Review

Bill Meulemans worked in Belfast for eleven years  as Professor of Political Science in Queen’s University. Coming from the United States of America , he was , naturally as an academic and a decent person, curious about how an outrageous  political and religious situation had formed around people in Belfast who were also decent and intelligent, including scholars and church people. He set out  and sent his students out to find what it had done to them and why.  What he found is full of interest and contradiction.

Years ago the Department of Political Science in Queen’s was very different. One academic year might be spent by students studying the political philosophy and systems of ancient Greece, the next perhaps a segment of European, American or world social history. Now it was involved , through teachers like Bill Meulemans, in studying what history, religion, politics  do to ordinary human souls and human behaviour at home . For him and for his students and for those who read the results of their studies it proved a fascinating and sometimes frustrating adventure.

For one thing, one had to read the codes correctly, understanding the meaning of words and phrases which could be as tricky in Belfast as learning what words  to use talking to people in the United States or the Middle East where names , titles and even modes of address of the people to whom you are talking can mean the difference between being courteously helped or sedulously avoided.

Bill and his students had to find their way through this cultural fog in Belfast and did so successfully. This present study is not  the result just of graphs studied, numbers assessed, official reports scanned, it is the result of many, many conversations with many people some of whose occupations the reader may learn and some not. But although the conversations and exchanges are with people of so many kinds there still remains in the book an atmosphere of wonderment and such a preoccupation with the sad fact of communal distrust that one could get the impression that this distrust is the only problem. But this is because we are sharing in  a courteous exchange between people who are unsure, hurt, often angry,  struggling with the contradictions in  their  lives, and who most often  say what they feel  but  are afraid to engage with the real reasons why they feel it.  It is as much a study of people’s reaction to distress and manipulation   as a  description of  the aftermath of a   political crisis in a modern European country . How far is the distress caused by selfish government, how far by people’s unwillingness to live together in peace ?  

The author responds : “This book is about what is inside the heads of Catholics and Protestants since the bombs and bullets no longer dominate the headlines. It is about the reason why they are still haunted by their conflicted memories . It is about why many of them are stuck living in the past.”(p.23). One might think this means  Bill Meuleman’s study would be more at home in the Department of Psychology but the history and present situation of the Belfast people he writes about have too often been  a matter of possession of power, wealth, military bases and in the struggle either for or against this too many people have been hurt. Historians often deal with facts other than  real people suffering the real pain of being pitted against each other whether they  want it or not. In N.Ireland there are   people of perhaps sixty different religious groups and yet they have been successfully corralled by politicians  into two groups Catholic and Protestant, as if the disparate Christian groups did not exist, nor did the Jews, Muslims Humanists and others in N.Irish society.

This book by Bill Meulemans will help  readers to understand the effect this has had on the people who have never been allowed to experience the richness of a fully free community.

BELFAST – BOTH SIDES NOW , Bill Meulemans, (Create Space, Charleston, SC. 2013)