The Office of Identity and Cultural Expression is a department that would fit well into Orwell’s 1984 and will cost us, the taxpayers, hundreds of thousands for exactly what? What it will do is further embed identity into our political and societal discourse, continue to foster competitive victimhood and lived experiences and undermine the future of our children; this is what identity politics does. Identity politics is also an underlying feature of our failed system of government, which we call a mandatory coalition. The only people happy with the creation of this useless office are the three commissioners, who will cost the taxpayer £300,000 annually.
To make themselves relevant, though that would be truly a miracle, the quango sponsored an event at the MAC as part of the Belfast International Arts Festival. The event was called Arts in Contested Spaces. The quango is organising this event as if it were something new. They call it art in contested spaces; I call it spaces with contested values. Artists have always had a role in post-conflict reconciliation by translating complex historical trauma into shared experiences. Singer-songwriters such as Bill Withers, Nina Simone, and Bob Dylan, as well as artists such as Sylvia Pankhurst, Picasso and Banksy, have all done this.
The quango ignores and fails to engage in a conversation about a post-1921 era myth. That tragedy and political myth is that working-class Seamus and working-class William have nothing in common. You may have already guessed that I come from a long-lost political space called the progressive and pragmatic left, no longer represented in our political ecosystem.
Please do not say it’s the SDLP.
The huge technical endeavour of creating a website for this new quango has still not been completed, but in its few lines of waffle it refers to a phrase called social cohesion but does not refer to shared values. I am sceptical not just of the office, but also of how the success of the so-called commissioners and the director will be measured, and what outcomes we can expect. I will keep my expectations low, so I will not be disappointed.
Going back to this unexplained phrase used on their “website,” called social cohesion, a phrase they use without any explanation of its importance. For me, this phrase underpins my political and social philosophy. So, let me quote Judith Maxwell: “It involves building shared values and communities of interpretation, reducing disparities in wealth and income, and generally enabling people to have a sense that they are engaged in a common enterprise, facing shared challenges and that they are members of a community”.
I would add three other things: that is, a society engaged in a participative democracy, no cultural hegemony, a secular education system with a strong civics program and an ethos at its core to understand our complex and interdependent world.
They also refer to the word reconciliation, an industry that has received hundreds of millions in largesse without any measurable outcomes, and now the director, Katy Radford and her colleagues have joined the party. Finally, this organisation is the last thing we need to bring about a sense of a shared community, but I’m sure Katy and her colleagues are delighted with their plunder
Suneil Sharma
28th October 2026
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