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Features

Seamus Heaney's poems are for Protestants too

The poet and Northern Ireland's great divide

7 September 2013

9:00 AM

7 September 2013

9:00 AM

The one and only time I met Seamus Heaney, in 2007, he was making tea in the kitchen of his Dublin home when he asked — more modestly regretful than coy — ‘Did you have to do the poems at school?’

I grew up in Belfast, and certainly we had to do the poems at school.

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Jenny McCartney is a columnist and film critic for the Sunday Telegraph.

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