The question of Louis MacNeice's Irishness can still generate controversy in Ireland. It may now be fairly widely accepted that MacNeice was one of the most accomplished of the post-Yeatsian generation of poets, but this Oxford-educated and London-domiciled, displaced Northern Irishman is still sometimes disallowed a role in the intellectual life of the Ireland of his day. As long ago as 1974 the poet Derek Mahon opined that he had played no role in the country's intellectual life and seemed unwilling, even as late as 1985 in an interview with myself as editor of the Poetry Ireland Review, to retract. And in 1987 Denis Donoghue, reviewing a ­volume of MacNeice's selected criticism in the London Review of Books (23 April), was able to use the original Mahon obiter dictum as a stick to beat those of us who think that the statement requires at the least substantial qualification if it cannot be completely contradicted.

There is, of course, lots of evidence to support the Donoghue line. In Armitage and Clark's less than fully dependable bibliography of MacNeice's work, we find that MacNeice in the course of a prolific poetic career published in only two Irish periodicals: in The Bell, when he was poetry editor, and once in Lagan, the Northern Irish annual associated with the Ulster regionalist movement of the 1940s.