Andrew Murray Scott takes advice from famous Irish writer on how to create our own texts of national Liberation
Sunday National, 15 June 2025
In 1921 on the eve of publication of Ulysses, James Joyce declared that ‘all great writers were national first and it was the intensity of their nationalism that made them international in the end.’ The text of Ulysses redefined Irish national identity and is the text of Ireland’s national liberation, a book pre-occupied with, even obsessed with, Irishness, the problems of raising national consciousness and the forging of a better Ireland. This might surprise readers unaware that Joyce was a nationalist. The theme of politics and Anglo-Irish relations has not been central to readings of the novel and this might be, as many critics claim, because the work was hijacked at an early stage by leading Modernists, who assumed that its Irishness was secondary to its Modernist aims. Later, post-Modernists redefined the novel as a ‘guerilla text’ attacking the discourses and regimes of colonial power. No coincidence, they said, that the gestation of the book between 1914 and 1921, parallels the gestation of the Irish Free State, and that it was launched the day after the signing of the Irish Treaty. On the same day Joyce wrote a letter to Sinn Fein leader Arthur Griffith congratulating him on the Treaty. This proves that Ulysses was always meant to have a political as well as cultural impact. Famously of course he was to spend most of his life abroad. He left Ireland but it never left him.
We in Scotland urgently need to frame our national narrative in the context of our long march towards sovereignty. We need to redefine our national identity in this much more diverse twenty-first century and bring a new perspective of cultural change to the journey. Many are becoming aware of it, not least Believe in Scotland and a plethora of podcasters, culture groups and social media channels within the indy movement.
Scotland needs to personify: to see itself in purposeful motion, as people, individuals, characters doing, achieving, empowering ourselves and our nation on its journey. And James Joyce can help us, or at least, excellent examples found in his work can show the way.
In ‘Ivy Day in The Committee Rooms’ from his Dubliners collection, Joyce found a method of combining the personal and the political, the individual and the national. It’s a telling little story and the only one in the collection overtly ‘about’ grassroots politics at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The story is set in Dublin, the committee room being of course a metaphor for Ireland itself with six characters, albeit all male, standing in to represent the nation as Joyce saw it; contentious, disunited, dissolute, over-sentimental, self-deluded and out for what they can get. It is satiric, a little jaundiced even in the wake of the death of Parnell, the great leader who was surely and steadily building the foundations of an independent Ireland. Since Parnell’s death, the nationalist cause had been stuck in a lethargy which has allowed the British to continue to rule and the status quo to be maintained. In my teens I was a student friend of Alex Salmond and can’t help seeing Alex as our Parnell. There are definite parallels.
In the committee room we meet Old Jack the caretaker of the hall or hired room, subservient, self-effacing, careful not to extrude a personal view that might offend his employers, then enters the political agent, O’Connor, who we soon realise is doing nothing at all to promote his candidate, the publican Tierney who is paying him to promote his campaign to be elected to the local authority. Overtly concerned with when his money is coming, and constantly suspecting that he will not be paid, he impugns the character of Tierney, ‘Tricky Dicky’ and does not show much, if any support for him. His colleague Henchy seems to be worse that O’Connor in that as a paid agent he does not support Tierney. He is a man who changes his mind at the drop of a hat, has no fixed views.
The third character, Hynes, is clearly some sort of spy, possible for Tierney’s rival Colgan. He is a shiftless character, desperate for money, yet it is his sentimental poem for Parnell which, read out to the company temporarily unites all. Father Leon, a priest or actor, is manifestly not religious, a poor deluded soul, who does not quite join the company or even enter the room, hovering in the doorway, apologetically, as if he is the soul of the dead killed in the various uprisings.
The candidate himself, Tierney, does not appear though is referred to by all. O’Connor and Henchy suppose he is a nationalist but suspect that he will vote for the Address to King Edward on the King’s visit despite that. The story mocks the heroic romantic nationalism of the past by portraying the shabby compromises and venality of activists who are anything but idealistic. There is agreement for the idea that previous times were better, ‘…them times. There was some life in it then’, implying of course that there is no life now. This is another of Joyce’s tropes of the living dead, or deadness-in-life, or political stasis, of all the stories in the collection. And Scotland is in exactly the same situation. Stuck. Unable to find a route forward to independence.
I have been engaged with our cause since my teens as an activist in city centre street meetings with the sound of ‘Scotland Is Waking’ filling my ears from car speakers. I recall the camaraderie and my own zeal of canvassing and leafletting in early by-elections and the sense of a nation on the move, the heady thought of independence being winnable – and close. I’ve been an activist for over fifty years including ten as paid party media man, and a stint as local councillor, alongside my own literary career and its twenty book titles.
I have always known that engaging in political struggle provides positive benefits for individuals. Humans need to engage with something deeper than the day-to-day details of existence, focus on something bigger than themselves to give their lives some sense of achievement. Like Alasdair Gray said, we need to see ourselves in the pages of a novel to be able to live better lives. We need a story-arc, from beginnings to a resolution that takes us to a better place. Narrative is the key and how to form it and refine it so that it parallels the common thinking and expressions of our people – embodies it and leads it, so that all willingly share in it.
And from that early time my thoughts as a young writer were engaged with the idea of what that narrative might look like, how to put the cause down on paper in fiction, to magnify it, personify it, explain it, make more of it, so that others would be inspired to take up our cause. The book that summed up for me then what I wanted to achieve was a Scottish novel, A.J. Cronin’s 1937 bestseller The Citadel. This highly-readable and exciting character novel about a young Scotsman and his early career as a young married doctor successfully promoted a political campaigning aim – in Cronin’s case creating widespread support for a national health service that led to early legislation.
But writers write and publishers publish. Quite soon I began to realise how difficult the struggle had been for the writers of the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ in the early 1930s led by Hugh MacDiarmid and others, and how quickly the movement had been snuffed out in a variety of ways although of course, not before providing a head of steam for the early national movement, in particular the NPS and then the SNP.
But the political movement in Scotland, unlike in Wales, swiftly dropped the wild-haired poets, and looked askance too at the bearded folkies of the 1960s, in favour of hard-headed politics and businessmen. Early leaders broke the essential connection between the artists and writers and the politicians. The movement became obsessed with economics, business, income, taxes and wealth. Important yes, but not as important as Story. Story and narrative are the backbone of life and without it, life is mere existence.
But writers need to make a living which is why so many of our writers are forced to use any political references in codified, oblique ways in their writing. Like others, I wrote novels that publishers would accept and didn’t write the ones I wanted to write, because I needed to get published. The numerous organisations that support our cultural community, Creative Scotland, the Scottish Book Trust, Live Literature, etc. are publicly funded bodies and keen not to rock the boat, or to vote themselves out of existence.
One leading Scottish literary agent responded to my pitch of a political novel a few years back with an astonishing reply: ‘no-one would want to read…’ she said, ‘brings back all the divisiveness of 2014…’ So, the biggest event in our history since 1707 and we writers are not supposed to write about it in case someone is offended?
Despite this, for the last few years I have been drafting and redrafting short and long form fiction that combines the personal and the political, focusing especially on the diversity of our movement and the variety of issues individuals might have in daily lives that include some level of commitment to the cause. Some of the stories have been published in literary magazines. My story, ‘We Are An Island’ appeared in Causeway/Cabhsair, the journal of Irish and Scottish writing. It focused on an elderly English couple and their dog moving to live on a remote island to remind us how much we have benefitted from inward migration and how it is possible for incomers to assimilate even in a Gaelic speaking community if the will and the tolerance is there. The Galway Review published ‘Greater Love Hath No Man’ in which the loss of Scots lives in British foreign wars is made apparent, when an intelligent young man, a YSI member, is seduced into the army and death at 19 in Afghanistan, like his great-grandfather before him. My story of the lost potential of Scotland’s working class through addiction is the subject of ‘Last Refuge’ published in Literally Stories. A series of four stories has now started to appear in the SNP’s Independence magazine. In ‘Hinterlands’, published in March/April’s issue, a veteran activist tries to convey to his son during a by election the importance of remembering and recording even the tiniest details of the struggle. Everything must be remembered so that those who were not there cannot rewrite our story. In the May/June issue, ‘The Wummin Inside’ an 80 year old woman takes a stand against moaners, regretting the missed opportunities of her generation, some of whom could have ‘run a small country like Nicola.’ More of the stories, some narrated by me, are set to appear on indy podcasts and websites and I hope the collection, Speaking For Ourselves/Unspeakable Things when published might prove something of an outlier that brings together a wider readership.
Not every writer wants to get involved in a movement or a national group. Writers write for themselves, express individual concerns and everybody is different. But to me at least, under the influence of Joyce and others, creating and deploying characters that live and breathe within our movement can help to heal the divisiveness and discord of our attritional politics and let us look to bluer skies of opportunity and the potential to create better, fairer and more balanced lives for all in life, and on the page.
Andrew Murray Scott is a writer and novelist: https://andrewmurrayscott.scot
He writes a monthly culture column in the Scots Independent.
