a short mongraph on the development of political thought in the early poetry of desmond egan

 

In 1972 at the height of an IRA bombing campaign, the Irish neo classicist Desmond Egan published what will probably be the poem he is remembered for, a fragmentary almost throwaway piece.

It went as follows:

The Northern Ireland Question

two wee girls

were playing tig near a car

how many counties would you say

are worth their scattered fingers?

The idea behind the poem is that the car containing an IRA bomb blew up and killed the little girls.

In 1975, a few years after Egan published the above poem, the IRA kidnapped Doctor Tiede Herrema. There was a standoff when the Irish police and army tracked the kidnappers to a safe house in the town of Monasterevin near where I live. After 36 days in captivity, including a two week siege in Monasterevin, Dr Herrema was rescued.

The events led Desmond Egan to rethink his political stance and shortly afterwards he published a collection inspired by the Monasterevin denouement to the kidnapping entitled Siege!

To my febrile imagination this collection had a much more romantic view of the IRA and indeed of political violence generally. Lots of intellectual mullagroaning about the role of the rebel in society, that sort of thing.

What it all added up to was that Desmond Egan had decided that the answer to the Northern Ireland Question was six.