The magazine was created by the late poet James Simmons in May 1968, when Paris was teetering on the brink of revolution and Northern Ireland civil war. It was subtitled "A Handbook for Revolution", in response to which the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) raided the printers, failing to comprehend that a revolution might be a poetic rather than a Republican or Marxist one. Instead, Simmons had hoped to bring about a revolution in the way we view the world, beginning with our own corner of it. To see life, through poetry and prose, as strange, fleeting and miraculous as it really is, to aspire to free thought and see beyond "all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls" as Orwell put it. It was brave and perceptive of Simmons to go beyond tribalism and unthinking allegiances to glorious pasts that never were. In the first issue of The HU, there was a manifesto that spelt out this intention, "We expect to print writers of varied beliefs and backgrounds. Not only protestants and catholics, unionists and liberals, but humanists, anarchists, atheists, mystics, communists, etc." This openness, scepticism and subversion remains as valid today as ever. We need only turn on the news to see how much we need the individual who asks questions, who exhibits the free enquiry that has taken us from the caves to the cities, in the face of those all too certain they have the answers; the writer who sees the vast world of places, ideas and experiences beyond the shores of this island and conspires, at the risk of being accused of treason, to let it in.

Honest Ulsterman

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