“The Northern thing”

Despite his move to the Republic in 1967, Friel himself betrays his increasing estrangement from Republican nationalism throughout the 1970s; indeed, by the early 1980s, he will most frequently employ the term “Northern” rather than “Irish” or “nationalist” to define his ideological association. Richard Kirkland has traced the emergence of such “a distinct Northern aesthetic” to Philip Hobsbaum's famed Belfast poetry Group of the 1960s (Kirkland, Literature, 77–82). For Kirkland, the development of a Northern sensibility is manifested in the poetry of a broad contingent of young poets who sought “a writing community distinct from London and Dublin; a community not primarily defined by sectarian division” (Kirkland, Literature, 59). Kirkland argues that The Group both benefited from and influenced the efforts of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and James Simmon's pioneering journal The Honest Ulsterman to, in Michael Longley's words, “foster our writers” who will “speak for us in the gate or give us our name and place in history” (qtd. Kirkland, Literature, 62). Admitting that “events through this period still remain vague” Kirkland (Literature, 80) devotes his energies to reconstructing this community among poets, ignoring any possible artistic cross-fertilization between poets and novelists or dramatists; thus, Friel's complementary efforts to envision a Northern subaltern escapes the purview of his study.