Inaugural Issue: Belfast In Europe
(Vol 1, No 1)

“Hubert Butler’s works warn that a debate about whether Ireland should become American or Swedish is missing the point – his point. Beware of enthusiasm for distant abstractions, at the cost of close and familiar details. Never mind America and Sweden: Ireland has not yet become Irish, until the alienation between majorities and minorities has been overcome in a new sense of community. There is a world to win. But there is also a family of neighbours down the road, and unfinished business with them. Hubert Butler enjoyed history’s proxy ironies. But not that Irish history should now repeat itself inside out: that one part of Ireland should again march away and sign up under the flag of some vaster identity – and leave the other part forgotten in the rain. Yes, there is a threat to Ireland’s ‘unique identity’ – but it’s to the identity which has not yet been created.”

From “Unfinished Ireland: Hubert Butler's Contemporary Relevance,” by Neal Ascherson

The Justice Issue
(Vol 1, No 2)

“A couple of days after the attacks of September 11th I talked on the phone with two American friends who chanced to be on holiday in Florence at the time. Dismayed like everybody else at what had happened, missing ‘the reciprocity of tears’ that would have been more richly available at home, they were finding that the best way to deal with the desolation in America was to keep doing the things that they had come to Italy to do. Their way of getting through those days was to seek out and look hard at pictures and sculptures that kept standing their ground, as it were, in spite of the shaken state of the world around them …

My friends were wanting art to hold up at the moment when they were being most borne down upon. They had a stake in its worth being proved in extremis since they are a couple who have lived lives based on the humanist wager. They know not to expect uplift from art, but they also expect not to be let down by it. And it was because of this knowledge and their unreadiness to renege on it that I found myself saying, not for the first time, that in these extreme cases the challenge faced by the artist – and hopefully also by the policy-makers – is the one W.B. Yeats formulated so plainly in his introduction to A Vision: ‘to hold in a single thought reality and justice.’”

From “Reality and Justice: On Translating Horace,” by Seamus Heaney