Some of the most lasting writing about the Troubles is poetry. Poets from Northern Ireland were often asked to speak for one side or the other. The best of them refused, and wrote instead about what violence did to people and to the communities that tolerated it.
Seamus Heaney's "Punishment"
In North (1975), Seamus Heaney published "Punishment", a poem that begins with an Iron Age body recovered from a bog in northern Europe, a young woman apparently executed for adultery. Heaney then turns to his own time, when young Catholic women in Northern Ireland accused of relationships with British soldiers were tarred and humiliated by republicans. The poem's force comes from the speaker's admission that he would have stood by in silence. It is an uncomfortable poem and has been argued over ever since, by readers who see it as honest about complicity and readers who find it too detached from the women themselves.
"Casualty"
In Field Work (1979), "Casualty" remembers a fisherman Heaney knew who was killed in an IRA bombing of a pub after he broke a curfew called in the wake of Bloody Sunday. The poem asks what loyalty means when a community's rules can get you killed, and what the poet owes the dead man.
Michael Longley's "Ceasefire"
Michael Longley's sonnet "Ceasefire" was published in The Irish Times shortly after the IRA ceasefire of 1994. It retells the scene from Homer's Iliad in which Priam kisses the hands of Achilles, the man who killed his son, to recover the body. Its final line, about doing what must be done, is often quoted in discussions of reconciliation, including by people who have had to sit across a table from those responsible for a death.
Why poetry keeps coming back
Paramilitary punishments, the "disappeared", informer killings: these were subjects the official record handled poorly for decades. Poems kept them in view. They are also a reminder that the questions inquiries ask, about what people knew and what they allowed, are moral questions before they are legal ones.
For more reading, see our list of books on justice, law and the Troubles.