Sir, – If Susan McKay is going to quote my critique of Station Island (“Seamus Heaney celebrated hope and not old divisions”, Opinion, December 16th) she should have quoted the context. It was in my introduction to a book, Hunger Strike – Reflections, which included contributions from Christy Moore, Frances Black, Nell McCafferty, Peter Sheridan, Ken Loach, Shane Connaughton, John Montague, Robert Ballagh and Edna O’Brien, among others.
Bobby Sands in his epic poem, H-Block Trilogy, written in the months before his death, criticises artists and poets, asking where are those in society who are meant to uphold or express in culture some defence of the powerless – especially those being assaulted in interrogations centres or being beaten on the blanket protest. “They sketch the moon and capture bloom/With genius, so they say./But never they sketch the quaking wretch/Who lies in Castlereagh.”
In Station Island there is a discussion of sorts about the role or responsibility of the poet in a conflict situation, when the poet self-consciously struggles with a sense of guilt.
That’s what I was discussing – and was entitled to ask if writers could have done more. That question stands.
In 1979 and 1980 I and others set out to lobby public figures to speak out about the prison situation in the North before the protest escalated into a hunger strike. Indeed, one of those I lobbied, the late Douglas Gageby, wrote an Irish Times editorial on the H-Block crisis.
I approached Seamus Heaney on the Dublin-to-Belfast train and asked him to consider saying something or writing something about the prisons. He told me about a poem he was currently working on (Station Island). Seamus memorialises our meeting in his poem, Flight Path, where I am made out to be aggressive though when we discussed this in December 2009 he admitted that he did “gild the lily a bit”, which as an artist he was quite entitled to do. Over the years this conversation has been characterised as menacing, intimidating even, but was far from that.
In 2010 I had the honour of hosting Seamus at a Féile an Phobail event in West Belfast which I chaired and at which he spoke about his mentor Michael McLaverty. Before that event I had taken Seamus back to St Thomas’s School in Ballymurphy for an emotional visit, his first time back since he had been a student teacher in the early 1960s under Michael McLaverty, then principal.
After the Féile event we shook hands and hugged in the car park of St Mary’s University College and that was the last time I saw him. Whatever our differences we had made up. – Yours, etc,
DANNY MORRISON,
Belfast.