But as I keep encountering people’s familiarity with Heaney, I sense something down-to-earth and personal too, as if he were a beloved uncle, a friend. A young woman having tea with her mum at Donnelly’s, a happy pub in Barna on Galway Bay, was there to visit her sister in Galway. When I told her – over the boisterous pub talk and Irish band — that I had once met Heaney, she brightened and began transmitting to her mum everything I said about my brief brush with The Poet. (My last impression of that pub was of this young woman sitting in with the band, swaying as she sang in lovely harmony with the old man playing guitar.) She and her mom were from County Wicklow, where Heaney wrote his Glanmore Sonnets.

(A taste from one:
Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow. )

Ireland loves her poets, living and dead. That rings clear with the John Hewitt Society “summer school” here in Armagh this week. All week, a few hundred poets, novelists, playwrights, newspaper columnists and sweet Northern Irish people aspiring to those vocations have come to this 12^th annual festival to honor a poet raised in this county. John Hewitt must have raised some vital questions about how we all should live locally but in circles of the wider world, for this conference opened with a lofty lecture by the elected president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins (a spry poet himself) on the week’s theme – “Regionalism: The Last Chance? Local identity in a shrinking world.” There’s a pub in Belfast also named for John Hewitt, a unique nonprofit business that donates its earnings to the unemployed. We had lunch there with playwright Martin Lynch.)

But the loss of Seamus Heaney is much fresher than that of Hewitt, a real sorrow in the flesh. I think everyone felt that with the lecture of poet and close Heaney friend Peter Fallon when he spoke in the main hall (a space like Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Theatre piled up with timbered balconies). Fallon gave the first of what is to be an annual “Heaney-O’Discoll Memorial Lecture” at the Hewitt festival. Dennis O’Driscoll, another beloved Irish poet, died in 2012. Fallon was close to both men, and seemed genuinely still in grief. His lecture was a transcendent prose poem. You can’t find it on the web. Sorry. It was in the moment, a large experience in a shrinking world. It was mostly about Heaney and his poetry – how he uses nouns and verbs, and in particular, the word love. He loved. He loved this thing and that, because it exists, and because the word for it and the metaphor for it are so wonderful.

My Heaney story? I was a Nieman fellow, a mid-career battery-charge for journalists who get to spend a year at Harvard. It was 1986-87, the year Harvard was celebrating its 350^th anniversary and one of the years when Heaney was lecturing there on British and Irish poetry. I took that class. He also came to the Nieman house for an afternoon of beer and talk with us fellows, and gave me a book he signed, Ireland’s Field Day, collected essays by a movement he had joined to offer the arts as a means of reconciling the warring factions of Ireland. Heaney was also commissioned to write a poem for the 350^th celebration. His reading of that poem, a tricky French form called a villanelle, plunged so deep into my hearing I can still recall his hard “r”s and his rolling voice as it boomed out over the Yarrrrrd. It was my invitation to harvest all that Harvard had to offer me that year, the books of its “VE-RI-TAS” shield unclasped and the Harvard gates, unbarrrred (but not un-barded).

Villanelle for an Anniversary

 A spirit moved. John Harvard walked the yard,
The atom lay unsplit, the west unwon,
The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

 The maps dreamt on like moondust. Nothing stirred.
The future was a verb in hibernation.
A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.

 Before the classic style, before the clapboard,
All through the small hours of an origin,
The books stood open and the gate unbarred.

 Night passage of a migratory bird.
Gownflap. Like a homing pigeon
A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard.

 Was that his soul (look) sped to its reward
By grace or works? A shooting star? An omen?
The books stood open and the gate unbarred.

 Begin again where frosts and tests were hard.
Find yourself or founder. Here, imagine
A spirit moves, John Harvard walks the yard,
The books stand open and the gates unbarred.

A Bronze Age farmer-warrior defends his tribe against earlier invaders, such as the Vikings, who were not settlers (except in Dublin).

Most of the questions posed by the exhibit were about the idea of the Plantation – the British effort to establish a controlling presence in Ireland starting around 1607 by sponsoring settlers from England and Scotland to homestead the land left by “the flight of the Earls.” The Earls were Irish Catholic aristocrats who had been given vast lands in the north under an agreement that allowed governance by the English Crown. The Earls, eventually, couldn’t abide the agreement, and fled to Catholic Spain.

In came the English and Scottish fishmongers, vintners, linen-makers and such, hearty and ambitious Presbyterian Scots and London craftsmen with their Church of England bishops and charters from London. They prospered, and the local Catholics stayed poor. Of course this was asking for trouble. The Plantation wasn’t their land, was it?

Asked by the exhibit to say what I thought about the Plantation system, I’ve been thinking about this awhile now. The English Crown – Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and then James I – had reason to worry about being attacked by Catholic powers on the continent, using Ireland as their launch. The Spanish Armada of 1588, after all, was not just a battle, but an all-out effort of Spain to take control over England. (The cannon we saw that was excavated 40 years ago from a sunken Spanish warship from the Armada and on display in Derry is a monster, far bigger than a ship cannon, obviously intended for a ground war on English soil.) It must’ve felt like the Soviet Union sending missiles to Cuba in 1962, or the fear Americans had earlier of Communist spies and sympathizers in the government.

In back of that were greater anxieties throughout Europe. Between about 1492 and 1688, in those two centuries, European nations all scrambled to extend their reach and power. Why? Was it defensiveness, or ambition, or curiosity about the larger world and larger possibilities for the human experience? If defensiveness, remember that the Islamic empire had been even more powerful than parochial little Europe in the previous centuries, and had made incursions into Spain, up the Adriatic to Venice and up to the gates of Vienna. The Battle of Lapanto in 1571 was little quarreling Europe’s version of the Spanish Armada, saving Christendom from Byzantium’s Muslim might as if by a miracle. The restlessness of Europe in the so-called Age of Exploration is something to contemplate.

In any case, it occurs to me that the Plantation system in Northern Ireland was just another piece of the Plantation system that brought the English to Virginia (also starting in 1607), to Massachusetts (in 1630) and to my home state of Georgia (in 1733). It brought a new culture to those lands, and it brought violence and burglary, but also some good. There was evil in other systems of national expansion too, and some good.

Moral judgment from this distance seems ignorant. But we can at least see that there were other options besides the Plantation system, and each was a mixed bag. At the risk of oversimplifying, I name the options this way.

The Spanish: All male force of soldiers, with a few priests; penetrating into the land, conquering, killing, grabbing wealth, and returning with booty. Sort of like the Viking system, with guns.

The English: Mix of men and their wives, procreating, planting farms and towns, churches, acquiring land by any means possible. Relations with natives tentative.

The French: All male venture with curiosity about exotic culture, relating to it like an anthropological participant-observer, mapping, intermarrying with the indigenous women, appreciating the Other (as long as they learned to speak French).

The Dutch: Trade with the Other; non-violent, capitalistic, and relatively detached. (Thanks, Nessa O’Mahony, for suggesting this fourth one.)

What do you think? Which one was nicest? Which one solved Europe’s anxieties best?

Claire Savage and me in Belfast City Hall rotunda.

The BBC Broadcast House in Belfast welcomed us like family. It was not at all the bunker I complained about in an earlier post as being today’s position of most news organizations – and this, in a city that was full of bunker defenses not long ago. It’s an old building, with “The British Broadcasting Corporation” chiseled in the stone lintel over the doorway. They were expecting us at the reception desk. Claire Savage, the on-air correspondent who was finally the contact I reached, greeted us warmly – me, Libby and my three journalism students – and took us up to the top floor for coffee and a chat. We were joined by two other veteran correspondents of Northern Ireland’s tumultuous politics and paramilitary violence, Mark Devenport and Martina Purdy.

These are my kind of journalists – well-rounded, realistic, generous-spirited, knowledgeable, modest. They seem to understand what a great privilege it is to stand upright in a place that allows them, like no one else, to tell the dramatic stories around them without the partisan grip of grievance or score-settling.

Mark Devenport

Claire Savage, from N. Ireland but with experience in the States, had helped start a daily in 2005 for both Protestant and Catholic readers, The Daily View, but it closed after six weeks. Claire was recommended to me, with her email addess, by the Belfast correspondent for the Guardian (Henry McDonald, partner of Dublin blogger June Caldwell – all these connections radiating out from this ieiMedia program). Afterwards, she led us through town, straight through lavishly ornate City Hall, to the John Hewitt pub, where she joined us for lunch with playwright Martin Lynch. It was Claire’s day off.

The BBC is uniquely subsidized by the annual tariff that everyone in the UK pays to own a television. The organization has represented the very best in independent journalism, although sullied recently by the scandal of a TV star who had been molesting young guests for years without anyone noticing. These three veterans of covering the troubles, and politics under the Peace accord of 1998, convinced me of the BBC’s “outsider” position on the violently charged issues in Northern Ireland. Mark Devenport is from Oxford, educated at Cambridge with a degree in history. Martina Purdy is from Toronto, and began her career in papers there.

Martina Purdy

They were all extremely helpful in providing names, background and contact information for my students’ stories. Martina followed up that day with a long email full of names and numbers. That night, as Libby and I were resting up in our B&B in Derry, Libby called my attention to the TV screen. There was Mark Devenport, explaining a political story in a talk-back with the anchor, looking indeed a little like Harrison Ford. He was wearing the same tie we’d seen him in earlier that day.

So magical thinking wafts in through the open window in our youth hostel’s Quiet Room where we are reading aloud the plays-in-progress of this odd mix of theater and journalism – our Amagh Project 2014. In one very promising play – a satire of the malarkey storytelling industry here, it seems to me – three automatronic crows have speaking parts. In the next play, as we’re reading, three crows gather on the crown of the slate roof just outside the window, black on black against a glowering sky that might rain one minute, and turn cloud-puffed blue the next. One of these crows – or are they rooks, or ravens? – emits a piercing sound that I swear has something of the dramatized human voices we’re projecting just inside the window. They stick around for the rest of that one-act, mockingly. It’s spooky.

After that is Kimberley’s script, in which a 63-year-old W. B. Yeats, ensconced in his Georgian townhouse in Merrion Square, Dublin, voices his resentments and delusions. I’ve been recruited to play Yeats. Me, a 63-year-old smiling public man, not three days past having wandered through Merrion Square, among school children.

My left eye’s problem, after six months of an idiopathic retinopathy that put a little colored distorting disc in the middle of that eye’s vision, is still with me despite last month’s laser treatment. But after I see a pair of Yeats’ old-man glasses at the National Library in Dublin, I’m struck by the fact that he, like Joyce, apparently required a patch over the left eye in old age. And now my eye problem seems to be going away. Homeopathic magic.

The news story was originally based on the Facebook reports of a researcher who had been searching through records of this Catholic home in Galway where unwed pregnant girls could have their babies in isolated shame and give them up for the nuns to raise.

But the story was wrong, or at least suffered from several steps of exaggeration and lack of context. Shawn Pogatchnik, the Associated Press reporter who was my original contact in Dublin, wrote a diligent analysis of how the story fell off the rails of verifiable facts.

The deaths of so many children, in the context of Ireland’s poverty and diseases at the time, was not unusual. In fact, the death rate at this “mother and baby” home was lower than that of most of the other nine such places in Ireland, all long-since shut down. Contrary to some of the news stories, these children were baptized, and buried on the orphanage grounds mainly because family plots in churchyards had no room. Death stalked the land from the 1920s through the 1950s, and infants in these homes were dying not so much from starvation but from measles, pneumonia, tuberculosis and the flu.

As for the septic tank, it was a “disused” tank when the burials took place, even if any were on that spot – which was merely the speculation of the researcher, not a fact. But “Nuns bury babies in septic tank” was too good a headline to resist, Pogatchnik says. A harder story to tell is the real one, of Ireland’s widespread poverty and disease during much of the 20^th century.

— Doug Cumming

The way you cast each poem inside the head
Of that great polymath, or of each kith
And kin, distinct, original, well said,
Yet each turn ending right on the foot fifth —

And in more perfect rhyme than I can fit;
Your three times 4 lines set not in concrete
But floating neatly, fleetly on the wit
Of couplets mathematically complete.

Thanks for these squared gems chiseled from the void,
And the Trinity tour (‘round 3) we so enjoyed.

Ignatius McGovern, a retired fellow in physics at Trinity College, Dublin, has published his third volume of poetry as a sonnet sequence based on the life and writings of William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865). Hamilton was also a fellow at Trinity, an astronomer and mathematician who devised quarternion algebra, a friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and a poet. Quarternions are numbers that reflect not just a single measurement, like our common numbers, but four, somewhat like the dimensions of time-space (as best I can understand). His insight into quarternions is said to have come to him while walking along the Royal Canal with Lady Hamilton, not with a jingle jangle but a mystic dream of 4. Thus, Iggy McGovern’s sonnet sequence, “A Mystic Dream of 4,” contains four sections of 14 sonnets each from the voices of Hamilton’s friends and relations, plus sonnets from Hamilton’s perspective and on the section titles: Geometry, Algebra, Metaphysics and Poetry. It is an amazing work of intellect and music, like a St. Brigid’s Cross of poetry and science.

Trinity College Library, which holds the famous Book of Kells

Let’s meet at the Writers Center at 10 a.m. If we have another room with the technology (or can just use my laptop), I’d like to have each of us show a multimedia news feature we like, preferably on a Irish subject.

I’ll also give a brief reading/synopsis of Malachi O’Douherty’s The Telling Year: Belfast 1972, about is start as a news reporter at the height of the Troubles, and discussion about beginnings of journalism careers.

Doug

Me and Prof/Poet Iggy McGovern in the old Schrodinger lecture hall of the physics building at Trinity College.

Libby and I enjoyed a privileged easygoing tour of a few inner sanctums of Trinity College (founded 1592 with the mission of opposing Irish popery), guided by a physics professor emeritus with a key, a Catholic gent from the north coast of Ulster named Ignatius McGovern. Iggy had an office adjoining the only Irishman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, Ernest T.S. Walton (won in 1951 for work at Cambridge in the Thirties with Lord Rutherford in splitting the atom, proving Einstein’s E=MC squared). Ireland has one Nobel in physics, but four in literature: Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and Seamus Heaney. (These four were the answer to one of the questions in the pop quiz poet Nessa O’Mahony gave us after her whistle-stop tour of Irish lit at the Writers Centre. Nessa set up our meeting with Iggy at Trinity.)

So lit hovers here. It splits the atom, turning hydrogen into helium. Every other man and woman on the street seems to be a poet, and is not embarrassed to say so (a cultural difference with Americans). Our tour guide on Friday, Brian, is a plumber. . .and a poet. The jovial man Nessa ran into on Lombard Street during that tour. . . another poet. Even the president of Ireland, who will open the Hewitt festival in Amagh later this month. .  . a poet.

Prof/poet Iggy McGovern

And Iggy, the physics professor. . .a poet, with three volumes and an anthology publish, all brilliantly braided around themes of science. Iggy’s poems are like Updike’s science poems, and have won critical acclaim. He and Nessa and their dozens of writing friends create quite a vibrant community here. Two years ago, at the Writing Center where we have been meeting, they held a reading of their own works, given 20 minutes each, that lasted from 10 a.m. to 3 a.m. the next morning. It won a Guinness Book of World Records designation.

I feel safe here, knowing poets outnumber police.

— Doug Cumming

from “The Dance Half Done,” by Mary Ann Larkin

a girl’s red hair
falling from the turret
The island itself suspended
in a primal sac of light
fed by a dark cord from within the bog

Poets send their words into the mist. . .

Norman “Pal” Simpson, 72, at the pub in the Charlemont Arms.

British troops were garrisoned on the hill just beyond the greensward Mall in Armagh as early as the 1740s. Around 1820, soldiers of this permanent encampment decided to build their own Anglican church, since the cathedral on the opposite hill was too crowded – and perhaps a little too high-church and snooty for these rough soldiers. St. Mark’s, they called it. And the soldiers planted two long rows of lime trees along the straight drive leading up the slope from the Mall.

Yesterday, moving under those orderly lime trees felt like walking into a great natural cathedral – the high vaulted peak enfolding a cool shade for our stroll to the church. There was a funeral underway. Graveyards full of the dead lie on both sides of the church, and extend far behind it. The plot thickens.

The British soldiers who tried to keep order here in Northern Ireland during the recent Troubles, some of them anyway, were not from across the sea in England. They were the sons and grandsons of families well settled here, many of them of modest means, grounded piety, a small plot in a churchyard.

Take Norman Simpson, for instance. He served as a private in the Ulster Defense Regiment here during the Troubles for 23 years. His father was from Armagh, and his father’s father. Although Norman was originally from County Tyrone, about nine miles up the road, he’s lived in Armagh for more than two decades.

“Pal” Simpson they call him at the Hole in the Wall or here in the pub at the Charlemont Arms Hotel. He’s a 72-year-old pensioner, collecting half his 1,088 pounds a month for his time in the Army. That was one of the reasons he went into the Army, for the security. He agreed to let us record an interview with him at the bar in the Charlemont Arms, where he was sipping on a pint of Harp.

“Well you see at the moment, I don’t like to talk much about politics,” he says when I ask him about the vote on independence in Scotland in September. “But I mix along with everybody no matter what religion they are, I don’t ask people whether they’re Catholic or Pro. .”

He has a slight stutter, which along with a lovely Irish accent makes it hard for me to transpose this well.

“.. . or what, I meet people, I have a drink with them. It doesn’t matter to me. You know. I know religion is religion but I don’t really inquire . . .you know what I mean, I’m not into that.”

But other people seem to know and care about which side you’re on. How do they know whether you’re Catholic or Protestant?

“Well, you know,” he says. “There’s just different areas that. . a wee pub up there right there, that’s mostly Catholic . . .I go into a Catholic pub . . .you know it doesn’t matter where I go, as long as you mind your manners.”

Although he says he doesn’t want to talk politics, he offers the opinion that a unified Ireland is going to come gradually, inevitably. “It won’t happen in my lifetime but there will be a united Ireland. . . I don’t know when.”

He has nothing  against the Ireland of the south, he says. “I would travel down south there for holidays and stuff, it’s a lovely, lovely country down there.”

After about 20 minutes, he offers to buy us all a wee pint. We decline. He picks up his Telegraph, a Belfast daily tabloid.

“Tell me this young man, how long are you to be, for I have horses to back? I’m going to back a few horses.”

— Doug Cumming

I understand they’re busy with the crackling controversies gathering heat around the impending July 12 Orangemen marches. This traditional celebration of King William III’s victory over the Irish (read: Catholic) rebels at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 falls on a Saturday this year, and the restrictions imposed by the Parades Commission don’t sit well with the British-leaning Unionists. To these loyalist Ulstermen (read: Protestant), the parades are like the Rex Krewe’s Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. They dress up in bowlers and black jackets and fly the Union Jack. But to Northern Irish Catholics, seeing the Union Jack flaunted this way (and in their neighborhood of Ardoyne!) must be something like having the Confederate battle flag paraded up Main Street in Lexington, Va., a flag that means “heritage” and “Southern history” to the Sons of Confederate Veterans but to those of us who know the South’s history of the 1950s and 1960s, it means the KKK and rabid Southern governors and senators spitting on the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. “Fergit, Hell” was the license plate on many a pickup truck.

Still, it seems odd that I, a news reporter for 26 years, would have trouble reaching seasoned BBC journalists who have been covering Northern Ireland since before the Troubles officially ended. Back in the day, when you came into a distant town or city to report a story for your paper or a magazine, the first place you went for a trusted perspective was the local paper. There, a reporter or editor would usually fill you in on background, then take you to lunch (or you pay for hers or his).

All that has changed in the digital age, and age of high security. Newsrooms are guarded bunkers, no longer open to interesting or interested (or weird) people who might wander in. My own former employer, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, doesn’t even have a newsroom you can find anymore, having abandoned downtown for an inaccessible cube of a building out by Perimeter Mall.

It’s not that journalists aren’t open to the public, or to fellow journalists. My friend who is an AP editor in NY gave me the email of Ireland’s AP bureau chief, Shawn Pogatchnik, who responded generously with names of BBC correspondents he recommended to me (he would’ve driven up to Armagh from Dublin to talk to my students, but was leaving for a long vacation in France with family). And these BBC correspondents are much more in touch with their public now than in the past, thanks to Twitter. (Shawn suggested I contact these folks by Twitter.) Rarely can you reach reporters by phone or email anymore, much less drop in on them in an actual newsroom. You “follow” them on Twitter. So the BBC’s Martina Purdy has 10,700 followers on Twitter, and she herself is following 273 Twitter accounts. And the BBC’s Mark Devenport has 18,600 followers, and is following 859. Good for them. This new froth of information and news linking so many engaged people minute by minute is certainly a powerful new form of journalism. But unless Martina or Mark or the others I’m following notice me, and follow me, I can’t tweet a private message. Well, now that I’ve finally got a local cell phone, I’ll try calling the BBC in Belfast.

As the old sing, so twitter the young (which oddly enough is the title of a 17^th century Dutch painting).

— Doug Cumming