A native of Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. The following excerpts are taken from interviews conducted with him in 1986 and shortly after he won the Nobel in 1996.Poetry summons you. That's been my own experience. The real difficulty about being a poet is not in the writing. It's surviving the silence, surviving lack of inspiration, and … [Read more...] about Seamus Heaney Poetic Champion
Northern Ireland
The British Army in Ireland 30 Years On
By Brian Dooley
August / September 1999
On the 30th anniversary of the 1969 deployment of British troops in Northern Ireland, Brian Dooley looks back on the response both in Ireland and in Irish America.About 5 p.m. on Thursday, August 14, 1969, British soldiers of the Prince of Wales Own Regiment swung into Derry's William Street and began stretching barbed wire across the road, so ending the Battle of the Bogside. … [Read more...] about The British Army in Ireland 30 Years On
The First Word: The Heritage of Hate
"I'm Serbian," the waiter answers a little self-consciously. It's the height of the bombing -- maybe it's not such a good thing to say. He's young, no more than a kid really, with short-cropped hair. My guests for lunch are visiting from Northern Ireland -- a couple -- he born and bred in Armagh, she born in London of Irish parents. They met in San Francisco where her English … [Read more...] about The First Word: The Heritage of Hate
The First Word: Living Up to The Nobel Prize
Ireland is no stranger to the Nobel Prize. Indeed the prize awarded each year in memory of Alfred Nobel (the inventor of dynamite) has gone to citizens of the island a total of seven times. W.B. Yeats (1923), G.B. Shaw (1925), Samuel Beckett (1969) and Seamus Heaney (1995) all won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But good writers aside, the Nobel Committee has also focused on … [Read more...] about The First Word: Living Up to The Nobel Prize
The Dawn of a New Peace
HISTORIC NI AGREEMENT GIVES HOPE FOR FUTURE: Deaglán de Bréadún, Northern Editor of The Irish Times, describes an epic week in the history of the North of Ireland culminating in the historic peace deal. ℘℘℘ I have been privileged to cover two truly epic stories in my career as a journalist. One was the mass migration of the Kurds from northern Iraq into Iran and Turkey … [Read more...] about The Dawn of a New Peace