Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
Seamus Heaney, “Blackberry-Picking”
I visited the Seamus Heaney HomePlace this month, and on Bank Holiday Monday found myself out among the hedges picking blackberries, coming home with stained fingers and enough for a pudding. I am eating the last piece as I write this. There’s something genuinely comforting for me in these small, seasonal traditions.
I need such mindful distractions, particularly as I watch a society seemingly hardwired to pick at old scabs until they hurt.
Hardwired, or do we actually have a choice?
There is so much noise, so much outrage, so much catastrophising, and much less pragmatism. Politicians telling the other side what they are doing wrong is easy. But does it actually change anyone’s mind, or does it sometimes make people dig in even further? What is the point of this endless need to prove that our side was better than theirs, that our hurt was greater, that their behaviour was worse? What does it achieve?
Take Drumcree. The decision has not even been made for the march to proceed down the Garvaghy Road, yet people are already reacting as though permission has been granted. We are already having the argument, and the temperature is already rising. In the context of the court findings, is anyone truly surprised that a fresh application has been made? We cannot control the Orange Order’s decision to reapply.
I was at Drumcree as a teenager, with my dad. It’s a bit of a blur, but I remember the digger, and I remember the Welsh accents of the soldiers, who were against us. I was shielded from much of the horror because we had no TV.
Derek Moore’s intervention interested me. He is a prominent loyalist bandsman who was prepared to question where this was going, warning that it could set parading back a decade.
I gravitate towards people willing to do that, to advocate for and challenge their own people, speaking from a position of credibility within that community. It is much harder, and probably much more useful, to turn around to your own side and ask whether what we are doing is actually helping or hindering. I’d love to see much more of this.
We need to ask ourselves more often what we are actually trying to achieve, and whether what we are doing is helping us get there.
We were ridiculously happy when we saw positive signs such as the Fleadh, yet give us half a chance, and we slide back into the same tired, circular debates. I don’t want everyone to agree, and I don’t enjoy surface-level conversations anyway. I want more difficult conversations, where we are willing to ask awkward questions of ourselves and our own communities, and where acknowledging that someone on the other side might have a point doesn’t somehow mean surrendering your own.
Surely we all get more from those conversations, even if they aren’t easy?
I don’t know how we stop ourselves from being drawn back into the same arguments. But I do believe that we have choices, and perhaps we need to get better at what we pick.
There are difficult questions around our health service, Lough Neagh and agreeing a budget that deserve far more of our energy and attention, and all of them desperately require some degree of consensus and collective responsibility.
Perhaps we could pick a different conversation and allow some of those old scabs to heal.
Originally from Co. Armagh. Unionist background; now pro-UI but not entirely at home in the nationalist camp. Frustrated by bias and blind spots in politics. I don’t like self-important types. Love a good conversation, with real listening. Member of the SDLP.
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