Seamus Heaney - Northern Ireland Troubles

The Troubles in Northern Ireland

Seamus Heaney has drawn on his background, his place of origin and its history throughout his career. The outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland coincided with his early writing. A number of his poems have addressed the political and social conflict in Northern Ireland, but he has always steered clear of any simplistic analysis of the situation. Heaney referred to himself as part of the Troubles and set out to comment on the deeply complex historical and cultural life of Northern Ireland. He has constantly been asked to state and restate his own position in relation to its political situation. His receipt of the 1995 Nobel Prize came at a time of renewed hope in Northern Ireland due to the 1994 ceasefire.

"All This Is Part Of Me"

The following interview with Seamus Heaney was recorded in 1974, a year of political unrest and violent conflict due to the collapse of the Northern Ireland Executive and the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. Eavan Boland asks the poet if he feels conscripted to writing about the political situation in Northern Ireland.

"I Actually Have An Enormous Love For The Protestant Community In The North"

Seamus Heaney argues that when dealing with the situation in Northern Ireland, "people set terms that are too simple", that it is the impulses from moment to moment that you go on. From being born and growing up in Northern Ireland, he feels he has an instinctive sense "of the velleities and dangers and the underground life of ... Protestant, Catholic in the Northern thing."

"He Had Gone When I Looked TO Meet His Eyes"

Seamus Heaney wrote an elegy, "The Strand at Lough Beg", after his second cousin Colum McCartney was shot and killed in 1975. In this clip, he reads a second poem, from "Station Island", which deals directly with the violence of this death.

Whatever You Say, Say Nothing

Seamus Heaney answers an accusation that he has side-stepped issues of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and again sets out his position. He reads from "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing" and discusses reading "Requiem for the Croppies" to sixth-form Protestant students.

Addresssing the Political Situation

In a public interview, Myles Dungan asks Seamus Heaney at what point he began to address the political situation. He replies that "as the seventies went on, as the violence became less a secret of the psyche and more a fact of the journals ... everybody felt the pressure to answer".

A Mood That Promsies New Energy

In an interview for RTÉ News after winning the Nobel Prize, Seamus Heaney reflects on the change in the Irish political landscape since the IRA ceasefire in 1994 and the need for magnanimity on both sides of the political and religious divide.