Séamas O'Reilly: The good old days were bad old days too

A screenshot of the tweet with fake photo of Noam Chomsky and an elephant in Belfast. Picture: Séamas O'Reilly

The solo trip to the Lansdowne bar had taken me some distance away from my final location, and I was running quite late. 

Worse, despite not having even had a drink in said pub, I’d not thought to use the bathroom before I left, and there were no taxis to be found, which left me walking down the entire length of the Antrim road in Belfast positively boiling for a wee.

But I was happy. I found myself in Belfast for a speaking engagement at the Titanic Pump House, where I’d been invited to tell a story at an event with the AVA Festival. 

I’ve been working with AVA, a music festival and conference, for the guts of a decade, usually interviewing notable people within music for the speaking portion of their events.

Today, however, I was to take the stage for their collaboration with Seanchoíche, a storytelling night that was started in Dublin in 2021 and has since run in New York, Sydney, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and, now several times, in Belfast. 

Given the venue, I thought it would be appropriate to tell one particular story, the best one I have about the city itself. 

But telling it would require me taking a specific photo in a pub on the Antrim road so, for all the sorrows it was now causing my bladder, I was jubilant I’d achieved this at least.

It would be over an hour before I hobbled to the venue, with the shell-shocked gaze and knock-kneed gait of someone finishing an ultramarathon, to tell the full story to a waiting crowd.

Some years ago, I told them, author, activist, and conspiracy kook, Naomi Wolf was getting pelters for a tweet she had posted. 

“It was amazing to go to Belfast,” she wrote in July 2019, “which does not yet have 5G, and feel the earth, sky, air, human experience, feel the way it did in the 1970s. Calm, still, peaceful, restful, natural.”

BRAIN-NUMBING IGNORANCE

This didn’t make sense to me for several reasons. 

Firstly, Belfast’s 5G network had been rolled out months before her visit, one of the first cities in Europe to do so. 

Secondly, one might observe a certain brain-numbing ignorance in citing 1970s Belfast as indicative of peaceful calm.

Reaction was swift and, as it happened, hilarious. 

My mentions were flooded with black and white photos of Troubles-era Belfast, gunmen hiding around street corners or old ladies squaring off against British soldiers, captioned with similarly nostalgic nonsense like “not a mobile phone in sight, just people living in the moment”. 

All of which was very funny, but also made a significant point: the belief that things were always better in the past must at some point reckon with the fact that the good old days were bad old days too. 

Getting nostalgic for the Troubles is merely an absurdist stretching of that point, and a salutary lesson in the complacency of rose-tinted history.

But then I started noticing another image that kept popping up. 

It was a photo of an elephant at a Belfast riot, accompanied by linguist and political philosopher Noam Chomsky. 

Now, I happened to know quite a lot about this image because — plot twist — I created it, with my colleague Michael Murray, some years previously. 

A screenshot of the tweet with fake photo of Noam Chomsky and an elephant in Belfast. Picture: Séamas O'Reilly

BANJO THE RIOT ELEPHANT

We’d made it as part of Remembering Ireland, our parody of nostalgic meme pages that offer “back in the day” shots of Ireland, the hoary old images of yesteryear which crowd pub walls in every Irish pub on the planet.

We made fake book covers, LPs, action figures, and magazines, all designed to ape the style of “Remember This???” kitsch we saw everywhere at the time. 

We made fake farmer’s erotica, journals for new romantic rally drivers and, one of my true favourites, a magazine dedicated to planning your wedding while in Belfast’s notorious Maze prison. 

The Maze Wedding booklet created by Séamas O'Reilly and colleague Michael Murray

And, yes, we also mocked up file photos from Irish history, including Banjo The Riot Elephant which, like all of the above, we intended as an exaggeration so surreal it would never be taken seriously.

Clearly, we were wrong, as there was usually nothing, no matter how bizarre, that we could make that someone somewhere would not see a grain of truth in. 

Not least in the case of our little riot elephant which, a little image searching swiftly revealed, had spread across the internet like wildfire in the years since, often presented as fact.

I had barely gotten my head around this turn of events when one poster chimed in with a final layer of absurdity that brought the whole story full circle. He told me he’d seen the picture in real life, on the wall of the Lansdowne pub in Belfast.

The fake Noam Chomsky/elephant photo appears in a pub in Belfast. Picture: Séamas O'Reilly

So it was that I made the pilgrimage that would break my bladder, in search of the image that I took that afternoon, which was now projected on a screen for all in the Titanic Pump House to see. 

From a parody of pub wall tat, to a place on a real pub wall, I told them, the internet is truly an elephant that never forgets.

My story was well-received. More than a few of those present reported seeing the image in the wild themselves, so I reckon if I keep doing these it may go some way to undoing the fake news I’d inadvertently spread into the world.

What really struck me was the reaction of those in the Seanchoíche crowd, my age and younger, who appreciated the chance to explore, and laugh at, the nostalgia that they too had seen passed down within their own families.

But the thing that will really stay with me, following an evening spent talking about truth, absurdity and the perils of false history, was the audience member who told me how much he’d enjoyed the cover I’d shown of Maze Wedding Magazine. 

Just as I began telling him how I’d come up with such an absurd idea, he buffered slightly. 

He had been christened in the Maze, he told me, and his parents had gotten married there.