The Cruiser and the Colonist: Conor Cruise O'Brien's Writings on Colonialism

Rooted in the poetry and prose of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and drawing heavily on unpublished material, this final chapter, Chapter 5, finds Seamus Heaney in another university setting, this time in Oxford. Taking its cue from Heaney’s own interest, in The Redress of Poetry, in the question of responsibility, it examines the complex intersections of the imagination with the challenges of contemporary society and the burden of history. It brings Heaney into dialogue with figures as diverse as Coleridge, Conor Cruise O’Brien, and Raymond Williams, and it charts the development of two key poems, ‘The Diviner’ and ‘Markings’, in order to illuminate his various expressions of the fraught but necessary interactions between the private artist and their social world.

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‘I ran away’? The I.R.A. and 1969: the evolution of a myth

Irish Historical Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021121400001887 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 38 (152) ◽

pp. 671-687

Author(s):

Brian Hanley

Keyword(s):

Traditional Role ◽

Communal Violence ◽

The Troubles ◽

Starting Point ◽

Conor Cruise

Between 13 and 15 August 1969 communal violence in Belfast saw seven people killed and over 400 treated for injuries. Nearly 2,000 families were forced from their homes. British troops were deployed on the streets to prevent further violence, events usually seen as the starting point of the modern Irish Troubles. In 1972 the Sunday Times Insight Team's Ulster set the tone for commentary on the role of the I.R.A. during this period. It claimed that the organisation had been ‘largely an irrelevance’ in Belfast during August 1969 and as a result ‘I.R.A. – I Ran Away was scrawled derisively over the walls of the Catholic Ghettos’. Conor Cruise O'Brien soon asserted in States of Ireland that when violence erupted ‘the I.R.A. had very few weapons and very few people trained and ready to use them. Their prestige in the Ghettos went sharply down. People wrote on walls I.R.A. I Ran Away.’ Echoing these statements twentythree years later Tim Pat Coogan in his book The Troubles stated that ‘the I.R.A. posed very little threat to anyone during those days. So little that the disgusted inhabitants of the area, used to regarding the I.R.A. in the traditional role of “the defenders” wrote up the letters I.R.A. on gable walls as Irish Ran Away.' Similar assertions are found in a wide variety of the literature, both popular and academic, dealing with the outbreak of the Troubles.

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