ABSTRACT
In his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Seamus Heaney (1995) recalls a dark hour in the history of sectarian violence in the North of Ireland when, in 1976, a minibus full of workers was stopped by a gang of marked men with guns in their hands and hatred in their hearts. The workers were forced to line up. A gun was waved in front of them as a man snarled, ‘Any Catholics among you step out here’. The lone Catholic man in the group did not move when his hand was gripped by his fellow Protestant worker in a signal that said, ‘we are in hell, but we are here together’. The story does not have a just ending. After hesitating, he stepped forward, only to see all his friends butchered. Yet Heaney finds hope in his belief that ‘the birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand’. Heaney spoke of the need to recognize and sustain,
. . . the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness, in spite of the wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they too are an earnest of our veritable human being.
