Mike Quille: Land of the Ever Young: An Anthology of Working People’s Writing for Children from Contemporary Ireland has just been published. It is the third book in a trilogy of working people’s writing from contemporary Ireland, edited by you. Can you tell us about the background to the project?

Jenny Farrell: When I began work on the first anthology, Children of the Nation, which had been commissioned by Culture Matters, the big question for me was how to reach out to working-class writers. I realised that there had never before been such a collection of working people’s writing in Ireland.

Until recently, I taught modern Irish literature and over the years have observed that students respond far more enthusiastically if they think a poem has something to do with their lives.

In all three of the anthologies of working people’s writing, the point of view is that things are not as they should be, they are not in the best interest of the working population.

Important themes are homelessness, immigration, the abandonment of women in the mother and baby homes, poverty, but also the fightback, internationalism and solidarity.

There are very many more themes of course, but all of them reflect what if feels like to be disadvantaged, a victim in a society that punishes the poor and rewards the rich.

I wanted the anthologies to be a collective voice of working people — not individual voices, but the voice of a class making a statement about being excluded from the establishment discourse.

Another important consideration for me was that I wished to include Irish language writing, because there is such a strong working-class tradition in writing in Irish, and this is rarely acknowledged even in academic study.

Finally I wanted these anthologies to have a good gender balance and to represent the whole island of Ireland. The fact that there are contributors from both parts of Ireland also highlights common ground between the people living in the North and those living in the Republic.

The Children of the Nation, a poetry anthology, was published in 2019 and was a fantastic success, selling out very quickly. It was launched by Peter McVerry, very well known in Ireland for his outstanding role in championing the cause of the homeless. There are 67 poets in the collection.

The second book, From the Plough to the Stars, is a prose anthology. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the contributions exposed the parasitical captains of industry and their fellow travellers in global finance, and the true value and critical importance of workers’ contributions to our communities.

The third and final volume in the set, Land of the Ever Young, is an anthology of writing for children. All the stories are packed with humanity, tenderness, and wisdom. The authors present children and adults who confront wrongs, challenge superstition and injustice, and who often see further than others around them.

The heroines and heroes in these stories are always filled with a sense of the common good, highlighting the qualities necessary to make society a fairer, better place, a home for a happy future, a Tir na nOg (Land of Youth).

Such a place can only materialise in the absence of wars, of profit-driven greed with its contempt for equality, humanity and the environment — a place where instead the common good is the measure of society.

Children read and re-read stories many times, and they often stay with them for a lifetime, acting as a moral compass. This is what makes literature for children so very important.

The images that accompany children’s stories are also remembered for a long time, and Land of the Ever Young has been beautifully and sensitively illustrated by the artist Karen Dietrich. Her images comment on and expand the humanist themes contained in the texts and help make them truly memorable for the readers, children and adults alike.

We have been extremely lucky that all three anthologies were financially supported by the Irish trade union movement. It is the first time that a literary project of this magnitude has been fully supported by trade unions in Ireland, in recognition of the importance of creativity and the right of the working class to express the wealth of their culture and to articulate their experience of life.

MQ: To conclude then: how can a more equal, communal society or Tir na nOg be imagined and created in the various areas of cultural production and enjoyment?

It is one of the functions of art to explore where we all going. Utopia is not a Never Never Land, but the goal towards which we are progressing. Here and now this is a world that is environmentally sustainable, one free of discrimination, exploitation, poverty and wars.

Every one of us can be involved in help confront the inequities that are at the very core of imperialism.

Ultimately, Tir na nOg will only be reached when the capitalist world we live in is changed into one which puts the common good at its heart. Every effort to defend and expand on democratic achievements, to challenge ruling-class control over all aspects of society, including culture, is a step towards achieving a better life for all.
 
The three Culture Matters anthologies do this by giving voice to the class in whose hands the future lies.

A longer version of this interview is available on the Culture Matters website, www.culturematters.org.uk, as are all three printed anthologies. PDFs of all three books are also available exclusively to readers of the Morning Star for £10, email [email protected] for details.