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WHO SPEAKS FOR ULSTER?

Published in Issue 6 (November/December 2022), Letters, Volume 30

Sir,—When my eyes spotted the title ‘Who speaks for Ulster, 1913, 2022?’, I rapidly flipped through the pages of the latest issue (HI 30.5, Sept./Oct. 2022), expecting to find some reference to the writings of Belfast poet John Hewitt.

Author M.C. Rast chronicles critical aspects of this momentous period of Irish history since 1913, but I think it is Ulster poet John Hewitt who best captures the heart and soul of the people who experienced that torturous period of Irish history. Hewitt’s ‘An Irishman in Coventry’ (1958) might be read as an epilogue to ‘Who Speaks for Ulster?’. It looks at the people from the outside but speaks in the first person, as Hewitt paints this portrait of:

a people endlessly betrayed
by our own weakness, by the wrongs we suffered
in that long twilight over bog and glen,
by force, by famine and by glittering fables
which gave us martyrs when we needed men.

While today’s scholars parse the documents and catalogue political debates in the North of Ireland and British parliament, I think that it may be the touch of the poet John Hewitt which speaks best for Ulster:

This is our fate: eight hundred years’ disaster,
crazily tangled as the Book of Kells;
the dream’s distortion and the land’s division,
the midnight raiders and the prison cells.
Yet like Lir’s children, banished to the waters,
our hearts still listen for the landward bells.

—Yours etc.,

ROBERT F. LYONS
Maine, USA

On this Day

April 25

1922 Commandant O’Neill, 3rd Cork Brigade IRA, was shot dead at the home of a Protestant family in Bandon, Co. Cork. In a series of unattributed reprisals, thirteen Protestant civilians were shot dead in the surrounding area over the following four days.
1920 RIC Sergeant Cornelius Crean, brother of the explorer Tom Crean, was killed by the IRA in an ambush near Upton, Co. Cork.
1870 Daniel Maclise (64), history and portrait painter who worked for most of his life in London, died.
1719 The life and strange adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe was published.
1819 Vere Foster, philanthropist and educationist, born in Copenhagen, where his Irish-born father was British minister.
1987 Lord Justice Gibson and his wife were killed by an IRA bomb as they crossed the border south of Newry, Co. Down.
1917 Ella Fitzgerald, jazz singer, born in Newport News, Virginia.
1922 Commandant O’Neill of the third Cork Brigade IRA was shot dead at the home of a Protestant family in Bandon, Co. Cork. In a series of unattributed reprisals, thirteen Protestant civilians were shot dead in the surrounding area between 26 and 29 April.
1915 During the First World War, Allied troops landed on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula. The disastrous Gallipoli campaign, ending in January 1916, cost 46,000 Allied lives, including over 2,295 Irishmen.

WHO SPEAKS FOR ULSTER?

Personal Histories

On this Day

April 25