It was timely that John Bowman should feature on his Saturday morning programme John Hewitt's pointed and instructive allegory The Colony, with its moving message for all on this island, though clearly aimed at the North. In the poem the Colonists claim: "For we have rights drawn from the soil and sky;/ The use, the pace, the patient years of labour,/ The rain against the lips, the changing light,/ The heavy clay- sucked stride have altered us;/ We would be strangers in the Capitol;/ This is our country also, nowhere else;/ And we shall not be outcast on the world." There were colonists and occupiers - or simply arrivals - before the Vikings, the Normans, the Elizabethans, the Cromwellians and the Scots and English planters of the North. When did the Celts come here? A couple of hundred years BC? And before that? About seven thousand years of such people as gave us Newgrange and other monuments we now revere. Where did they come from? What is now Spain, maybe. And what is it in the North? Natives and usurpers? Hewitt's line is that they all have rights "drawn from the soil and sky". And what a marvellous patch of earth it is. The Antrim Coast Road, where early Larnian man, as the settlers are called, fashioned tools from the local flint to clear the land for sowing crops, lived off the fish, using spear-head flints on the larger species and for hunting animals for fur and food. The mountain Tievebulliagh gave a hard stone, particularly useful for making weapon-heads, which was exported to Europe.
So much is part of the common heritage: the round tower at Devenish and the two-faced gods on Boa Island; the enigmatic figures on White Island. In Co Antrim is a famous mound - Donegore, said to be a Norman motte built on an earlier mound. And here many United Irishmen gathered in 1798 to march to the town of Antrim. Beside the mound is the grave of Sir Samuel Ferguson, author of the most haunting elegy Lament for Thomas Davis, beginning: "I walked through Ballinderry in the spring-time", and going on to: "But a hundred such as I will never comfort Erin/ For the loss of that noble son."
What a richness for all lies in that corner of Ireland. And it all began how many thousands of years ago? We are sometimes accused of having too long memories. In fact we have very short memories when it suits us. Going back, some think, only a few hundred years, instead of many thousands of years. Y