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The Irish Times
August 6, 1994
Belfast hosts Ireland's largest community festival
By VICTORIA WHITE
"THERE'S no problem getting publicity for West Belfast if there's a body
found," says Ciaran Quinn, of the Feile an Phobail/West Belfast Festival
committee. "But people don't seem to be interested in a true image of the
place. After seven years of this festival, however, the barriers seem to be
coming down."
Are you all in Sinn Fein, or what?
There are only a couple of questions your average journalist who is not from
the North wants to ask about anything happening in the place. Feeling them
leaping up in your own mind can be a disturbing experience nearly as disturbing
as being asked, abroad, if you know what a condom is, when you say you're from
Dublin. Stereotypes, particularly of the media variety, are stupid and
dangerous, and Feile an Phobail is dedicate eradicating.
"At the time festival was first organised, West Belfast was being portrayed
as a community of savages," says Ciaran Quinn. "We just decided to have a
party." August was picked because it marked the anniversary of the introduction
of internment. We wanted to diffuse some of the negative feeling," explains
Quinn. "Kids had been killed by plastic bullets. We wanted to divert them away
from confrontation with the RUC." Since the introduction of the festival, says
Quinn, there have been no incidents in the area linked with the anniversary.
The festival is now flagged as the biggest community festival in Ireland,
with over 300 events planned for this year's week long bash, which begins
tomorrow. There could hardly be a better showcase for the mingling of down to
earth with high falutin ways for people to enjoy themselves together. Along
with the Bonny Baby Competition at the Brooke Activity Centre, a Scavenger
Hunt, quizzes, discos, and even a Blind Date event, there is an opera
recital headlined by West Belfast born Angela Feeney, the premiere of a new
play by Marie Jones, A Night in November, presented by Dubbeljoint
Productions, and Charabanc Theatre Company's touring comedy, The Vinegar Fly,
by Nick Perry.
Apart from sending out a more positive image of West Belfast with the 5,000
plus visitors to the area which the festival attracts, Quinn and Co. are
dedicated to bringing in events which will be new to much of the audience
"events like the opera or a classical music, which are usually inaccessible to
working class communities," he clarifies.
THIS IS a community, with unemployment averaging 60 per cent, which is deeply
aware of representing a cultural minority. The extraordinary flowering of the
Irish language in the area, to which the festival programme bears witness, has
been one form of self expression the community has found. The impact of 25
years of the Troubles is addressed in events such as La na gCimi, a day
dedicated to commemorating thousands of local people imprisoned in that time,
with exhibitions, videos, and the launch of a collection of testimonies by
Republican prisoners during 1980-81.
Quinn asserts that there is no political censorship in the festival, and
that, for instance, the critic Edna Longley, who has described the festival as
"solipsistic" was asked in to speak last year. There is a sustained attempt to
widen the nationalist issue by "drawing parallels", as Quinn puts it, and this
year there is a feast of Basque food and music, a discussion on the South
African peace process with speakers including Guardian journalists Victoria
Brittain and David Beresford, and the first exhibition by Irish photographer
Kevin McKiernan, of photographs taken when he stayed with Native American
activists during the siege by the FBI on Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973.
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