“Even though it’s not too easily played, it has that special tone” That's how I imagine Irish concertina player Noel Hill answering the question. The Fifth Province doesn't just have a tone, it is a tone. Or a tone backwards. The Fifth Province is place and play.

Sometimes you know you're in the Fifth Province by sound, sometimes by mood. This, whatever this might be, began as the curiosity of some Irish diasporics in art and design school, in a political, theatrical, philosophical project around imagination originating in Ireland the 70s and 80s – the Fifth Province. It became our entrypoint for issues of decolonisation, as a catalyst for something to think with, about this troubling moment. A threshold for surfacing timelines of alternative pasts and futures, where the surfacing is itself an act of imagination that hacks the official, normative, timeline and history. The Fifth Province as a hack, an ethical, creative hack of your mind and body, and the world you believed sustained it. The because of imagination.

How do you know you’re in the Fifth Province?

It’s when you realise the time and the space of the world you thought you moved in, its histories and futures has shifted. Which is why this Fifth Province is ‘hauntological’ too in the political sense that the late Mark Fisher suggested

“What should haunt us is not the no longer of actually existing social democracy, but the not yet of the futures that popular modernism trained us to expect, but which never materialised. These spectres – the spectres of lost futures – reproach the formal nostalgia of the capitalist realist world” (Ghosts of my Life, p.34)

The Fifth Province is where we experience the force of lost futures, of past human futures that were swept away by famine, industrial schools, Magdalene laundries. The Fifth Province is when someone opens up spaces, times, and people moving along different timelines and different speeds, from the past and the future, and create an opening to think the world differently. Like Lullahush’s An Tochchai, an Irish word meaning ‘the future’ whose music and the accompanying video by Kelvin Barr, surfaces the different times moving at different speeds and different directions simultaneously. 

How do you know you’re in the Fifth Province?

The question puts me on the spot. It’s a spot beside myself, where I try and use imagination to make the question and the world beside myself. To use an idea form the late Lauren Berlant, rather than the critical distance of conventional academic thinking, the Fifth Province enables critical intimacy through imagination, the self you dream your way into.

Like when Cian, Miriam, Olivia and me shared sounds, poems, videos, stones, with colleagues at the Decolonising Arts Institute at University of the Arts London, on the idea of Disapora at our first Fifth Province event. We showed a video trailer of the play Translations by Brian Friel, a play from 1980 originally staged in Derry/Londonderry by the Field Day Theatre co-founded with Stephen Rea, which tells the story of Baile Beag (‘small town’) in the 19th Century when British Soldiers arrive to map the landscape, with names, for the Ordinance Survey.

The play explores colonialism, language and education. Central to the story is what was known in Ireland as the Hedge School, and Cian, Miriam, Olivia and myself are all teachers, Friel’s setting made us think of the Fifth Province as a place of different kinds of learning, separate to the “ordinance mapping” of more official education. Thinking about where teaching and learning happens in our world of social media and AI, in a world where difficult histories and omissions are often sources of conflict rather than opportunities for learning,

We call it ‘Hedgucation’, made-up temporary spaces of study and learning that are visible, audible, touchable, smellable to participants. The ideas of teaching and learning we want to explore will require accessing the people of the Fifth Province.

Like Liam Neeson who was in the original premiere of Translations, I accidentally acquired a particular set of skills.  Way back when, I studied with philosopher Richard Kearney, co-editor (with Mark Patrick Hederman) of literary and culture journal The Crane Bag which explored ideas of Irishness partly revolving around their conception of the Fifth Province as a way to think the future beyond unionism and nationalism, beyond the empires of London and Rome as Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses ("'I am the servant of two masters', Stephen said, 'an English and an Italian'. 'Italian?' Haines said. "A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me'. 'And a third', Stephen said, 'there is who wants me for odd jobs' [Nationalism]). The Field Day company and the editors and contributors to The Crane Bag tried to create a space to live and think how to be Irish, beyond the violence, horror and savagery of The Troubles of the 1970s and 1980s.  

For the Diaspora event I cut and paste some texts into a doc around the idea of the Fifth Province, including a selection from Richard Kearney’s Crane Bag editorial:

“Modern Ireland is made up of four provinces, whose origin lies beyond the beginning of recorded history. And yet, the Irish word for a province is coíced, which means a ‘fifth’. This fivefold division is as old as Ireland itself, yet there is disagreement about the identity of the fifth fifth. There are basically two traditions. The first claims that all five provinces met at the Stone of Divisions on the Hill of Uisnech, which was believed to be the mid-point of Ireland. The second is that the fifth province was Meath (Mide), ‘the middle’. Neither tradition can claim to be conclusive. What is interesting is that both divide Ireland into four quarters and a ‘middle’, even though they disagree about the location of the middle or ‘fifth’ province.
 Although Tara was the political centre of Ireland, this second centre was just as important and acted as a necessary balance. It was a non-political centre. It was sometimes described as a secret well, known only to the druids and the poets. The two centres acted like two kidneys in the body of the land. The balance between the two was essential to peace and harmony in the country. It seems clear to us that in the present unhappy state of our country it is essential to restore this second centre of gravity in some way. The obvious impotence of the political attempts to unite the four political and geographical provinces would seem to indicate another kind of solution, another kind of unity, one which would incorporate the ‘fifth’ province. This province, this place, this centre, is not a political position. In fact, if it is a position at all, it would be marked by the absence of any particular political and geographical delineation, something more like a dis-position. What kind of place could this be?”

The sample of texts also included extracts from a paper by Edward Molloy a Professor of Irish Studies, who notes how the dead were ‘called-up’ in the proclamation of 1916. The dead are always with us, and Molloy tells the story of the Hunger Strikers in the 1980s who conjured up the ghosts of the famine in asserting a version of Irish identity. 

Ghosts signal the breakdown of linear time and space. Molloy writes:

“the increased frequency of ghost sightings at certain locations and the wail of the Banshee before someone has died result from the ‘flooding of the social space with death’ and indicate a ‘leaking of the future in the present[. . .] and a return of the past in the present’ (Feldman 1991, 67). That such tales are rife throughout Ireland indicate then both a deeply complex and problematic relationship to modernity as well as the related pervasiveness of death. It’s worth recalling here how postcolonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that the experience of the supernatural can be constitutive of the production of colonial modernity. ‘Political modernity [...] brings together two noncommensurable logics of power, both modern. One is the logic of quasi-liberal legal and institutional frameworks that Europeans introduced [. . .] The second has no necessary secularism about it; it is what continually brings god and spirits into the realm of the political’ (Chakrabarty 2000, 14).”

'Modernity', the word's sleek future-facing edges (mo-dern-it-ee) for a long time served, in Ireland and elsewhere, to misrecognise industrialisation, infrastructure and the visible order and lines of Taylorism (this one not that one) for the movement of progress and history. Whereas in reality (a reality that needs to be heard and sung as well as visually uncovered) modernity as Alexander G. Weheliye argues was produced elsewhere.

For us the Fifth Province at this moment is a device for dis-positioning and decentering. We took one of our crossover points to the Fifth Province, an Irish riddle noted by Kearney in his Crane Bag Editorial.

“The figure five is as the four of the cross-roads plus the swinging of the door which is the point itself of crossing, the moment of arrival and departure.”

Alongside the Fifth Province we're looking at Mark Fisher’s vision of Hauntology (a reading of philosopher Jacques Derrida’s take on lost futures) and Julian House’s complementary sonic aesthetics of Ghost Box – a kind of Fifth Province of lost futures, where post-war modernity, social democratic egalitarian civic culture meets hidden knowledges and folk cultures.

I’m hoping The Fifth Province, wherever it happens, will teach us how to listen and work with ghosts. And that the ghosts from the past and the future will help us learn how to take care of their memories and futures.

"Are we there yet?"

Namechecks

Fisher, M. (2014) Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures. Zero Books

Molloy, E. (2021) 'Racial capitalism, hauntology and the politics of death in Ireland', Identities (28:2)