Conor McCabe has an excellent ongoing series on the working class's place in Irish history and arts. His latest installment focuses on Conor's affinity with the English arts, suggesting that the Irish working classes are better described by English representations of the English working classes than by any Irish works. As Conor puts it,

"The problem is that I grew up in a working class area, but one with virtually no expression in Irish mainstream culture. In order to find similarities, we had to look to British drama. This was for very simple reasons. British drama has a strong working class identity to it.

"Whereas on RTE in the 1970s, the Irish working class were breaking out of Borstals or nicking TVs, living in slums and dying of poverty, on British TV and with British cinema, we had teenage boys obsessed with cornflakes passing under bridges, and trying to learn Italian so they could kiss the girl they fancied. On British TV, the working class lived…. On RTE they died with their (stolen) boots on."

This is interesting stuff. I do wonder, though, if Conor is not missing something in his discussion.

The tenor of his threads seems to be - and I hope I'm not misrepresenting him here - is that Ireland lacked a positive set of icons, whether in scholarship or in the arts) of the working classes because of because of the prejudice of the people who were recording events and because of the biases of professional historians (see here).

He's probably quite correct that the Irish working classes haven't had been sufficiently represented in the national story (which is really centered on a romantic vision of small-town morality), but I think he's mistaken in his view of what's going on in England. What he's pretty much missing, in short, is politics.

I doubt very much that the arts or academia in Britain are any more representative of the working classes than here in Ireland, and it's certainly not like English culture is lacking in snobbery. That said, the celebration of the working classes, or of working class culture, is very often an expression of political solidarity. Inclusivity does not exist in a vacuum. It is a function of politics, most visibly of socialism. Kes is the almost archetypical example of this, but one could also point elsewhere, for instance to the motives of many social historians, to see that the celebration of working class culture was also a rallying call.

Which brings me on to a second point. I think Conor underestimates the differences that ideological ferment produces between a working class identity like I suggest existed in England and that which Conor describes in Dublin.

It's important, first to recall that identity is distinctive from culture. Whereas culture happens in the background of people's lives, shaping their worldviews and behaviour, identity is the self-conscious expression of a group (or rather, of individuals claiming justifiably or not to represent a group).

As Bernard Williams pointed out, working class identity is unique and ought not to be considered as akin to other societal identity (like, say, self-conscious expressions of black culture). Working class identity specifically looks forward to the dissolution of the group, to the end of the working classes as a class. Whether this will happen through revolution or aspiration (in its social democratic and Thatcherite ways) is beside the point. The identity is not quite about celebrating itself or seeking inclusion of its distinct viewpoint. Rather it is about overturning the social order so that they working classes disappear (again, as a mass or as individuals).

Ireland probably doesn't have much in the way of a consciousness of working class culture because Ireland doesn't have much in the way of an ideological polity. Without a left, there was very little in the way of a requirement to address poor people on the lines that Ken Loach has done. Rather, poverty becomes simply a focus for charity. The problem isn't middle class historians. It's living in a conservative Catholic society.

I really am enjoying Conor's series and I hope it continues. But I can't help but think that, but putting his narrative across as an attempt to celebrate Ireland's working classes (as a ceaseless phenomenon), he's highlighting the degree to which he is a product of our culture. In which case, perhaps he ought not to look to Britain for identity. Instead, he should look to our conservative Catholic compatriots along the Mediterranean.