ON BEING AN IRISH WORKING CLASS WRITER

PART ONE

On the same Easter Week of the 1916 rising, a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition was held in Dublin. Chaplin, well-known to be a socialist as well as the world’s leading entertainer at the time, had a mass following among the Dublin working classes.

Truth be told, among many in the Dublin working class, there was probably as much interest in the Charlie Chaplin competition as there was in what the crowd of poets with guns and big ideas were at in the GPO. There were many dozens of entries to the lookalike competition and the various merits of each were discussed in newspapers and among young and old in working class communities. For many, the Chaplin lookalike competition must have seemed a supremely important event, and the unannounced eruption of the Rising an unwelcome distraction.

The story goes that about halfway through Easter Week — while field guns pummelled the GPO from across the street, and the rebels inside did their best to hold tough and return fire — one of the most impressive of the Chaplin lookalikes decided to amble Chaplinesquely right down the middle of O Connell St, in between the hostile lines.

Both sides, it is said, ceased fire and both sides, it is said, looked on in appreciative amazement at the slick and entertaining performance — as unexpected and courageous as the Easter Rising itself.

Once he/she/they had finished the cannon-silencing performance, they turned and bowed in both directions, and a general applause broke out. No observer could have told which portions of the noise of the applause was British Loyalist, and which emanated from the clapped hands of Insurrectionary Irish.

Minutes later, once the fabled impersonator was out of range, the unresolved hostilities resumed and bullets sought heads to explode in every direction.

Art does not ask or expect of its appreciators that they subscribe to one political point of view or another; does not inquire as to whether they be on one side of the class and anti-imperialist struggles or the other.

Mozart was popular among the officers of the death camps. Trotsky recognised the avid fascist Céline as the greatest of inter-war French novelists. No contemporary liberal novelist could or presumably would claim to be of equal artistic stature to the religious reactionary Fyodor Dostoevsky.

So it’s not the purpose of this essay to dispute this fundamentally supra-political aspect of art. Great art disintegrates all borders, ignores all our divisions. Within this universally levelling effect, the aesthetic bears a radical promise of no nations, borders, classes or any kind of unequal and agitating divisions on Earth — “all the people together in harmony,” as John Lennon sings it.

Art is Utopianising in its collective effect on us as a species — it unites us by temporarily obscuring or abolishing our real divisions and without asking for a sacrifice of our individuality. Though of course it does so only temporarily, only in the realms of feeling and imagination, and without much actual impact on borders and class divisions in the here and now.

It is important not to have the illusion that making art, generally speaking, is a kind of political activism. Art is most often not political activity so much as it is the suspension or deferral of political activity.

Bertolt Brecht wrote many songs and poems and plays and novels aimed at, and enjoyed by, millions of German workers in the 1920s and 1930s. Fascism came to power anyway and would likely have done so in exactly the same way had he never in his life bothered to write a single line.

All the protest songs and singers of the 1960s and 1970s couldn’t prevent the election of Reagan and Thatcher.

There certainly are occasions when art and artists can make a centrally important contribution to social causes. The relationship between Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League is one such good news story, as is the successful resistance to the Carnsore nuclear reactor here in Ireland.

Others will have more examples, I’m sure, but all will be exceptions to a general rule of artistic creation, which is that it takes place in a separate sphere from political activity, and with its own traditions and orientations which are different to and even opposed to political activity. Activism always seeks to highlight the social divisions that anthropologists argue it is art’s social and evolutionary role in human societies to paper over and obscure.

On the other hand, this grand distinction between spheres of activity makes anyone trying to fuse them a priori a subversive. And it is obviously true that a poem on a picket-line or an artistic online video can inspire and promote causes.

But it is usually the case that artists make their best contributions to social movements in the same way as plumbers or nurses — that is, by handing out leaflets, turning up to meetings and demos etc. — by blending in rather than standing out.

Similarly, the cultural value and aesthetic quality of a work of art has nothing to with the class background or political opinions of who has produced it or who is relaying or performing it.

Nor does the personal morality of the artist have any bearing at all on whether the music they compose will be beautiful, or the book they write un-put-downable.

W.B Yeats lived a long and luxurious aristocratic life paid for by the hard labour of Irish peasants. He owed the inspiration of many of his plays and poems to the lore of Irish peasants. The music and diction of much of his poetry is simply a refined version of the daily speech rhythms of the Irish peasantry.

Nevertheless, he enthusiastically supported the war crimes of extra-judicial torture and execution of socialist and republican POWs from peasant backgrounds during the so-called Irish civil war. Yet he remains the most melodious and memorable Irish poet of the early 20th century.

Margaret Atwood’s practical support for apartheid Israel in breaking the cultural boycott does nothing to reduce her status as one of the pre-eminent global novelists.

Conversely, some of the worst poetry ever written has emerged from council estates where a local loudmouth has discovered an online rhyming dictionary and decided to inflict their thoughts on world affairs on us in toddleresque rhymes.

So when we talk about how injustice and inequality manifest themselves in class society in relation to the arts, we are not talking about anything to do with aesthetics or the internal qualities of works of art.

Demanding increased access to art for workers

Working class people, despite the obstacles they face, make and appreciate art in countless ways and by various means. There, obviously then, is no one way of being a working class artist, and there is no ‘working-class aesthetic’ as such. Therefore, a socialist party should have no aesthetic policy or prescriptions whatsoever.

The role of a socialist party or movement is to campaign for increased working class access to the arts, period. It is never to poke its nose into the processes of artistic creation. A Stalinist policy of interference in artistic creation and limiting artistic freedom must be totally rejected and struggled against for art as well as for politics’ sake — there are no ‘socialist realist’ novels worth reading.

None of this means that we cannot highlight and unpack some distinctive ways in which working class communities have evolved artistic traditions, and which are markedly distinct from the dominant bourgeois way of doing things — ways that might incorporate something subversively political, above and beyond the artistic.

My focus is on illustrating just this kind of politicised working class literature. For any worker to start making art is by definition to make the case that we are not born solely to consume and be exploited — that we too, just like the bourgeoisie, are capable of both creating and appreciating on the higher plane of art. It is in this sense that we can agree with Michael Hartnett when he writes, “the act of poetry is a rebel act”.

The work of art is always concrete and historical, whether it be artefact or current. Art has all the apprehensible qualities of the real, whether it is a song that passes us by in three minutes or a statue of a mother deity that has withstood 65,000 years on Earth. Because of this, we can both share an encounter with an artwork, and differ widely in our opinions of it, as we can with all other historical events and objects.

But we can say definite true things about works of art as well. We can keep in mind that the work of art is a self-contained object that can only be authentically judged in relation to other self-contained objects of the same kind. As stated above, we cannot judge art by the nature of the person or person who produces it. The work of art is supremely indifferent to the name and nature of he/she/they who made it, be they saint or sinner.

And yet class is a determining factor in who gets to make art and appreciate it in so many unjustly political ways.

For example:

1) Working class access to arts education.

Access to quality arts education is not provided at all in many Irish public secondary schools, and only at the most rudimentary, amateur, and unenthusiastic levels in most of the rest. Despite the overwhelming pedagogic evidence of a hugely positive impact on teenage mental health, there is no creative writing curriculum in public secondary schools.

Even more disgracefully in the year 2019, there is no multimedia creativity education (production of podcasts, videos etc.) whatsoever in Irish secondary schools. By contrast, private schools have all of the above. Well-off parents can and do pay for additional extra-curricular arts education, giving their children a huge advantage.

2) The lack of Arts Council support for predominantly working class art forms.

Literary funding in the Arts Council goes almost exclusively to predominantly middle- and upper-class forms such as the page poem, opera, and so-called ‘literary’ fiction.

There are no funding streams for performance poetry, rap, storytelling, singer-songwriters or bands, online video, podcast, digital music production — all forms that are far more accessible to and engaged with by working class people as both producers and consumers of art.

This is nothing but institutional class prejudice.

3) The cost of being an artist.

Many successful writers (it takes 15-25 years to become a successful writer) are sustained by crucial financial support from their well-off families.

Most of us do not have such parents and so we are systematically excluded in yet another way.

So to level the playing field, we need not a few legislative tweaks, not just a token couple of panels on ‘being a working class writer’ at literary festivals few working class people have ever heard of, but a complete overhaul of education, art funding, and arts access from the bottom up — that is, a revolution.

PART 2

What is the working class?

The working class is the class of people who depend on the continuous sale of labour power, their own or family members’, in order to live a decent life. Workers & their dependants have little or no say over the conditions or the products of employment. They must do what they are told to do, make what they are told to make, turn up when they or told to turn up, & so on. They do not ever benefit proportionately from the success of enterprises that exploit them & which without them would be nothing. They lose out disproportionately should these enterprises fail.

Working class lives are about as far from ideal conditions for producing artistic works – especially lengthy works such as the novel – as it is humanly possible to get. Fundamentally we have so few working class novelists for the same reasons we have so few working class symphonic composers – reasons of educational disadvantage, time poverty, economic insecurity & eternally stressful living conditions.

In Ireland, as elsewhere, to be born into the working class is to face a life obstructed by chronic inequality & injustice in every sphere – health, education, leisure & arts provision, housing – you name it and workers are losing out badly in it. In 2018 Ireland’s University system – the font of our contemporary textual literature – remains a fortress of privilege. While 99 per cent of young people from affluent Dublin 6 attend college, the figure for Dublin 17 is 15 per cent. Working Class people in Ireland are 73 per cent more likely to die by suicide than others – the figure for Travellers, by the way, is 660%. I could go on all day – the statistics are endlessly tragic, endlessly troubling.

On average, life for working class people is much more difficult, much more complicated, much more tragic, much less rewarding than it is for people from luckier backgrounds. If you, like me, are a working class person or from a working class background, you will have no trouble accepting this – you have lived & are living it.

Obviously, numerous factors complicate & qualify the basic definition of working class offered above – & will deepen the oppression experienced – gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, occupation, location…. The lives of working class women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ in Ireland are without doubt more difficult & more traumatic, on average, then those of white working class men like myself. And it is often white working class men who are doing the front-line oppressing.

But all workers & their dependants are similarly alienated, similarly dispossessed, similarly disadvantaged to begin with by their working-class status & we all share a common interest in overthrowing capitalism and establishing a society free of economic and social injustice.

The working class is at its weakest and most vulnerable when divided against itself along lines of gender, race et al, and the ruling classes of the world have long used these implicit & potential divisions strategically, to guarantee their own rule.

However, recent referendum results in Ireland have seen the most spectacular votes for the right-to-choose & marriage equality often emerging in densely populated urban working class areas. This should remind us that the working class is also, as revolutionary socialists have always argued, potentially the most progressive class, capable of throwing off centuries of oppressive ideology overnight when it comes together in active struggle to improve its own conditions & those of others.

An ounce of struggle is worth a ton of votes, says Lenin.

My conception of a working-class writer then is one who is not only biographically from the working class – an accident of birth & hardly something to congratulate oneself for –  but also politically for the working class – a conscious choice which implies a certain pragmatic approach to form & medium. My aim as a working class writer who is for the working class is to contribute honestly & constructively, in as entertaining & thought-provoking a way as possible, to overcoming the divisions within the working class, & to helping workers in whatever small way I can, & always as part of a wider movement, to realise & enact the world-transforming nature of their collective power.  For this I need a working class audience & so I must make literature in a form or forms accessible to & preferred by working class people.

This point about finding a working class audience, however & wherever it can be found, is crucial to me. If I, or anyone else of similar ambition, were to only follow the waymarked way of conventional literary advancement in Ireland, marked out entirely by and for middle class people, this would not be possible. Working class people do not engage, by & large, as producers or consumers of our conventional, textual, literary culture – a culture which in a revealingly colonial-elitist manner terms itself Anglo-Irish – rather than say, Hiberno-English. Who indeed, one wonders, are these Anglo-Irish the universities and publishing houses are talking about? Where is their homeland? Their capital? The colonial elite historians refer to as the Anglo-Irish vanished a century ago – that our academies & literary culture industry do not seem to have noticed is a troublingly clear indication of how fortified, how castellated the marginal arena they have generally existed in for the last 100 years is. Another way, in other mediums, in another accent, must be found by an Irish working class writer who wants an Irish working class audience.

Working class literary fiction? 

What has literature got to do with the working class?  On the face of it, not a lot – at least not if we confine our idea of literature to literary fiction. On the whole, literary fiction has not now nor ever had a whole lot to do  with the working class – even or especially way back when the literary novel was the central medium of artistic & intellectual expression in society .

Few will deny that the literary novel achieved its zenith in the 19th century, when very few workers could read. Only 17 per cent of Russians could read when Anna Karenina was published; very few of those were workers or peasants.  Dickens & Zola & Deledda & how many others of that era wrote about & even for the working class – but an artform of & by the working class is different matter. Contemporary studies of the readership of the literary novel – an insignificant number of people these days in most cases – confirm that not a lot has changed in this regard, with the bulk repeatedly found to be ‘educated and affluent’ – a code for middle and upper class.

I mention this because it is normally literary fiction being referenced in discussions of working class writing, at least as the discussion takes place in the Guardian & similar middle-class forums. There is a part of me which recoils at the very idea of discussing working class culture in publications such as The Guardian, which has relentlessly campaigned against the socialist working class movement in Britain for many decades, most recently by its brazen support for the anti-semitic slander against Jeremy Corbyn. Discussing working-class culture in the Guardian seems to me the equivalent of discussing women’s rights in a lads magazine – something which quite rightly would never be accepted as a genuine approach to the question.

If we are going to discuss the working class, lets find ways to involve workers in the conversation, let’s actually look at the working class and try and see how they make literature and how they receive literature in our day and age.

The concentration on literary fiction is too constricting to live up to the reality of working-class literary practices, past & present, & is also somewhat misleading in our current circumstances. Because of the well-documented extreme cultural marginality of literary fiction, as well as the inevitable poverty of the returns on the practice, the chances of a working class person under working class pressures making a sustainable life for themselves in the literary novel are nearly zero. The literary novel is in a sense the fool’s gold or the imperial vestment or the bear-shitting-in-the-woods of the contemporary writer – there are prizes & grants & residencies galore for the few who make it – but there is no economically sustainable readership to speak of in most cases, certainly  no working-class readership.

This is not to say that people from working-class backgrounds do not write literary novels – evidently they do – recent years have seen a welcome boost to our contemporary novel in Ireland by several such writers. But no matter how working class these novelists are themselves, it is middle class people they will have to sell books to – in large & frankly highly unlikely amounts – to remain in favour with publishers for any significant period.

Besides, one or two novels does not a novelist or a sustainable artistic life make. It is very difficult to envisage all but a tiny minority of working class people making a 21st century life in textual literature alone. In practice, many working class writers of my acquaintance and generation who have lasted more than a couple of years in the writing vocation have done so by relating to the new media literatures in one form or another.

In part 3 of this essay I will outline a history of working class literature and explore which medium or mediums of literary production are best suited to today’s working class writer guided by working class principles & wishing to speak in the main to a working class audience.

PART 3

The ancient novelty of Working Class literature

Working-class literature, that is literature produced chiefly by & for the working class, comes in  many forms & in many mediums, many informal & ephemeral, others not so, but all defined by their ease of access to both the producer and receiver of the work. They generally do not cost much to make, or to enjoy. Short forms are favoured in all mediums, as well as content relevant to the lives & struggles of the working-class audience.

For most of its history, the working class has created its literature mainly through the medium of the voice, & chiefly in the form of the song. The typical, representative working class writer throughout the pre-digital era is the singer-songwriter. The singer-songwriter can claim direct descent from the tradition of sung poetry which stretches unbrokenly back to the very beginnings of ‘Western’ literature in the city states of Ancient Greece & before that Mesopotamia. The singing bard, the sung poem, the song, the songwriter – this is the longest, largest, broadest & deepest of global literary traditions.  If any literary tradition has  right to claim itself as THE literary tradition, it is this one.

In contrast to the culture of text literature, where ownership of the text and individual artistic vanity are often foremost, authorship often does not matter much in working class literary culture. Instead, the particularities of the delivery of the song, either on record or at a live event, are what matters, not atall who the song belongs to. It is not who in the past wrote the song, or who initially came up with the story, or who first cracked the joke, but how well these are being sung or being told here and now at the ongoing concert or session or sing-song.

An exciting contemporary echo of this long tradition of non-proprietal, non-profiteering, anonymised literature-making came during the recent referendum on the 8th amendment, in the form of the poly-authored testimonies of the I Believe Her & In Her Shoes – Women of the Eight facebook pages. Hundreds of women anonymously contributed to these evolving online anthologies – with the literary standard often as high as can be found in most literary journals. Hundreds contributed personal essays & tens if not hundreds of thousands shared and engaged. No money changed hands, there was no artistic narcissism at work. I Believe Her & In Her Shoes are of course a product of the radical end of the women’s movement in the wake of #metoo, rather than of the working class movement per se. Nevertheless, the characteristics of anonymous poly-authorship & widespread community distribution of community relevant content that we see in these immensely popular online storytelling initiatives, added to their freedom from vested interests in arts admin & profiteering publishing houses, give us something altogether remarkable in the history of literary forms. A new genre of long, poly-authored, metamorphic, open-ended and above all inclusive narrative which looks nothing like the short story or novel and is on the whole far more suited to working class self-expression than the novel could ever be.

Up to now, & many many country miles, the most important working class literary tradition in Ireland has been our native folksong tradition, growing over as it has into our thriving contemporary folk song tradition. The most important Irish working class creator of our time & indeed of all time is Christy Moore. It is in the Christy Moore songbook & in the repertoires of other folk-literary giants such as John Spillane, Mary Coughlan, the Black sisters etc that the artistic record of the Irish working class experience, working class hopes, working class losses & working class sorrows is to be found.

This tradition remains easily our most vital working class literary tradition in Ireland today & is currently being revitalised by a new & diverse generation including Damian Dempsey, the poet laureate of working class Dublin; Mick Blake; Bernzy Mac; Sharon Murphy; Evelyn Campbell; Stephen Wall, & countless other talents.

But in 2019 becoming a singer-songwiter is no longer the only practical, likely option for individual working class writers who wish for a working class audience. The digital revolution in the form of the universally available smartphone has massively expanded the genre possibilities for a working class literature by opening a completely new & practically infinite terrain of accessible multimedia creativity to the entire population – at least in the OECD countries.

Moreover, this new multi-terrain of human creativity is one into which skills learned in the old oral & live terrains natural to workers (& absorbed by many of us in the rambunctiously oral environment of our childhoods) are easily transferable. Our age-old, if most often informally acquired, literary inheritance of storytelling, performative displays, communally relevant content, passionate intensity – all these seem made for the video literature age. These inherited skills combine & hybridise with new digital skills and tools to great effect in the creation of new or entirely revitalised genres such as the poetry video. The possibilities are enormous and many of our finest young talents are already beginning to realise them beautifully.

One obvious example is Emmett Kirwan, whose brilliantly conceived poetry videos Just Sayin & Heartbreak are among the most popular & engaged-with works of Irish literature in recent years – but there are countless other irish working class creators involved in poetry video & the related genre of performance poetry. It is clear to me that among the younger generations of irish working class writers at least, the poetry video is far more important & sustainable  & artistically exciting a form than the short story or literary novel – both of which only continue to exist here because of the state’s willingness to heavily subsidise middle-class literature.

It is not and will not be only the working class that takes advantage of the artistic possibilities of the newly emerging ecosystem in the literary arts, – so much is obvious. But this is the first time in history that the working class en masse has gained access to the prevailing tools and methods of creative expression. Such notions as working class cinema & the working class novel are pipe dreams, or at the most can only be exampled in rare and exotic cases. The working class cannot afford to make cinema, or participate in any level-playing-field way in the literary novel. But every irish worker has a smartphone or knows someone who will lend.

Smartphones, despite the moral panics they generate – echoing similar establishment anxieties upon the arrival of the printing press, & no doubt of papyrus & vellum before that – are unique in world history as creative devices & mark the beginning of a new era in human creativity. Using on board apps, cameras, social media, it is possible to produce – collaboratively as well as individually –  distribute, broadcast & receive innumerable & diverse works of art in a variety of mediums. No-one can say, ten years into this new era, what the long term effect of this incredibly creative technology will have on literature, but that it will completely transform it there can be little doubt.

In fact the transformation, even at this early, post-natal stage is well under way. It has taken less than ten years for the twinned disciplines of live poetry and the poetry video to become far and away the major arenas for both accessible participation in poetry, and in the public encounter with poetry. Now that poetry books sell in the dozens while poetry videos are regularly watched by hundreds of thousands, & DIY performance poetry festivals such as Lingo dwarf the size of long-established, heavily subsidised page-poetry festivals, only reactionaries & vested interests can deny the major changes taking place in the poetic art in Ireland.

Working Class Literature and Working Class Division

Working Class researcher Emma Penny of UCD that the key factor in the growth of womens’  poetry circles in parts of working class Dublin in the 1980s was the accessibility of poetry to women of no means and no property. There are no educational barriers to participating in poetry – poetry being fundamentally an oral artform, one does not even have to know how to write. There are no technological barriers to participating in poetry. There are no financial barriers to participation in poetry. These poetry circles, led by women writers such as Cathleen O Neill – who was in contact with Audre Lorde at the time –  were collective and collaborative & mutually supportive in nature – characteristics essential to making them welcoming to everyone who wished to participate; no forms, no hoops, no ‘qualifications’, no gatekeepers. All working class literary scenes bear something of these qualities of openness and accessibility to all-comers.

Simply put, working class people make the literature they can afford to make, afford in terms of both time and money spent.

Working class cultural practices are of course diverse, but in many instances worldwide, and most instances in my homeland of the west of Ireland,  it is while present at an informal session or sing-song that the workers in the pre-digital era would have participated in their own literature of song, story, joke & so on. The poetry circles Penny echo these sessions in their communal, collaborative, & mutual validating nature. So do our contemporary open mics, story circles & so on. Though of course these latter may look very different, younger, & more cosmopolitan than the sessions of yore, the basic structure is similar, and the participants will be, in the main, working class people just as before.

Importantly, Penny also records that these women in 1980s Kilbarrack & Raheny often had to struggle against husbands and boyfriends for their art, in some cases even to win the right to attend the poetry circles. This is no surprise to those of us who grew up under the regime of actual or implied male violence which was and is the rule in far too high a proportion of working class homes & working class communities. Working class women have too often endured and continue to endure an extra layer of oppression imposed upon them by backwards layers of working class men. If we were to take a tour around Saint Mary‘s graveyard in Clonakilty, down that long avenue of the suicides it contains, we would find ourselves stopping off on several occasions at the graves whose suicides are without question the result of male violence towards them and of general mail tolerance of the violence of other males towards them. This is to say nothing of the poor young working class woman who I remember as one of the shyest slightest women in the whole town, and who had her throat cut in front of her children by a violent male.

Considering the above, isn’t it true that the working class writer, in particular the working class male writer, needs to establish their ground of spiritual independence and free expression in opposition to and in contrast to much of their own inherited ‘hard man’ culture, as well as in contradiction to middle-class artistic culture?

Working Class Literature and Working Class Struggle

The relationship between working class literature & working class struggle is naturally strong & long-established. Singer-songwriters, & these days increasingly performance poets & producers of literary video, make an important contribution to both the clear, memorable expression of, & the moral sustenance of many working class or majority working class campaigns.

The connection between literature & cause is one of the bedrocks of working class literature – there is no working class literature to speak of which does not connect with working class struggle or progressive campaigns in which the working class plays a key role in some way.

As well as their role in memorialising & validating daily struggles, the working-class writer  also plays a role on a more abstract level, in keeping alive the dream and the hope of a socialist future, free of all oppression & exploitation.

These proudly political roles form another strong contrast with the literature of the middle class, which, generally speaking, valorises formalism and an aesthetic of faux-neutrality, seeking to deny the inevitably political nature of all art, & to occlude its own foundations in social & educational inequality.

Campaigning suggestions

Even though working class writers, mainly employing the new media, have placed themselves at centre of literary creativity in today’s Ireland, we still have far from a level playing field for working class people of talent who wish to make a sustainable life for themselves in the Arts.

Measures to level the playing field – this side of a revolution – will not happen unless the cause of the working class writer & the working class artist as a whole is taken up as a campaigning priority  by the working class movement, by trade unions & working class political parties and community organisations. Our best chances as artists then lie in maintaining and deepening our solidarity with the working class movement.

A literary website is not the place to determine campaigning priorities & I would hesitate to individually make any detailed programmatic proposals here. I look forward to reading suggestions from other working class writers responding to this essay.

Perhaps, however, as a first step, we need to demand that the Arts Council open a funding stream for working class writers with working class audiences which is at least equal to the current literary bursary scheme which is entirely and prejudicially reserved for middle class writers with middle class audiences. We need a bursary scheme for performance poets, singer-song writers, video-lit producers, community writing facilitators & so on & this needs to be overseen & distributed by working class literary representatives – not the strategically embedded,  out-of-touch, middle-class gatekeepers who currently oversee literary funding in ireland in a manner starkly prejudicial to working class writers & working class communities.