Ireland

So. Ireland. St Patrick. Potatoes. The Troubles. Green, and a lot of it. I’ve been thinking about Ireland lately, due to some research on Maria Edgeworth’s literature, and a rereading of Yeats. Irish literature is such a pleasure.

Ireland and England have historically had an uneasy relationship. For me, it’s the anecdotal that has really made this apparent to me. A few years ago, a teacher told me a story about some English friends who were showing off their newborn baby to family friends in Ireland. The reaction? “He’s really very nice, in spite of Oliver Cromwell.”

After the Irish Rebellion in 1798, the British and Irish governments enacted the Act of Union that made Ireland a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Following this union, the issue of a separate Irish identity was on the table again, and home rule became a goal. After three attempts, the Government of Ireland Act 192o instituted home rule. Northern Ireland—largely a protestant region—opted out and stayed a part of the United Kingdom, while Ireland became a separate entity. This division of Ireland created tensions that continued throughout the twentieth century, especially during the thirty or so years leading up to 1998’s Belfast Agreement. More recently, the Provisional IRA announced the end of the armed campaign in 2005, which was followed by full disarmament under the supervision of international weapons inspectors.

Seamus Heaney is a poet who has moved between Northern Ireland and Ireland. As a recent winner of the Nobel Prize and one of the most widely read poets of the past fifty years, he was an obvious choice. More than that, he is a poet that has meant a great deal to me for many years now. The poem I have chosen is “The Toome Road,” which I found online here.



The Toome Road

One morning early I met armoured cars
In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres,
All camouflaged with broken alder branches,
And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.
How long were they approaching down my roads
As if they owned them? The whole country was sleeping.
I had rights-of-way, fields, cattle in my keeping,
Tractors hitched to buckrakes in open sheds,
Silos, chill gates, wet slates, the greens and reds
Of outhouse roofs. Whom should I run to tell
Among all of those with their back doors on the latch
For the bringer of bad news, that small-hours visitant
Who, by being expected, might be kept distant?
Sowers of seed, erectors of headstones...
O charioteers, above your dormant guns,
It stands here still, stands vibrant as you pass,
The visible, untoppled omphalos.

—Seamus Heaney