Policing in Northern Ireland: The Ministry of Fear

Background

In his poem, The Ministry of Fear, Seamus Heaney recounts personal experiences from his time in grammar school under the watchful eye of his strict, Roman Catholic educators. Throughout the poem, his diction and allusions weave the narrative of his childhood education with the broader narrative of Catholics’ subjective experience in the primarily Protestant Northern Ireland. The harsh teaching style of his Catholic educators is meant to parallel the policing strategy in Northern Ireland at the time. Anything less than full cooperation with police, especially for Catholics, was met with swift and severe punishment, just as Heaney was punished by his teacher at school. The final two stanzas of the poem weave together the two narratives to give the reader a complete picture of how Heaney’s school experience serves as a microcosm for the broader historical issue of policing in Northern Ireland.

1. The Ministry of Fear [1]

(for Seamus Deane)

Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived
In important places. The lonely scarp
Of St Columb’s College, where I billeted
For six years, overlooked your Bogside [2].
I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat
Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack,
The throttle of the hare. In the first week
I was so homesick I couldn’t even eat
The biscuits left to sweeten my exile [3].
I threw them over the fence one night
In September 1951
When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road [4]
were amber in the fog, it was an act
of stealth [5].

Then Belfast, and then Berkeley.
Here’s two on’s are sophisticated,
Dabbling in verses till they have become
A life: from bulky envelopes arriving
In vacation time to slim volumes
Despatched `with the author’s compliments’.
Those poems in longhand, ripped from the wire spine
Of your exercise book, bewildered me—
Vowels and ideas bandied free
As the seed-pods blowing off our sycamores.
I tried to write about the sycamores
And innovated a South Derry rhyme
With hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled.
Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain
Were walking, by God, all over the fine
Lawns of elocution. [6] Have our accents
Changed? ‘Catholics, in general, don’t speak
As well as students from the Protestant schools [7].’
Remember that stuff? Inferiority
Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on [8].
‘What’s your name, Heaney?’
‘Heaney, Father.’
‘Fair
Enough.’
On my first day, the leather strap
Went epileptic in the Big Study,
Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads,
But I still wrote home that a boarder’s life
Was not so bad, shying as usual.

On long vacations, then, I came to life
In the kissing seat of an Austin 16
Parked at a gable, the engine running,
My fingers tight as ivy on her shoulders,
A light left burning for her in the kitchen.
And heading back for home, the summer’s
Freedom dwindling night by night, the air
All moonlight and a scent of hay, policemen
Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round
The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing
The muzzle of a Sten gun in my eye [9]:
‘What’s your name, driver?’
‘Seamus …’
Seamus?
They once read my letters at a roadblock
And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics,
‘Svelte dictions’ in a very florid hand.

Ulster was British, but with no rights on
The English lyric: all around us, though
We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear [10].

 

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[1] Heaney, Seamus. “Singing School.” Poetry Foundation. Web. 1 December 2014. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178022.

[2] The Bogside is the primarily Catholic part of the city of Derry, located outside the city walls.

[3] The use of the word “exile” implies that Heaney did not leave home voluntarily.

[4] Lecky Road is traditionally associated with Free Derry corner, an iconic symbol of the Troubles.

[5] Here, with the use of the word “stealth,” Heaney is emphasizing the climate of fear in Northern Ireland that made him nervous about even such a petty act as littering.

[6] Hobnailed boots were traditionally worn by those who lived in rural villages, such as Heaney. This reference is meant to invoke a sense that Heaney’s early attempts at poetry were not received well. His rough Irish language was, in the minds of others, trampling, “by God,” all over the English language.

[7] Heaney is invoking a sentiment that was common in his youth; he is quoting an anonymous adult figure who told him and others that Protestant children were better educated and thus spoke better. This further demonstrates the climate of fear, as Heaney was always made to feel inferior to his Protestant peers.

[8] Heaney is wondering how young Catholics such as himself could possibly have big dreams themselves when they were constantly being denigrated and reminded that they are less than their Protestant counterparts.

[9] In this stanza, Heaney is recounting a night spent enjoying summer’s freedom that was abruptly ended when his car came to a police roadblock. This is another example of the “Ministry of Fear” at work, as a young Heaney cannot even enjoy a night out without the fear of being aggressively confronted by armed police.

[10] Heaney is suggesting that despite Ulster’s strong cultural connection with England, he can still use the English language to his own ends. He goes on to say that while there was no formal name for what he refers to as “the Ministry of Fear,” it was a sort of zeitgeist that people at the time felt in their core. It was a reality without being recognized as such.

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