Geoff Martin: Book review - ‘Keeping the Faith’ offers a ray of light from an often dark landscape

The book is in three inter-related but not entirely unconnected parts.

There is the autobiographical starkness of early rumination. A childhood in loving grand-parental security, but with a sense of loss of direct parental closeness due to a single-parent teenage mother and an absent father, who later left to make his fortune in England.

It moves easily through the educational revolution of 1947 into secondary education, near national-level sports with the Queens University hockey club, and a first-class education in the Honours School of History where the narrow earlier perspectives of our place in these islands were conditioned by English history and geography, and an almost complete absence of any dignity and perspective as to who we are.

The educational phase slides effortlessly from editing the university newspaper Gown into a career in journalism and writing, interrupted only once to become the director of information at Queen’s and thus an important support to several distinguished vice-chancellors whose public image owed much to their Information Director’s insights and common nous.

Day to day reporting with the Belfast Telegraph led to an esteemed entrance to the elite world of leader writers who together honed the public mood of Northern Ireland to the satisfaction of at one time of most of the 200,000 thousand readers of the newspaper which was almost equally balanced between people in the two religious and political communities.

Frequent international travel especially in the developing countries of Africa and Asia conditioned and widened the thinking and the attitudes of this author.

The outcome is a record of almost 40 books produced by Alf McCreary, the latest being this stimulating read, Keeping the Faith, which I put down only once during several hours of refreshing enjoyment.

They include his majestic history of Belfast Harbour titled “Titanic Port”. Yet others range from a history of the Ulster Orchestra to the story of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.

I’m told that yet another book will deal with the history of Mackies, the Belfast-based textile engineering machinery company which had a global outreach whose exports dominated the huge textile mills of Calcutta and the Ganges delta, and many other places including Cuba where they built a factory for Fidel Castro.

Keeping the Faith is different. It is not a religious tract, it does not get tied down in politics, it describes the best in religion and avoids bigotry. It acclaims the generosity and thoughtfulness of a Catholic cardinal and a Church of Ireland archbishop.

It shuns Protestant fundamentalism and Catholic hypocrisy and respects the absolute right of dissent in all matters of faith.

The author is a liberal Protestant from the deep rural border country of South Armagh where his basic principles were first formed and came to life in developing an unwavering abhorrence of sectarianism in all its forms.

That is why the pages of this book are filled with an unrivalled knowledge of Northern Ireland society from the inside. It is a special and different society from others within and between these islands. It is culturally distinct.

There is no envy or yearning for something different. In this important respect the book reflects the best in Northern Ireland society. It embraces a society at ease within itself, which does wish to be replaced nor overtaken by others even though violence and hatred have been the hallmarks of minorities within.

McCreary was born into the 1947 educational revolution. He grew up with all the universal benefits which that education provided and evolved into the Civil Rights movement lead by his university friend and close Catholic colleague Austin Currie.

He welcomed every move towards reconciliation down the years and celebrated the Good Friday Agreement which gave all of us the inalienable right to decide our own future on the basis of consensus.

In the final page of Keeping the Faith he believes that he and many of the people who have inspired him have helped to pave the way towards that achievement.

On a purely personal basis I hope that the new generation of leaders, headed by the two young women of the moment, Michelle O’Neill from Tyrone and Emma-Little Pengelly from Armagh and neither from Belfast, can accept that challenge.

Keeping the Faith is a ray of light from an often dark landscape.

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l Geoff Martin, who was born and brought up in South Armagh, was the first EU Head of Office in Northern Ireland and later on the EU’s Representative in the United Kingdom based in London. He was also the Adviser on Global relationships to the Commonwealth Secretary General.

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​l Keeping the Faith by Alf McCreary is published by Messenger, and available in bookshops and on Amazon, priced £12.95.