“Saying Nothing ” was a great poetic theme but the time to speak out is now. A lament on a society ” based on lies” by Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon  the boy from the Moy ( I can still see the youth in him at 75), is probably the last living survivor of the  group of poets who were the best and brightest of the age of the Troubles. Call them the Northern Poets. Not shaped by the Troubles we must add quickly,  but formed in the culture both hidden and in plain sight that both nurtured them and showed us a better world.

In this FT  extract from  his introduction to Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing about the disappearance and murder by the IRA of the alleged informer Jean McConville, Paul follows the track of reasoning from that microcosm to the general in a lament about the state of Northern Ireland from the beginning.

More often than not, to live in Northern Ireland is to live a lie. To begin with, Northern Ireland is a politically convenient construction that was allowed to come into being in May 1921 specifically because of the threat of bloodshed by Ulster Unionists, who rejected Irish Home Rule. The British government was, and is, unwilling to call their bluff. In other words, the place is intrinsically flawed.

In the early 1970s in the hectic atmosphere of the early Troubles we were colleagues in BBCNI, he a Radio Arts producer searching for wider enlightenment and diversion ( with great success I may say), I  at the other end of the spectrum as a news reporter of the bombs and bullets.  Paul’s  version of “Say Nothing” with its obvious reference to Heaney is nonetheless a far more pointed analysis than Heaney’s  infinitely subtle yet vivid  characterisation. Much less does it follow reform from within, championed by another friend he mentions, the eminent Catholic civil servant Maurice Hayes. This a graphic lament full of anger and frustration on our history and identity which offers little hope for the future – unless  we all speak out.  He is as much at fault as anybody ; he admits joining  in the reticence himself.

I hadn’t realised he had followed events and maintained old relationships so closely from his permanent base since 1987 in Princeton University and New York, obviously interrupted by many visits home and with establishment access enhanced by his growing fame as a poet. His poetry ranges worldwide across many cultures and ways of life but the tug of the roots survives. There is the indirect connection between  the McConville murder and his friend the actor Stephen Rea, once married to Dolours Price.  As Paul rightly observes, ” it’s a tight little world” even while part of it  is full of dark secrets.

This  is not a political manifesto and works better as an introduction to the theme of “telling lies” whether of IRA murders or state collusion.

But the drift is clear if not the destination and how to reach it.

Failure of government in Northern Ireland is not a phenomenon to be relegated to the distant past. That the present government has a history of repeat subsidence, including a two-year period between February 2022 and February 2024 when it collapsed completely, doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. So adept are we at self-delusion, however, that we have persuaded ourselves things are pretty much OK. This Northern Ireland Assembly, or as it’s styled in Ulster-Scots, the Norlin Airlan Assemblie, has become such a byword for dysfunction that there must be some who sigh for the relative straightforwardness of good old sectarian Stormont. At least there was no linguistic pretzelisation, such as coming up with a madcap concept like Norlin Airlan Assemblie.

Woe to the citizen who might nowadays suggest that Ulster-Scots is not a language per se but the orthography of an accent.

Woe to the citizen who might suggest that the music associated with Orange marching bands is less an art form than a mode of intimidation. Woe to the citizen who might suggest that the response by Unionists, flying the Israeli flag, to Nationalists flying the Palestinian flag is indeed an example of meshugaas, might even be farkakteh. To make such a suggestion, indeed, would be perceived as throwing into jeopardy the long-cherished “peace process”, nowhere more embodied than in the “peace wall”, all 21 miles of it somehow yet again attesting to the idea that everything is hunky-dory. …

Whether we happen on an arms cache or a peace process, we all look the other way. As Gerry Adams himself is quoted as saying, “I learnt a long time ago if you don’t ask, you can’t tell.” Among the others I met over the years was Gerry’s compadre, Martin McGuinness, also footnoted in Say Nothing. He and I had a private breakfast in Washington on March 17 2009 while he was deputy first minister in the Assembly. We had spent the previous evening in Barack Obama’s White House, where I had read some of my poems. We discussed salmon fishing and the plight of Native Americans. Did we discuss whether or not he had ever been armed with a Thomson submachine gun? Most likely not.

The very cows standing about in their little border fields know it is not always going to be like this. Deep in the bones of every person living in Northern Ireland is the sense that what I’ve described elsewhere as an “eternal interim” must one day come to an end.

Brian Walker

Former BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London