Ian, I happily stand corrected. I made the unwarranted assumption, for some reason, that Heaney, having been born in Northern Island, and having attended Queen's University in Belfast (and having received an honorary doctorate from them in the 1980's - !) was a Protestant. (How did the folks there like his little verse about the Queen, btw?)
In fact, you only reinforce the point I was trying to make. The Irish have produced, out of all proportion to their numbers, an extraordinary number of outstanding literary stars, and they deserve the cr edit for it. Yet it is not surprising when all those Anglophiles (sorry, Neocon) try to ascribe this success to their purported basic "Englishness," given the relatively high proportion of Protestants among them.
Was Beckett, for example, any the less Irish for having been born into a Protestant family?
And are really that many Irish Protestants of primarily English origin? How many Muslim Bosnians or Muslim Georgians, etc., are of Turkish origin? The incentives to convert to the conquerors' religion have often been strong indeed.
Joan |
