evidence: Let’s return to MacNeice, and why this poem is a valuable history lesson about Irish identity. MacNeice himself was born in Belfast, to Protestant parents, and grew up in the very Unionist town of Carrickfergus. By all accounts, his father was bothered by the acute polemics of Northern Irish politics, but MacNeice was sent to school in England, and is usually associated with a very British clique of poets, including W.H. Auden and Cecil Day-Lewis. You may remember my previous blog on Seamus Heaney’s traditions, when I spoke about Shakespeare, Henry V, and the character of MacMorris, Shakespeare’s only Irish character, and I wrote about the liminal Irish identity – MacNeice is this, as was Oscar Wilde, William Allingham, and a host of other Irishmen who went to England, and were at odds with themselves. [...] So we’ve learnt a lot in those two short verses. There’s great craic happening somewhere, everyone in the village is going, except for one fellow, who is left behind. And we wonder why? The explanation is, I believe, not what we expect. [...] Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.