In this chapter Adam Hanna notes that “From the lonely farm-redoubts of John Hewitt, to the flooded demesnes imagined by Seamus Heaney to, more recently, the imperiled familial spaces that appear in the work of Sinéad Morrissey, the homes and other refuges of Northern Irish poetry have often been isolated, watchful, and precarious ones.” Apart from the threat of political violence arising from the Troubles (1968–98) in Northern Ireland, Hanna detects a complex dialogic between domestic spaces (which are immediately beholden to local pressures) and the wider environment (which is endangered by rising seas, violent storms, and overflowing rivers). Hanna deconstructs this interplay between the effects of climate change and the “discourses about both the established order of the province and the subversive energies that might undermine this order” and defines a distinctive “Northern Irish ecological poetics” in which “global anxieties and local pressures entwine.”

In Ireland, where the struggle for independence has transformed generations of former gunmen into established statesmen, political violence offers a less contentious term than terrorism for analysing how non-state actors used force to bring about political change. Conveying how violence was conceived ‘as a form of politics, a bargaining tool in the negotiation process between state and opposition’, it offers a useful (if more diffuse) category to analyse the political impact of violence. Given that ‘terrorists don’t just do terrorism’, there is a strong case for analysing terroristic forms of violence alongside other strands of political and armed struggle which it supplemented or displaced. This chapter will argue that the significance of political violence in Ireland stemmed primarily from its impact on non-violent nationalism and the state, and that the forms of violence adopted by republicans shaped that dynamic relationship in important ways.

A dominant theme running throughout Heaney’s writing was the tension between art and political commitment, between personal vision and the demands of the community. The relationship between his writing and his politics is complex but insistent. Raised in a Catholic family in County Derry with a broadly 'anti-Partitionist stance', he was always alert to social, political and sectarian difference. He claimed his family background was nationalist, with little emphasis on the Republican tradition. His first overtly political journalism appeared during the Civil Rights period. He later found “emblems of adversity” in poetic images of bog bodies which he described in mythic method poems, but he wrote many historical, allegorical and parable poems which were infused with a political undercurrent. Generally he was wary of becoming co-opted by political dogma, but his deepest impulses were compassionate and allied with personal and artistic liberty, human dignity, political freedom, and civil rights.

The violence that infected the North during the decades of the Troubles was represented in a variety of forms as a generation of writers attended to how its intertwined narratives on both sides of the sectarian divide were articulated as shared experiences of national trauma in dire need of understanding and representation through the language of literature. Beginning with Seamus Heaney’s reflections in ‘Cessation 1994’ on the overwhelming difficulties but also undeniable opportunities of envisaging pathways of historical, political, and economic recovery on the eve of the Belfast Agreement, this chapter proceeds by reading Patrick McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto and Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs as two novels that continued the unfinished work in Irish literature after 1998 of representing the traumas of violence from national and global perspectives (and thus not only in the Irish context of the Troubles).

Taking inspiration from Edna Longley’s notion of the ‘cultural corridor’, this chapter emphasises Post-Agreement literature’s commitment to Northern Ireland as a place of interchange that enables and envisages various crossings. Rather than accepting the ‘post’ as a temporal marker that designates a distinct break with what came before, it contends that contemporary Northern writing raises awareness of what remains to be worked through and addressed. If critics have suggested that literature from Northern Ireland reflects its ongoing political state of liminal suspension, this chapter seeks to recover the recalcitrant dynamics of literary liminality as a crosscurrent to the homogenising and teleological thrust of the progress narratives underpinning both the Agreement and Brexit. This emphasis on the active energies suggested by the motif of crosscurrents allows a revision of the more passive concepts of the cultural corridor and suspension and foregrounds the potential of contemporary Northern Irish literature to establish new affiliations and reconciliatory discussions.