In November 2018 it was announced that developers associated with Castlebrook Investments had designated that the Cathedral Quarter part of Belfast city centre would be renamed ‘Tribeca Belfast’. Not only is Belfast in every way unlike New York, ‘Tribeca’ itself comes from the construct ‘Triangle Below Canal Street’, rendering it especially nonsensical. ‘Tribeca Belfast’ is not the last time Northern Ireland will be spuriously subject to the torrential politics of capital, and in George Legg's book – his first – we have an historical overview of the said dynamic, interspersed with cultural history, often crystallising on the theme of ‘boredom’.
The first chapter addresses the city of Craigavon, though the principal concentration is on a minor capital (Belfast) and the Antrim hinterland to its north, ultimately struggling for fixed identity in a period of flux. The significance of this book is to frame things in the intersection between economics, culture, and geography. It is a work that raises key questions facing ‘post-conflict’ Northern Ireland, without always delivering on the promise of its intellectual identification. Most, though not all, the key names appear (the work of Stephen Baker, who has commented locally on these contemporary themes, is a notable absentee), thick and fast to reflect the general arguments, with bite-size quotes compartmentalised and contrasted, ‘what Aaron Kelly calls’, ‘For Bourdieu’, the insights of grand theory summarised and condensed. But something analytically remains, more often than not, finally incomplete.
Despite the relevance of the subjects, a jargonistic manner sometimes gets the better of Legg's writing. It makes what is an accessible and deeply important subject occasionally hard to grasp. A further drawback is Legg's introduction of punk music as a concept into an airy conclusion, having mentioned it nowhere else in the book. This is a fascinating subject and one that really deserved its own chapter, especially because, in his own astute phrase, punk spoke, and continues to speak, to ‘the dispossession and disgust that underpin ideologies of capitalist accumulation’ (p. 183).
The stand-out chapter of interdisciplinary balance is the third on Derek Mahon, suitably titled ‘Middle class shits’. It locates the critical intersection between modernity and history, politics and capital, that most exemplifies Legg's original contribution: the ensuing ‘tension between the old and the new’ (p. 60); between the industrial materialism of the past (masking what was serious sectarian division); and the apparent economic ‘potential’ of the present site(s). This is given added weight by Legg's deployment of the uneven intricacies of social class, with a new Catholic middle-class having essentially settled in wealthy Protestant enclaves by the 1990s, arcing up from Seamus Heaney's original ‘generic life of the newly upwardly mobile eleven-plus Catholic’. Throughout this book, Legg commendably pinpoints class politics as intrinsic to Northern Irish character and phenomena with Mahon's poetry providing suitable background to explore pertinent themes of apathy and its critical intersection with ‘boredom’. Enabled by Mahon's peculiar perspective, blurred between working- and middle-class existence, this chapter also identifies the accordant retreat of the Protestant middle-class from political life and leadership; a factor ‘the North’ continues to reckon with.
Another key chapter is the fifth on ‘total history and the H-Blocks’. Here Legg states that it is his intention to challenge what the memory – and, literally, the site – of the H-Blocks has essentially become: ‘history at its most banal: a blank space for multinational investment, a misunderstood location for touristic pleasure, a myopic shrine to terror’ (p. 153). Again, whether this succeeds and hangs together with its focus on cinematic works that have framed the H-Blocks (Steve McQueen's Hunger, Terry George's Some mother's son and Les Blair's H3) is open to question. David Harvey and Michel Foucault get theorised into a valuable point about the redevelopment delivering ‘a tamer – often static – version of its past’ (p. 155), but Legg's discussion of the cinema feels like a separate paper. And there is no follow-up on the eventual fate of the Maze site, now caught, like Northern Ireland itself, in distressing limbo. It would have been worth noting how the plans were politically torpedoed, ironically, by one of the more moderate unionist leaders of recent years, Mike Nesbitt.
Political bearings are sometimes askew amid an otherwise assured approach (Legg seems unaware that ‘special category status’ was enjoyed by both republicans and loyalists, before and – in a different form – after the prison protest). Loyalists, of course, are generally absent from proceedings (despite the way the political crisis tends to begin within unionism), with prison analysis taking place through the dominant ‘resistance’ narrative, passing over critical class politics that would have strengthened Legg's emphasis and chimed with earlier points made in the Mahon chapter on tensions within unionism (pp 68–69).
Legg makes it clear that he distinguishes his overall analysis from Conor McCabe's theory of Northern Ireland's ‘double transition’; this dual process includes the political move from violence to participatory democracy, combined with an economic framework shifting from social democratic principles to one dominated by free markets and neo-liberal economics. Legg clarifies his convincing assessment that conflict and capitalism continue on by other means, even if McCabe's more radical view holds sway in structural, universal terms. Arguably, then, the ‘double transition's’ first strand is liable to revert to type, especially in a time of renewed constitutional wrangling, Brexit, and D.U.P. threats to break the British government they prop up. The connected second strand is only just warming up.
