Rain or shine this is summer, and so there are summer schools or ‘festivals’ - like the west Belfast Féile.
All over the island people who have never met come together around a core of hardy annuals to celebrate a person, an era, a kind of music, a type of writing. The writer Nuala O’Faolain thought the Irish love of summer schools had something to do with the weather but was probably fed by shyness, the unlikely national characteristic many might admit lurks behind our instant friendliness, dissolved often enough by drink alone with no top dressing of culture.
There is nothing shy about Francis Martin Patrick Boyle, aka Frankie, the Scottish stand-up whose scheduled appearance this Friday at the Féile has roused such passions.
The organisers probably thought they had demonstrated cutting-edge taste. Reliably left-wing, ferociously dark-humoured, child of the Glasgow Irish, Boyle ticked obvious Féile boxes and initially was hailed as a major catch. Then the protests began, against his ‘jokes’ about Down’s Syndrome, disability in general, suicide. (His misogyny went without mention.)
Parents holding disabled children by the hand knocked on Féile’s door, Sinn Fein old-stager Tom Hartley protested on behalf of his Down’s Syndrome brother. Féile apologised for hurting feelings but pleaded, with Gerry Adams fronting up the message, that cancelling and refunding tickets would cost more than they could bear. But ‘going forward’ there would be efforts to consult in advance and ‘reach out’, all the right/rights language. Perhaps someone from a disability action group would agree to join the management committee.
Before an anti-censorship argument got its boots on, the sums won. Finance decided, and fair enough. After a 25 year development from modest beginnings, it would have been a shame if defending a single event had shut down the whole show.
The annual arrival of ‘names’, of southern and overseas visitors and of people from elsewhere in the north who usually stay well clear of Belfast and west Belfast in particular, has lifted at least some local spirits. Another product is knee jerk unionist resentment at Féile publicity, from people who do nothing for the self- esteem of the poorest Protestant districts.
There is a separate dislike, some of which might be begrudgery, plus perhaps understandable distaste for a tendency to smugness.
Overheard café conversation between resident of non-west Belfast, and summer returner from long time English exile looking through the café’s Féile programme: "This is some line-up. I wish I could stay for it." Resident, sourly: "Ah there’s good stuff ok but the Shinners are so vain about it." Returner, waving programme: "This would be good though to show some in England it’s a different place now. Some of them don’t know that."
The organisers meanwhile must have breathed out during Saturday night’s standing ovation for Mairia Cahill’s Féile lecture – indicting IRA and Sinn Féin handling of the abuse against her, begun when she worked eighteen years ago in the Féile radio station.
This paper reported her as addressing the IRA team ‘investigating’, because the man she called a rapist was an IRA member, as though the self-appointed investigators were in the audience. She called their behaviour ‘torture.’
Tom Hartley’s comment on the Boyle protests was that there was ‘a fine line between freedom of speech and the rights of those with disabilities’, and he didn’t think Féile would have invited homophobes or racists.
Boyle may turn the protests into material. He published his manifesto on Offence and Free Speech a while ago, after all. A touch plaintively for a sabre-toothed comic, this proclaimed that "causing upset is often the price of trying to reach each other...We have given taking offence a social status it doesn't deserve: it's not much more than a way of avoiding difficult conversations."
There you are, then: the swimmer Rebecca Adlington’s looks, Katie Price’s disabled son, Susan Boyle’s looks, the way some Down’s Syndrome children sound; all essential preliminaries to ‘difficult conversations’.
A review of Boyle in 2010 noticed that the comic ‘giggles like a girl at his own gags’ but ‘deals with hecklers harshly, threatening them with removal by security if they don’t shut up, and shut up now.’ What comic worth the name needs muscle to silence a heckler?
But Féile bouncers moving in on local hecklers at the behest of a visiting comedian is a winning notion. There is room now for people to make their own protest about Boyle on the night, by leaving paid-for seats empty. Or they could always turn up and heckle.
