Ciarán O’Rourke is an Irish poet and activist. His most recent book is Phantom Gang.
Irish poet Seamus Heaney was often cast as a national treasure who avoided taking sharp partisan stances. But his work is also deeply colored by his quest for artistic authenticity — and the moral questions on which he could not keep his silence.
Since he resigned last week, Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar has been hailed by liberal media as the representative of a modern, forward-looking Ireland. Yet he was above all an ally of corporate elites, not people in need of housing and health care.
Poet Linton Kwesi Johnson calls his verse a “cultural weapon in the black liberation struggle.” For half a century, his work has provided a peerless record of black British experience — offering a vital lesson in how oppression fuels the flame of defiance.
Jack Butler Yeats, the most important 20th-century Irish painter, is often presented in apolitical terms of pictorial technique. Yet his work was deeply colored by Ireland’s independence struggle — and the yearnings for human dignity that inspired it.