The Archbishop's Beard

Our Prime Minister, David Cameron, made a speech recently in which he suggested that multiculturalism has failed. He implied that this failure was responsible for the emergence of home-grown terrorism in the UK. He is not an unintelligent man but he comes from a very privileged background and his experience of the diversity of life is sadly limited.

Multiculturalism has been a great success in this country. Compare the relations between different ethnic groups in this country with that in the countries of mainland Europe, such as France where far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, who described the Nazi gas chambers as a ‘detail of history’, came second in the presidential election in 2002; or Italy where the grand-daughter of Mussolini, who has her own quasi-fascist party, declared in 2007 that all Romanians were criminals.

Of course, there are racial tensions in Britain, and there are people who make a living out of the culture of grievance. But you get people like that in every sphere. However, to make a link between these sorts of tensions and the growth of terrorism is quite unreasonable. Particularly when Mr Cameron makes absolutely no mention of our foreign policy, or the wars in which we have spent so much money and lost so many young men trying to arrange the political affairs of other countries to our liking.

The trouble is that David Cameron doesn’t have the kind of complex set of identities that many people experience in contemporary Britain. Consequently he feels threatened by them. Well I suggest there is nothing to be frightened about.

In my own way I am a product of multiculturalism. I was born in this country to fiercely republican Irish parents. I was brought up as a fervent Catholic who was taught by nuns that the best thing that could happen to England would be that it would be re-converted to Catholicism. In assembly we sang hymns like Faith Of Our Fathers, the final verse of which goes like this:

Our fathers, chained in prisons dark,
Were still in heart and conscience free
How sweet would be their children’s fate,
If we, like them, could die for thee

Now if that isn’t an incitement to martyrdom, what is?

Nowadays I see myself as more of a cultural Catholic. I like to think of it like this: if the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury were having a boxing match, I’d be shouting for the Pope. Admittedly, it wouldn’t be much of a fight. Unless the Pope started cheating and pulled the Archbishop’s beard. Now that I would pay to see.

In the same way, if Ireland were playing England at football I would be cheering for Ireland. Why? Because that’s my parents’ culture and I will never turn my back on it. Of course if England were playing France or Italy, it would be a different matter.

Identity is a complex and shifting arena. It is at the heart of so much of our art, literature, music, fashion and cuisine. For centuries this country has been fashioned from multiculturalism. That’s one of the reasons I love it and it’s why I would not want to live anywhere else.

My Parents Were Immigrants

There is a lot of fuss in the UK about immigrants at the moment. This is because (a) we are in a recession and people are looking for a handy scapegoat and (b) there is a general election coming up and it’s a useful lever for manipulating public opinion.

The general feeling seems to be that there are too many immigrants in Britain and the government needs to place more restrictions on them. In this one-sided debate very little mention is made of the fact that our public services are being held together by immigrants, or that immigrants are doing many of the jobs that indigenous British people don’t want to do, like working in the food-processing industry.

My parents were immigrants. They came to Britain because there was no work in their own country. They were not warmly received. My mother told me that when she went looking for accommodation she repeatedly came across signs that read, ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.’

As the child of immigrants I was always conscious of how my parents saw a different reality to other people. The world around them was less real than it was for me. Beneath the thin and shabby world in which they earned their money, glittered the more substantial geography of Home, just out of reach.

I grew up listening to sentimental songs about people leaving home, dreaming of home, returning home. But for me there was no such thing as home. My parents’ country wasn’t home but neither was England. Home was something I had to carve for myself out of my imagination. It’s a project I’m still working on.

Whenever the voices of those who feel with complete certainty that this is their country begin to be raised in righteous indignation, I always think of my parents, keeping their heads down, working hard. My father, whose name was Jack, putting up with being called Paddy by everyone he worked with. My mother cleaning the altar in her local church, taking her troubles to God.

Good Writing

I am half way through the First Draft of my next novel. I know this because the story already exists very clearly in my head. I’m not a writer who explores the story on paper, at least not these days. I explore the story in my head for ages before I set to work. Then I write an outline, merely to remind myself of everything I want to include, since it’s quite easy to forget great chunks.

Working in this way leaves me with the opportunity to work on the writing itself, rather than trying to devise a story and write it in the best possible way at the same time, which strikes me as a bit like cycling down the road carrying a parcel.

When I say that I want to work on the writing I mean that I want to get it as good as I can by my own standards. Everybody has different ideas about this but for me good writing should be almost invisible, like the glass in a shop window, so that the reader only sees the goods on display. I’m not interested in writing that calls attention to itself all the time like some leather clad rock star standing in the spotlight producing endless guitar solos.

As a children’s writer I naturally visit schools now and again. In more than one primary school I’ve had the experience of the teacher saying something like, ‘Now then everyone, I’m sure that Mr Keaney is going to show us how to write using lots of lovely describing words.’ That sort of attitude makes me want to scream, ‘No Mr Keaney is going to do no such thing!’ This is no way to teach our children but of course it comes from the rigidity of the National Curriculum.

Recently, a secondary school asked me to visit and I expressed a certain reluctance because on a previous visit some of the pupils had seemed to have no idea who I was or what I was doing there. I only want to come if you do some preparation for the visit, I said. The teacher sent me back a reply stating that this wasn’t really possible because the curriculum determined what was taught in English lessons and there was no time to deviate from that. What was the point in me coming then, I wondered. Because the school was having a Book Week, she said. So my visit was effectively no more than a box-ticking exercise.

You can’t measure good writing by the number of adjectives used. Nor can you pretend that you are introducing children to literature by having an annual Book Week. These are both simply examples of tokenism. I believe this sort of thing has come about because of political interference in schools. In the UK politicians seem obsessed with micro-managing the curriculum so that it produces a series of statistics. And what is the purpose of these statistics? Purportedly, it is to provide parents with choice. But really it’s just so they can use the figures as part of their own miserable campaign of self-preservation.