Morrison: how I settled differences with Heaney
EX-IRA man says he had been ‘made out to be aggressive’ in poem
A former republican prisoner has recalled how he and poet Seamus Heaney reconciled with a handshake and a hug — after he previously requested he should write more about those imprisoned during the Troubles.
The reflection by Danny Morrison — previously the communications director for Sinn Fein — comes in response to Irish writer Susan Mckay criticising his interpretation of Heaney’s 1984 collection of poems entitled Station Island — a series of works exploring the poet’s relationship with the Troubles.
The debate is in the wake of the row over Seamus Heaney’s image being included in the UK Government’s Northern Ireland centenary campaign.
Writing a letter in yesterday’s Irish Times in response, Mr Morrison recounted the interaction he had with the Nobel Prize winning poet on board the
Dublin-to-belfast train around the time of the hunger strikes, when he asked him to consider “writing something about the prisons”.
Mr Morrison explained he and other republicans at the time were “entitled to ask if writers could have done more” during the Troubles.
“Bobby Sands in his epic poem, H-block Trilogy, written in the months before his death, criticises artists and poets,” he wrote.
“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.
“In [Heaney’s] 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.
“I approached Seamus Heaney on the Dublin-to-belfast train and asked him to consider saying something or writing something about the prisons.
“Seamus memorialises our meeting in his poem, Flight Path, where I am made out to be aggressive. Over the years this conversation has been characterised as menacing, intimidating even, but was far from that.”
However he also recalled how they overcame their differences after he hosted Heaney at a Feile an Phobail event in west Belfast in 2010.
He wrote: “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 Feile 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.”