A Shooting Script

Heaney employs a kind of poetic software package to produce a feature regretting the ‘dwindling’ of the Irish experience and the replacement of Old Ireland including its Irish language and Gaeltacht by a modern culture that is capitalist, self-centred and anglophone. The narrative includes a sideswipe at the Catholic Church but finally wishes it to be known that there is still time to protect old values – the scribbled message in the sand sure to be erased by the tide is preserved in the eternal present of his poem. The Shooting Script is aimed at the Irish-minded, providing imagery and scene directions bristling with specialist vocabulary. Setting 1 presents the Irish ‘cultural imagination’ of a previous  age – characters fixed […]