Barry Sloan

Michael Longley's Father: Memory, Mourning and History

Michael Longleys father has been a recurring presence in the poets work from his earliest to his most recent collection. The article examines the exceptional strength of that bond reflected in the varying and changing ways in which the poet has responded to it - memorising and mourning his loss; discovering through his fathers First World War stories a means of memorialising loss of life in contemporary conflicts and a way of facing the history of the 20th century; confronting his own ageing and mortality; and marking the specific, but also representative, generational history of his family.

‘Each neighbourly murder’ Lost Lives and the challenge of commemorating the victims of the Northern Ireland troubles

This essay opens by considering the sensitivities surrounding any attempt to create a memorial to all the victims of the Northern Ireland troubles, and proceeds to a detailed examination of one such project, Lost Lives. The links between the methodology of the book and the aims of its writers to commemorate each individual death, to provide an alternative history of the troubles, and to address future generations are central to the discussion which follows. Drawing particularly upon the work of William Watkin and Wilhelm Verwoerd, the essay considers Lost Lives as an example of the possibilities of ‘ethical mourning’ and ‘inclusive moral remembrance’ both in its commemoration of the dead and in its implicit appeal for new and conciliatory ways of resolving the issues that divide the community.

‘Drawing the Line and Making the Tot’: Aspects of Irish Protestant Life Writing

The political events in Ireland in the early twentieth century which led to the partitioning of the country in 1920 — with a Dublin-based government assuming control of 26 counties and a Belfast administration with close links to Westminster overseeing the remaining six — had particular effects for the Protestant communities on either side of the new border. In the Irish Free State, which became a republic in 1949, the already declining authority and influence of the once prosperous Protestant Anglo-Irish community were further eroded, and many families chose to leave the country rather than adapt to life in a radically altered political landscape, where the growing power and influence of the ultra-conservative Catholic church added to their sense of alienation. Some less socially privileged Protestants in the south felt betrayed by the leaders of their co-religionists in the north-east who had preferred to protect their interests by partition rather than to take their place in an all-Ireland political system; most faced the necessity of accommodating themselves to life in de Valera’s Ireland. In Northern Ireland itself, the in-built Protestant majority prepared to rule in perpetuity, making minimal concessions to Catholics within its jurisdiction, affirming its loyalty to the British monarchy and its defence of the liberties associated with reformed faith, and forever distrustful of the political and religious aspirations of its neighbours across the border.

When Parents Die: John Montague and Paul Durcan's Poetics of Loss and Recovery

The article compares and contrasts John Montagues The Dead Kingdom (1984) and the poems in Paul Durcans Daddy, Daddy (1990) in which they write of the loss of a parent. It examines the individual anxieties and needs the poets are seeking to resolve and their distinctive poetic strategies for managing loss and delivering themselves from its impact.