Given its reputation as a place apart, post-war Northern Ireland appears to offer a most inhospitable terrain for the transformative project of modernity to take root. If modernity embodied the hope of a better future through a radical break with the past, Northern Ireland, with its famously blind adherence to entrenched tradition, not least the absolutes of religious faith, seems its very antithesis. Yet the same powerful forces creating the conditions for modernity on the global stage were making a significant mark on Northern Ireland’s political and social landscape, both in the public realm and the private sphere.
Whilst historians highlight the official rhetoric of modernity as expounded by politicians and planners, other powerful currents of modernity were emerging, expressing a widespread enthusiasm for change and progress from below. The reception of modernity into the fabric of regional life was largely determined by Northern Ireland’s complex relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland had been broadly subject to the same mobilizing ideology of a progressive ‘People’s War’ against fascism. Beyond official propaganda, the war was perceived in the popular imagination as a struggle to remove the old political class and the failed systems that had caused the poverty and unemployment of the 1930s. Inspired by visions of ‘building a New Jerusalem’, Britain’s post war modernization drove the creation of the Welfare State and related developments in education, social policy and Keynesian economics.
In a similar vein, architects and planners, drawing on the work of their European and American contemporaries, imagined radically different forms of private and public space in which new modes of living were to be consciously created. Although Northern Ireland’s embrace of modernity reflected many of these wider British themes, the experience was distorted, refracted through its own peculiar conditions and distinctive political structures. For example, Unionist hostility towards the introduction of the Welfare State in the late 1940s often expressed explicitly sectarian attitudes towards the potentially disloyal Catholic poor, defined as the undeserving beneficiaries of the system. This simultaneous absorption of, and resistance to, modernity reached its apogee during Terence O’Neill’s government in the 1960s. In drawing on the fashionable rhetoric of Harold Wilson’s white-hot technological revolution O’Neill seemed, both at the time and retrospectively, to fully justify his reputation as a modernizing reformer. Conscious technocratic intervention was placed at the heart of his project: “Our task will be to transform the face of Ulster. To achieve it will demand bold and imaginative measures… Northern Ireland… [can] capture the imagination of the world.
Policies that combined state action with multi-national investment in new industries obviously resonated in a region where traditional industries were in terminal decline. Indeed, beyond the rhetoric, the Northern Irish state’s re-articulation of the universalist language of modernity in its own provincial voice resulted in major policy changes in civic planning, housing, regional and economic development. By the mid 1960s, from the expansion of public sector and local authority housing in Greater Belfast to the development of the new town of Craigavon and the creation of the New University of Ulster, Northern Ireland’s future as a successful, modern society seemed assured. However contemporary critics and later historians have identified contradictions at the heart of O’Neill’s technocratic programme, explaining his commitment to reform as the triumph of style over the substance of modernity.
Allegations of sectarian bias arose from decisions in housing and development planning, whether the dedication of the new town of Craigavon to one of Unionism’s founding fathers or the New University of Ulster’s location in a staunchly unionist area. Consequently, many people concluded that ‘modernization’ in the Northern Irish context was just another stratagem in the region’s zero-sum game of communalized politics. The limitations of O’Neill’s reformism and the local conditions that ultimately determined its character were starkly revealed in a celebrated interview he gave after leaving office in 1969, just as the Northern state began its descent into chaos: “ It is frightfully hard to explain to Protestants that if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house, they will live like Protestants, because they will see neighbours with cars and television sets. They will refuse to have 18 children, but if a Roman Catholic is jobless and lives in the most ghastly hovel, he will rear 18 children on National Assistance. If you treat Roman Catholics with due consideration and kindness, they will live like Protestants…
If these conservative tendencies provoked cynicism, the lived experience of modernity was proving to be more authentic and profound. Buying cars, moving onto new estates and with new worlds opening up through television and travel, for the people of Northern Ireland the adventure of modernity was both enticing and unsettling. Equally significant in the political and economic sphere, new ideas and international models as diverse as the struggle for black civil rights in the United States, the liberalizing impact of Vatican II and modernist housing projects across Europe were to have a major impact on the ways modernity was being absorbed and experienced in the North. Colliding with the immovable structures of the Unionist status quo, however, these new ideas and dynamic forces were soon to give rise to even more disruptive forms of modernity that would ultimately explode onto the streets.
Northern Ireland’s experience of modernity seems to suggest that the pursuit of a unifying vision for transformation must also engender disunity and conflict. Yet, like Britain the condition of modernity in Northern Ireland was patchy and full of ambiguity. In one unexpected area of life, often in rural landscapes and at the most parochial level, the absorption of modernity was startlingly realized in the building of modernist churches. Neither entirely material nor spiritual, but a confluence of the two, the influence of modernity on church architecture seemed to express a yearning to transcend the provincial, whilst somehow accommodating to the particularities of place and seeking stability amidst uncertainty. Modernist church architecture was a particular feature of, although by no means exclusive to, the Catholic tradition, both pre-empting and responding to the doctrinal development and liturgical changes of Vatican II.
One of the giants of 20th century Irish architecture, with Corbusier, Gropius and Alvar Aalto among his stated influences, Liam McCormick’s modernist churches were genuinely popular in rural parishes amongst people often regarded as a most conservative religious and social milieu. In applying radical ideas from Northern Europe to the building of both Catholic and Presbyterian churches, his work engenders a surprisingly emotional engagement that seems to speak of a startling ambition to create something altogether modern in the heartlands of rural Ulster. It is an exemplar from which we have may still have much to learn. The modernist project in Northern Ireland, as elsewhere, may have been imperfectly absorbed and incompletely realized, but continues to offer a model for our times. The common thread linking all modernist projects is a belief in the collective subjectivity and creative ability of humanity.
It is this inspiring legacy that shows us that we are not prisoners of history, mere passive objects cast adrift in the world, but rather, conscious subjects capable of making history, and transforming our world.