No good was ever going to come of this. One of Seamus Heaney’s most intense preoccupations as a poet and essayist was the anguishing complexity of identity in this divided island. Now the British government has used his portrait, alongside a photograph of Mary Peters, to market its celebrations of the centenary of Northern Ireland.
The perfect set of binaries, their branders must have persuaded them – great Catholic writer, male/great Protestant sportswoman, female. Both instantly recognisable so no words needed.
Predictably, the moment the blandly nasty Secretary of State unveiled it, Northerners went at each other like, to quote Yeats in Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, “weasels fighting in a hole”. This century, the hole is social media.
He deplored the IRA's violence, but he also admitted to wondering for a moment if it was the only way
SDLP leader Colum Eastwood was one of the first to post the line, “No glass of ours was ever raised to toast the queen”.
This is from a tongue in cheek response Heaney wrote after some of his work was published in an anthology of “British” verse. He said himself there was “a bit of merriment in it”.
As he told Mark Carruthers in one of the last interviews he gave before his untimely death in 2013, “I didn’t want to sound like a bigot but I wanted to address the breach in the community”.
Similar vein
To be fair, Eastwood may have intended his response to be taken in a similar vein. Neither the SDLP nor Sinn Féin is taking part in the Northern Ireland Office’s centenary forum.
Sinn Féin’s Northern leader, Deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill, put her party’s view bluntly: “There is nothing to celebrate.”
Some of the replies to Eastwood were far from merry. One loyalist tweeter suggested that “maybe they should have used Billy Wright” along with a photo of that late, and to some, lamented, sectarian killer. Another called Eastwood a “bitter sectarian bigot”.
Former Sinn Féin director of communications Danny Morrison also quoted the toast line and later threw in that “not a single unionist elected representative” had attended Heaney’s funeral.
This, disgracefully, was true. I saw none at his burial in Co Derry even, but when you consider that the nearest unionist MP to Bellaghy would have been Gregory Campbell, it is not surprising. Campbell so respects his nationalist neighbours that he said if there was an Irish Language Act he would use it as toilet paper.
Morrison himself had, according to Heaney, tried to “levy” his support during the IRA prison protests of the late 70s and early 80s, a pressure Heaney resisted.
Morrison later claimed that in his Station Island poems Heaney “self-consciously struggles with a sense of guilt”. He referred to a line in which, the poet having asked the victim of a loyalist murder for forgiveness, the murdered man replies, “nothing to forgive”. Morrison’s snide comment was, “which must be very reassuring.”
Incredibly moving
The Station Island poems are actually incredibly moving, a testament to the terrible sorrow of those murderous times and a lacerating examination of Heaney’s own conscience, as a neighbour to many of the nationalists who died – whether as hunger strikers or victims of sectarian assassinations – and as a poet. Far from sparing himself, he has his own murdered cousin accuse him: “you whitewashed ugliness” and “confused evasion and artistic tact”.
From his earliest work on, Heaney struggled with his public role, his “responsible tristia”, his sense of being “a wood kerne escaped from the fray”.
He deplored the IRA’s violence, which he felt made it almost impossible to imagine reconciliation with the unionist community, but he also admitted to wondering for a moment if it was the only way.
He dispelled the thought. Loyalist violence was “equally atrocious”. He hated what the division within the North did to people: “open minds, as open as a trap”.
Ulster Unionist Party leader Steve Aiken got in on the row, retorting to the toast quote with a photo of Heaney graciously shaking the queen’s hand, during her visit to Ireland in 2011, watched by a smiling president Mary McAleese.
Heaney told Carruthers that the world had changed after 1998 (and the Belfast Agreement) and that he was simply doing “the decent thing”. He also said that he was on a committee for awarding the queen’s gold medal for poetry.
While he preferred to be described as Irish/Ulster, as a concession to the changed times he was willing to call the North, Northern Ireland.
His quest
Heaney wrote that his quest was to find “words adequate to our predicament”. He quoted the Greek poet Seferis who wrote of his belief that “poetry could help”.
Heaney returned again and again to the hope he found in what he calls “moments of achieved grace”. He wrote of such a moment in an early poem about a Protestant neighbour in his childhood who discreetly waits to come into the Heaney home because he can hear the family saying the Angelus.
He also spoke more than once of the extraordinary moment in advance of the Kingsmills massacre when the killers called on the Catholics to step forward. Thinking the gang must be loyalists, one of the Protestants reached out to touch the hand of the one Catholic present, signalling him not to sacrifice himself, that he was among his own.
It was the IRA and all of the Protestants were murdered.
As well as his poems, Heaney’s 1995 Nobel lecture should be required reading for anyone wishing to comment on the centenary of partition. There are too many who prefer our “coherent miseries” and to “hug our little destinies again”.