The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland

6. Working Memories

6 Working Memories = In May and June 1985, a ‹ve-week strike took place at the Drumcoo Glassworks, one of the Catholic, nationalist enterprises inspired by the movements for social justice in and around Ballybogoin in the 1960s. Prior to the strike, a long one by local standards, the workers had reestablished relations with their national trade union, the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union (ATGWU), for the ‹rst time in more than four years. The ATGWU, a British union, promised to back the workers but chose to remain neutral on management’s ‹nal offer, which was draconian. If the workers did not return to the factory and the status quo, management said, the glassworks’ furnaces would be extinguished. Once the ‹res were out, the factory would take one to three months to reopen. Management hinted darkly that the glassworks might close permanently. Of the sixty workers who cast ballots on that ‹nal offer, only four voted to continue the struggle. Two of these were the only Protestant unionist workers to attend the ‹nal meeting.1 But the failure of the strike was only the ‹rst casualty. The second was the embryonic sense of class solidarity the workers had felt with the union and with each other. Back at work, not a single skilled worker would take a shop steward position. No one wanted to negotiate with management. No one wanted to organize fellow workers to ‹ght another day. Although it was not apparent, the workers’ inability to sustain momentum was more than a failure of will. It had much to do with 149 other struggles under way in Northern Ireland. The workers’ attitudes toward class issues were profoundly affected by the culture and politics they brought through the door. Political and class identities were negotiated simultaneously, and none was determining. Instead, they were articulated to each other through cultural and linguistic practices, especially the practice of talk, as Catholics in and around Ballybogoin perceived it. The practices of Catholics were particularly in›uential in this Ballybogoin factory because Catholics made up more than 85 percent of the workforce.2 A Roman Catholic priest, Father Finbarr, who was concerned about discrimination against Catholics in employment had founded the ‹rm. Since the 1960s, the factory had been classi‹ed as an Irish nationalist ‹rm, linked, on the level of local politics, to the ‹ght against discrimination in employment and housing and, on the national level, to the Irish nationalist desire to unite the six counties of Northern Ireland to the twenty-six counties of the Republic of Ireland. The cultural practices exhibited at the Drumcoo Glassworks and their effects on the strike should be examined in the context of current debates about working-class formation and the concept of class because the profound economic, political, and intellectual transformations marking the past quarter-century, in all areas of the globe, have put the concept of class under scrutiny (Joyce 1995, 3–16; Hall and Jacques 1990). Global markets have transformed labor relations, patterns of investment, and the articulation of capitalist institutions to nationstates (Appadurai 1996). Many manual sectors of employment have moved to the industrializing states, leaving a less organized working class in Europe, the United States, and Japan. New forms of industrial management, the expansion of service work, the widening of the female labor market in the United States and Europe (much of it part-time), and the feminization of industrial work through free-trade zones and subcontracting ‹rms in Latin America and Asia and in sweatshops scattered throughout the globe have challenged established models of economic development, class formation, and collective identi‹cation (Ong 1991; Rouse 1991). These economic transformations have profoundly affected the organized working class. In places where women and men have organized politically around the category “worker,” the shift in investment and employment from manufacturing to consumption has weakened workthe troubles in ballybogoin 150 ing-class institutions. In this situation, collective and personal identities cannot be assumed to derive from positions in the social division of labor. Consumption, too, can be a source of identity (see Berdahl 1999, 104–39). Along with these economic, political, and social transformations, structuralist, poststructuralist, and feminist theorists have challenged the assumption of rationalizing actions that both liberal and Marxist social theories have propounded (see Bourdieu 1987, 1991, 1993; Eley 1996; Joyce 1987 for this important discussion). These theorists conceive language not as a re›ection of reality but as...