit. Emily, I wanted to ask you about just some of the stuff that's been touched on already about social change over the last few years, and I think we were on a panel about the essay earlier, and we were talking about how books like Notes to Self, your book of essays, to some degree it's kind of linked to those changes. So there was like... That came out around the same time as a referendum and a referendum on abortion, repealing the Eighth Amendment, both of which revealed that Ireland was more than ready for both of those things, and there was actually a conservatism amongst politicians. But when you were writing your essays, did you have a sense that you were, I think, in any way about those things, or again, like, what is the responsibility of a writer to... Yeah, I'm going to say I'm with Wendy on the sense that I didn't feel that I had a responsibility, except to be as truthful as I possibly could, and to be, yeah, to be as honest. That was my project, really, in it. The book, when Notes to Self came out, I cannot imagine it having the same... It was kind of an extraordinary moment for me, and for the book, and for the country. No. It had been... I mean, 2018, it was like after the referendum for equal marriage, it felt like a different place the next day. It did. It just felt happier and better, and like the majority had transformed things and said... And Panty Bliss was talking about this recently in her one women's stage show, and she had campaigned hugely in that referendum, and she said it's one thing to hope that you're accepted, and then it's another to know that you're accepted, and that transformation was absolutely huge for her, and I felt exactly the same after the abortion referendum, and I campaigned door to door, talking to people, and I had campaigned in the 1990s divorce referendum as well, and I remember people on the doorsteps in 2018 saying, oh, well, what will happen if abortion is legal? I said, everybody said the same about divorce, and the family has not fallen apart, the marriage rate has increased. To think about this doesn't equal crisis, and I thought it was a really interesting conversation to be having. But the other side of that kind of happy news is then the kind of personal cost of it was that I wrote about in an essay about my experience of being denied a medical abortion, because it had happened before the referendum and before it had been legalized, and it was a kind of really strange moment of exposing something deeply private for myself and my partner and our families, but also a weird solidarity with everybody who was speaking out and talking about their experiences. And so, yeah, I think when you're writing, but also when you're publishing, and then when you're talking about it, you tread these very fine lines between trying to be a private individual and then understanding the kind of public impact of the act of speaking, whether that's in writing or on a doorstep talking to somebody, asking them for their vote, asking them to vote for you. I think that thing about, I think in Ireland's people were kind of hoping and believing that things had liberalized, but in both those referendum people got evidence of that. You'd have for years kind of conservative columnists saying, oh, middle Ireland isn't ready for any of this, and clearly I was at Tara Flynn's one woman show, which you saw as well, and she was talking about, she had campaigned a lot, told her story about having an abortion, and she actually felt quite depressed when she realized that the country, not only was the country with them, the country would have been with them 10 or 15 years earlier if politicians hadn't been so conservative about it. So there's a kind of, there is a strange melancholy to that. I was kind of curious about, as somebody who's studied writers, and kind of teaches writing. Yeah, I still pontificate, by the way. So your book, I can see how you could very much make a case that, oh, it's very much in tune with the times, and it's like clearly what she's trying to do, is you kind of sometimes look at how writing is analyzed, and you go, now, actually, they were probably just writing about themselves. Yeah, absolutely, and my funniest anecdote is nothing to do with Irish writers, but actually it's about Tom Stockard, and he was being interviewed once, and the interviewer asked him about his pattern of migration, and his family's move, and how English was not his first language, and how there have been all these different languages in his life, and is that why he became a playwright who was just fascinated with words and with puns, and he listened to the interviewer, and he said, that's, yeah, that's brilliant. And he said, but my brother is a dentist. And I just love that idea that, yeah, yes, yes, it is, I think, the times, and it is the context, and yet we are also individuals making choices about which directions we want to go in. When the context of Northern Ireland, there's a very different kind of history of change, right? So I was kind of curious, when you look at the last 10, 15, and I guess particularly since Brexit, what are your own kind of, what's your own sense of where Northern Irish society is, or is it, and again, is the problem that it's a load of different societies, and it's hard to continue? I think that's always the way it is, that there's a load of different societies for deaf nut, and what we need is we need an assembly that actually is operational. And there's so many people that want to live in a kind of orderly, civilised kind of a way, but we just don't have the leadership that is necessary for the job, basically. Is there a similar, because in the north so much is to do with the assembly and so much is to do with the legacy parties and all the rest, but say that kind of movement of social change that the south has seen. It feels like that's happening too in the north, but it's less discussed because other things rise to the fore. Yeah, I think so. I think it's absolutely like that. Do you, again, back to that question of the responsibility of writers to reflect that? Do you feel that your books are having an educational effect on people in the south? I don't know. It's a really hard one, because I suppose some of the characters in my stories, it's absolutely intrinsic to their experience that they live in a particular part of Belfast. So, for example, I think of one like Lady and Dog, where we have a woman who's fallen in love with the wrong person twice. So, first time round, she fell in love with a married UDR man as a teenager. And then second time around, she falls in love with a guy who is a Gaelic player. And both times, she can't ever express how she feels to anyone. And in some ways, I suppose, she's from a community that in some ways is kind of quite often in the media ridiculed a little bit, you know, that anybody that's from a, you know, even a small unionist tradition is, you know, they're stereotyped as, you know, super narrow minded, borderline racist at times, homophobic. And, you know, people can be all those things as well. But this is maybe a person that people could see that beyond these very local sort of specificities, this is somebody as well who is a complex and interesting character. So there's that dimension to it, but it's never really a conscious thing that I'm ever thinking, okay, so let's try and humanise, you know, unionist women in their 60s or whatever, or 50s. But at the same time, you know, there'll be other characters and it's totally irrelevant to their story that they're from a particular place. And I suppose that's what I'm always trying to sort of guard against, that we say a sort of a homogenous Northern Ireland experience or North of Ireland experience that there's a kind of homogenous Troubles experience that this is how it was for people in the 1970s. Well, that depended very much on where you lived, you know, and what social class you were and all sorts of different variables. So it just depends, I suppose, on the story. Do you think Irish people are often very dismissive of British people's lack of necessarily understanding of the mutual histories between the countries? But I think there's also a thing that people in the South are a bit in denial about how they've had a historic lack of interest in the North. When you are engaging with Irish people from the South, do you find yourself coming up against a lot of lack of knowledge and ignorance? Well, yeah, I do sometimes, but I wouldn't say it's exclusive to people from the South, you know? I would think it would be reasonably widespread that it seems a complicated thing, a messy thing, people aren't interested, people think, well, sure, you've moved on since, you know, it's okay now since the Good Friday Group, whatever. So I don't think it's anything exclusive to people from the South. It's funny sometimes when you speak to people and it's people that have been to, you know, all these European capitals and they've never been to Belfast. People from the South, I do think that is unusual. There's a weird kind of sense that you know those pictures that they put on the weather reports in Britain and North is like a country on its own and there's nothing connected to it. Like there's a kind of sense of that generally. And it makes no sense on the weather report. It's your weather tomorrow, right? There's another thing, so like, Ireland today is a pretty complicated subject, but there's also this thing, Ireland can be quite solipsistic and I think everywhere it can be quite solipsistic, kind of obsessed with its own kind of internal battles and politics. And I think what I loved about your book is you bring in the story of people who are coming to Ireland, there's a mass migration crisis. You've written, you've worked as a data scientist and you've looked at it and you've kind of humanised it a lot in your book. Do you feel when you came to Ireland that Irish people had an understanding of the fact that there is a migration crisis, a lot of people moving all over the world. Ireland is, I mean, historically, Ireland is very into the fact we were at an impoverished place that, you know, but the reality is now Ireland is a country that's doing okay, apart from housing, which we'll go through in that. But what was your kind of experience of coming to Ireland and maybe thinking and writing about migration in a country that was really kind of safe, stable and maybe complacent? I think it was a good experience because people could relate when I talk about leaving home or not belonging or the migration crisis because it is in the history of the Irish and when I lived for a while in New York and went to Ellis Island there was this museum about the Irish migration and the racism that was against the Irish in the U.S. and I felt that they could relate feeling that racism against them and feeling maybe not welcome and sometimes so that helped actually them empathize when they would know I'm from Syria. Of course occasionally I get those weird comments sometimes when I say I'm from Syria because of the media, because of the negative stereotypes that always make people think that Syrians are only living in tents or they are always cold freezing to death because of all those fundraising campaigns and there are people freezing to death in tents but that's not the full story there are other stories I get comments like your English is too good for Syrian or you don't look Syrian or you're too white for Syrian I get weird comments sometimes but the general reception was that people were sympathetic and apathetic when they would know I'm from Syria and they would be welcoming and there would be questions concerned questions and I remember from the first day when I was at the airport the passport officer and there is a huge scene in the book about that when I was always worried that he would be questioning why I'm here or that he would kick me out maybe or not allow me to enter but he was genuinely concerned and he was nice and he wanted to make sure that my family is okay and he was welcoming and every time I go to Ireland if I'm traveling and I go back to the airport they tell me welcome home when they check the passport and I always love that sentence cool we're going to have to move on to something more depressing but actually I think we should move on to housing like in Emma in your book what white people can do next one of the really interesting arguments you make is there's a need for a more collectivist left that kind of thinks more structurally about problems now one of the things that has happened in Ireland over the last ten years in particular is what Ireland used to be dominated by two centre-right parties they're now in a coalition together and there is a growth of left wing parties so the main one being Sinn Fein is that the type of collectivist thinking is that something that you think ties into your book or is that a different kind of in the context of Ireland is that the type of collectivist left move you need well yes in the book I try and shift the emphasis I'm trying to shift out of the logic of kind of liberal mainstream anti-racism that roots everything in the kind of dynamic of privileged politics and individual interpersonal privileges and grievances about that and saying look the energy that is focused on this does not have the capability of transforming social relations in the way that they need to be transformed in order to not just combat racism but to also deal with the environmental crisis and to deal with the deeply entrenched poverty and inequality that just diminishes the life opportunities of so of so many people in all over the world and I was also very frustrated by how a lot of the social justice movement at the moment are actually pretty much absent of any class analysis and they focus very much on particular aspects of identity but without having class analysis and without having any kind of rigorous attention paid to the ways in which capitalism capitalism determines social relations so they're very they just don't have the I feel like they're not kind of world making practices so I think one of the places where that kind of change that needs to happen can occur is at the political level where you have politicians and governments who are committed to ensuring a decent standard so basically one of the proposals of the book is rather than this emphasis on privilege interpersonal privilege we actually need to redistribute resources and we need to look at everything from housing to wealth access to opportunity and how that can be more equally distributed throughout our societies which you know at the moment like wealth is just consolidated increasingly consolidated with kind of increasingly small and increasingly obscenely wealthy so it's I was reading a statistic today that 40% of I mean this is the UK but 40% of families people in Britain are living in poverty or financially precarious you know it's really it's really stark so yeah I think politicians that are political parties that are committed to actually tackling that entrenched inequality are very much what is needed in this moment, yeah. In Ireland it's all centered around housing and like you said you want to well the big factor of why you didn't come back was housing and I think the rise of Sinn Fein and the left wing parties I think it's sometimes misunderstood in Britain as something to do with nationalism but it's almost entirely to do with housing I was kind of curious I'm only like you're teaching students and I'm kind of curious about you know people leaving the country because they can't find somewhere to live or they're stuck at home with their parents is it something that affects the young people you're teaching yeah absolutely it's another and are you seeing that political kind of shift it's the number one issue I would say in terms of educational access right now and third level access and so I have never seen attendance solo in my classes whether we're talking about big lecture courses of 300 students or small seminars of 25 students it is now standard and it's not just that I'm a deeply unpopular teacher but it would now be standard and it's not just exclusive to UCD either I'm talking to colleagues across universities in Ireland and also colleagues in the UK as well and it's part of it as a post COVID moment right where people got used to learning online and but most of it is cost of living and so I have students who are just commuting from to UCD in Dublin from you know the midlands like from Kildare is normal from you know they're all still living at home and so they have two areas of classes they have two areas to get there and two areas to get home and during those six hours they can't earn anything and that's the crucial thing and it's incredibly incredibly difficult to justify saying to them we have to come for this class when I can see the hardship that that causes and one student said to me about UCD she said it's like going to a casino it's so expensive and you know it's a problem in terms of lack of grant support it's a problem in terms of social housing more generally but also specifically focused on student housing it's a problem with individual universities but it's really weakening a connection between between all of also the other thing as well my partner always says the learning that you get in college is about 30% what happens in classrooms 30% what happens outside of it and they're not getting any of that and that's got a real knock on effect for the bonds that they don't get to create and the lives they don't get to live outside of home and all of that so yeah they find it very depressing so I find it very depressing Do you see a politicisation amongst them? I do in lots of ways so the way a benchmark was for it was when I started teaching a new city in 2008 which I liked to think was like five years ago I was teaching a first year class and called writing the body and I thought quite naturally in one of the first classes I said so okay so we're all feminists here and got the syforist objection to that statement right and that has totally changed so now everybody wants to talk about feminism everybody wants to talk about racism and this is an intersectionality and this is a class actually this is amazing it was the other day we were doing a play The Fall from South Africa which was devised by students at the University of Cape Town about bringing down a statue of Cecil Rhodes and decolonising the curriculum and decolonising the university and so as an exercise what we did with the students and say okay right let's start let's workshop what would you write your protest play about and housing was what they said Wendy like you teach younger kids are you seeing I'm veering towards a sunny eyed view of the future are you seeing reasons to hope in younger kids are you seeing a kind of a different perspective on society than we have or are they a bit ground down by circumstance I mean I would see kids interested in all the things that you've just talked about Emily and so from that point of view absolutely that's a positive thing I mean in terms of housing in the north I think Belfast is much more expensive than it used to be but one of our issues would be I suppose you would say that the housing is essentially quite segregated which does poses challenges for the future and no matter what ideas the kids might have themselves they're still in this structure so sort of a almost like a centrifuge a force that kind of is pushing people apart in terms of some aspects of education also in terms of housing broadly speaking though I feel really positive about the kids that I work with I think COVID has hit them hit them hard but I think I think they'll be okay we're going to go to questions shortly but I did want to ask you what kind of gives you what would you like to see happening in Ireland in the next while what makes you hopeful that you started with some hope there and it gave me some hope so do you have a sense when you look around Dublin where you live now that there are things you'd like to see happening things you hope will happen the health system you should have just had a list of things since we moved from the health system I hope one day it will get better that was one of the biggest shock for me in Ireland to be honest the health system could you talk about why it was such a shock what was the thing that you were surprised with I think the first time was when we had to go to the emergency room just for a glass cut in the finger, my husband and we stayed overnight for more than 12 hours just to be seen and then we were seen by someone junior he wasn't sure what he's doing and it was very very not very professional service and we learned the lesson like never go to A&E just wait for it to be better or go to your GP the next day we learned that the hard way and then over the year going through my birth as well for my child that was terrible the mental health services we are on a waiting list to see specialists that's taking years I still can't believe someone can stay on a waiting list for years to be seen by a specialist for any kind of service it's all about the commons the public resources the state that we should own as a state am I just on that question what are the things what are the things you'd like to see happening in Ireland politically and socially I'd echo that about the housing and the health service even with the NHS on its knees it's like incomparable I'm shocked when I go home my hopeful moment is that I think that there is a degree of and we were talking about this earlier on various panels actually there's a degree of compassion in some of the public conversations that are happening so it's appalling that we still have a direct provision system but it is incredibly hopeful I think that the conversations around direct provision and around Ukrainians coming to Ireland has been much more type of conversation it's so far from perfect but I think people's ability to care and there is something about being and this is linked to what Emma was saying there is something about being in a small society which 30 years ago made that those conversations impossible and now makes them highly possible because of the shift that's happened and I think that's that's certainly a really positive thing it's connected to as well we were talking on the essay panel earlier about things that were unsayable but once somebody writes an essay or speaks openly about abortion about being gay or wanting to be married like it suddenly opens the doors and loads of people talk about it and again that's part of the rule of literature so one of the things that I have been you know yeah troubled by is like I've witnessed like a level of policing at events that are populated events that have like a lot of young black Irish people going to them being policed in a way that I've never seen anything policed in Ireland before like I was going out I remember going out like you know going out all the time as a teenager and there would be no police and anything that we'd go to and I think there's very very heavy police presence at things where there's black teenagers which I just find shocking and really alarming and it really actually depresses me that relationships between black people and the police from other parts of the world it seems a kind of maybe being reproduced to a degree in Ireland and there's really no need for that to be the case because I really just don't think we have to import those kind of racialized dynamics from other parts of the world so that saddens and worries me on a positive note and a really really positive note like I think that what I'm seeing in terms of like you know this kind of renaissance of like Irish culture and Irish language that's happening and the way it's like there's this great interest in the Irish language and it's like you know really cool now you know to be interested in Irish, to be speaking Irish or to be learning Irish in a way that's so markedly different like from when I was in school and then the possibilities that exist or the possibilities that are created from looking at the world from looking at reality from looking at social relations from looking at like identity and our relatedness to our entanglement you know with the natural world and with the environment from looking at all of these things from an Irish language perspective you know is ripe with potentiality and possibilities that don't present themselves you know through approaching the world through the logic of English I think that development is really like incredibly exciting and I think that kind of process of you know decolonisation like a cultural decolonisation that is that is facilitated by that is just a really exciting development you know that's kind of currently happening at home Cool I think we better go to audience questions because we don't have that much time left Does anyone have any questions for the panel like you can ask anything Thank you for a great discussion I just wanted to ask about moving forward in Ireland so here with Brexit one of the key drivers for that was kind of a backlash against immigration this sense that citizens of nowhere coming into the UK were really progressing but the indigenous British weren't necessarily and do you think in Ireland in particular in Dublin with the housing crisis with big tech companies coming in a lot of immigration from Europe and elsewhere and I guess do you think that they could be that same backlash against I guess these citizens of nowhere coming and kind of maybe making it more difficult to live actually from hand I think that traditionally politics has been just my take has been shaped slightly differently I think Sinn Fein are a very complicated party that people have a lot of different views on but one of the positives is that they are a postcolonial nationalist party which means that they've never really adopted the kind of more far right stuff and they've kind of taken up the space in the south of Ireland that would normally be a kind of might have a kind of right wing backlash on the other hand we should definitely not be complacent about those things there is a housing has created there's an awful lot of right now in Dublin there's a load of far right demonstrators of infiltrated inner city Dublin to complain about housing for refugees and it's always it's there in the edges for sure I do think the relationship to Europe is fundamentally different and that Ireland's kind of movement out of the dark ages has been linked to its membership of the European Union and that sense of identifying as being European is incredibly important and the and the values that go with that and those values are about progressive like outwardly looking and connect it connectivity and relate like identity being relational as opposed to separational I think that Bedrock has been really important since like the early 1990s and the EU Supreme Court rulings around women's right to travel for abortion and legalisation of homosexuality in 1993 those things wouldn't have happened without the EU and so there isn't the sense that there is in a lot of the rhetoric about let's get back to basics or whatever the phrase is now but like make it great again that was awful before as I'll go back to that and even politicians rhetoric around the EU like in Britain it's kind of like the standard Irish politician was I went to Europe and I got a load of stuff so the talking but it is different does anyone else want to comment on that any other questions thank you so much maybe this is a good follow up to what Emily Pine was just saying what role do you see for a folk in the Irish diaspora so for example someone like me whose parents came to London in the 60s and then now my sons who identify very from a very early age as London Irish and that kind of postcolonial analysis of identities is very common where we live in Hackney wherever you're from so I just wondered because many of us are now proudly carrying our Irish EU passports so much more attention on the part of ourselves to the links with Ireland but I wondered if you saw any developments there from where you are in Ireland I mean I think we all grinned quite a lot when we saw the passport applications go through the roof right it did feel like I mean I I don't know why suddenly it became the spokesperson because you mentioned you I think there's an interesting thing about the Irish relationship the diasporas because you know like it's even had a huge impact on Northern Irish politics because the number of Irish American politicians who strongly identify with their Irish roots but I think there's also a kind of strange relationship that the state has I've written about this before where it's kind of like let's get as much money as possible from the rich diaspora or there's a lot of talking up of the diaspora without maybe always having the meaningful links with them there could be more meaningful links Something that I noticed was quite interesting when I was teaching in the states earlier this year I was like a chair of Irish studies at Villanova University and something that I observed that I hadn't hadn't seemed so pronounced at all when I'd been in America previously was actually quite a lot of black Americans who have Irish ancestry so are also part of the Irish diaspora in a way that you know hasn't been acknowledged or recognised actually like a real rise in interests in yeah Irish ancestry amongst black Americans and kind of conversations happening in those spaces about being part of the Irish diaspora I think there's a new there's an organization that's been set up and there's different yeah you know kind of academics of Irish and black or African American black American academics who also have Irish ancestry and the way that diaspora is being kind of recognised or acknowledged and there's also an interest I think maybe it was kind of a taboo seeing in certain ways but yeah there's definitely conversations happening there which I think is obviously from my work that's really interesting I think we maybe have time for one or two it used to be that historically people would go to university from the north from Northern Ireland and then they would never return and they would regard this as a lucky escape you know that this was their escape route out of the place but I think in more recent years there have been more and more people who have spent time somewhere else and then have returned and I think that's wonderful I think the more people that do return the better so if you're thinking please do come we'll sort out the house unless you're a millionaire I think we probably have the time for one more question there was a girl sorry to point at you I know you had your hand up earlier if we have a microphone for down here I think this has to be the last one they don't usually have to come on to stage and say stop yes sorry it's not much of a question but more of an observation because I come from a country where as I want to mention its name but you probably know what country I'm speaking about that's lately things have really gone to shite and we had a massive abortion ban we have a massive inflation whatever I mean when I'm hearing you speaking about the LGBTQ rights about the abortion about everything I can see that there is still hope so thank you for that oh wow thanks a million for coming and thanks to this amazing panel particularly Purama who's on the screen