INTRODUCTION
by Peter Brooke
Wilson John Haire is perhaps best known as the author of Within Two Shadows - one of the first plays concerning the Northern Ireland 'troubles' - though John dislikes the term 'troubles', preferring to see it as a war fought between the Catholic community championed by the Provisional IRA and the British state. Actually, John may well have written the first play. As he says in an article in the Irish journal Church and State (No.151, Jan-March 2023): 'I had written a play about the oppression of the Northern Catholic in 1968, which no other theatre in Britain would produce but Unity Theatre' - the theatre associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain.
John's father was a Protestant (Presbyterian-Christadelphian-Communist) and his mother was Catholic. At the time of their marriage the Catholic Church required the Protestant partner in a mixed marriage to sign a declaration that all the children would be raised as Catholics, so John and his four sisters were all, technically at least, Catholics, though they were raised in Protestant areas of Northern Ireland. So they didn't quite fit easily into the Catholic community either. At an early age (fourteen) John started working in the great Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast, first as an office boy, then as an apprentice joiner. Subsequently, he worked as a bouncer in a Belfast ballroom. These experiences are powerfully described in his short stories The Yard and Elsie. Subsequently he moved to London, where his career as a playwright began, beginning with the Unity Theatre, then in the Royal Court, then in the National Theatre, with a spell as resident playwright with the Lyric Player Theatre in Belfast. His life as a labourer in London inspired the stories in the collection This London.
John is a frequent contributor - prose essays and poems - to the journals Irish Political Review and Church and State both of them part of the broad Athol Books family. These short pieces are all contributions sent to a discussion group organised under the auspices of Athol Books. Athol Books originated in the material published by the British and Irish Communist Organisation which, in the 1970s, developed the 'two nations' view of Irish history. John, whose life was spent on the fault line between the nations, was an early convert to the idea. These pieces could be described as despatches from the working class experience of the national conflict. I have just placed them in the order in which they came to me. I feel very privileged that John has allowed me to reproduce them here.