Seamus Heaney - Seamus Deane

Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in Northern Ireland.

The poems of North (like Punishment) appeared in 1965: they were the result of Heaney's meditation on his reading Glob's "The bog people", dealing with the discovery in peat bogs of the preserved bodies of people sacrificed during tribal rituals. In the poet's mind the Bog People became a metaphor for the atrocities and rituals of the political and religious "troubles" in Ireland.

Seamus Deane is a northern-irish writer. His novel "Reading in the Dark" is set in the city of Derry, in Northern-Ireland, were the author was born. The story starts in 1945 and gives a picture of what growing up in Northern Ireland was like. The narrator is a young boy, born into a working-class catholic family, who tries to unravel the mysteries hiding in his family's politically active past.

"Reading in the dark" was called a "Bildungsroman", because as we watch the narrator unfold the long-buried mystery of his family, we also see him lose the innocence of imagination.

This book shows clearly that in N.I. the political and private are bound together. The Catholics have two spiritual resources: the popular heritage of Ireland's gaelic life and the Catholic Church. The Church plays an important and rather ambiguous role in the novel: it becomes an accomplice of the Government by controlling education and teaching the boys acceptance and inner peace.

The experience of violence is also central to the story, highlighted in the brutal beating of the narrator and his father by the police (police culture).

First extract: Reading in the dark

The boy enjoys reading novels and tales when he is in bed at night: now  he is reading a novel called "The poor old woman", that belonged his mother. This novel is about the great rebellion of 1978, and the protagonists are two lovers, Ann and Robert. In the second section the english teacher of the boy reads another novel, written by a country boy. It is about everyday-life, and the boy feels embarrassed because in his novels he writes only about rebellions, love affairs and fights.

Second extract: Pistol

The boy is suspected of hiding a gun: he watches his house ransacked and than is brutally beaten by the police.

He is terribly scared because he knows that it is his fault: the day before he had showed his friends a pistol that had been given to his father by a German prisoner, although he had been warned not to mention the gun because the police kept watch on his family.

The life of a republican prisoner was hard in the H-Bolks, and for us it is difficult only to imagine what it  means to live 24H shouted up in solitary confinement, without being able to look outside, forced to sleep on a mattress put on the floor, full of dust and urine and to communicate with the other prisoners only through fine cracks of the walls.

Bobby Sands spent four long years in that hell, more than 1000 days of solitude, violence, pain and humiliation, days that were always identical. And one of this days is described in the pages of "One Day in My Life", a raw and shocking story and a true evidence that reveals a reality non far from that one of the german Lager during the Second World War.

The history of Ireland in the early 20^th century saw the country split into two parts with separate Parliaments in Dublin and Belfast. The Irish were themselves divided: many wanted Ireland to be a united country under one government (Republicans); most people in Northern Ireland wished to keep the "Union" with Britain. The conflict between the Unionist and the Republicans was bitter. After the Second World War, new factors strengthened the power of Protestants and made unification less possible. The introduction of the Welfare State made a powerful argument for keeping the Union with Britain, since Northern Ireland was guaranteed higher living standards than the Republic of Ireland.

The Catholics were considered potential enemies of the state and they were kept out of responsible positions.

In the 1963 the new Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Terrence O'Neill, promised reforms which could benefit Catholics. By 1967 few of these promises had been kept, and the Catholics organized a civil rights movement, taking inspiration from the black civil rights movement in the USA.

The events that would become known as "The Troubles" began.

The British sent troops to ensure peace between the Catholics and Protestants: these soldiers came to be seen as the representatives of the British control of N.I.

To counter the threat of terrorism, internment without trial was introduced in N.I. in August 1971, and lasted until December 1975.

There was also a deterioration in relations between the army and the Catholic population and, in January 1972, 13 people were shot dead by British troops on a civil rights march in Londonderry (Bloody Sunday).

In 1976 a group of IRA prisoners in the Maze prison in Belfast claimed special status because they said they had committed their crimes for political reasons. They took to wearing only their blankets, then soiling their cells with excrement and finally in 1981 they went on hunger strike; ten of the prisoners died before the hunger strike was called off. The first to die was Bobby Sands, who became an IRA martyr.

In 1985 Britain and Ireland made a formal agreement to involve the Dublin government in the affairs of N.I., but violence continued and was experienced both in Britain and in Ireland.

Finally, in December 1993, British Prime Minister and his Irish counterpart signed a historic declaration affirming the right of self-determination for the people of N.I.

Easter 1916 was written by Yeats after the Easter Rising on 24^th April 1916. The uprising was planned to take advantage of Britain's weakness owing to the war, in the expectation that a British defeat in the Great War would bring independence About 700 Republicans had begun the rebellion by seizing strategic points in Dublin (foremost was the Post Office). The held an admist heavy gunfire for several days, before being defeated. Some died on the spot, others were executed later.