According to one possible reading of "Storm on the Island," the poem is itself an extended metaphor for a series of conflicts that plagued Northern Ireland in the years directly prior to, as well as the decades following, the poem's publication. These conflicts had roots going back hundreds of years, and were based on cultural, religious, and linguistic divides. They date back to the early days of British rule in Ireland. The nineteenth century saw the birth of new tensions between Ireland's Protestant and Catholic communities, and these tensions boiled over in the years between 1966 and 1998. The thirty-year period during which these conflicts came to a head is now known simply as "The Troubles."
To understand the political context for "Storm on the Island," it is necessary to go back several hundred years, to the early days of British rule on the small island. In the twelfth century, the British crown first invaded Ireland, England's close neighbor. By the mid-sixteenth century, the entire island of Ireland was under British rule. Ireland's population was primarily Catholic, but their colonizers were, following the establishment of the Church of England, primarily Protestant. English and Scottish settlers were encouraged to settle in the colony, and they did so, primarily in the northern part of the island. As these early British settlers put down roots in Ireland, and were joined later by new Protestant arrivals, Ireland became regionally split. The southern part of Ireland was primarily Catholic, an identification that influenced all aspects of culture—not merely religious belief. Though the northern part of the island still had a significant Catholic population, its many Protestant landowners were also more likely to think of themselves as British and feel an allegiance to the crown. Relations between Britain and Ireland soured, however, in the nineteenth century, due to the infamous potato famine. British colonial policies known as the Corn Laws limited lifesaving food imports to Ireland's starving population, prompting British rule to become more controversial than ever before.
In the early twentieth century, significant numbers of Irish Catholic people began to agitate for home rule and an end to British authority. The Protestant population concentrated in the North of Ireland opposed home rule, but this population, though a powerful majority in the north, lived alongside a pro-independence Catholic minority. On Easter Day, 1916, pro-independence forces seized property around Dublin and announced the establishment of an Irish Republic. The British army responded by crushing the uprising, further fanning the flames of discontent among many in Ireland. Three years later, the guerrilla Irish Republican Army began a steady campaign, often with violent methods, to push the crown out of Ireland. This later became known as the Anglo-Irish war. When rule over Ireland as a whole became untenable, Britain responded by partitioning Ireland. In 1921, the southern part of Ireland became the Irish Free State, while the northern part remained as it had been prior to the war: a part of the United Kingdom.
However, in Northern Ireland, tensions between Catholics and Protestants did not disappear. Systemic discrimination and economic inequality in Northern Ireland created a hierarchy in which Protestants wielded disproportionate power. Starting in the mid-twentieth century, Catholic republicans and Protestant loyalists began to clash again, this time resulting in enormous bloodshed. Paramilitary forces resorted to increasingly extreme methods, while the British military's attempts to quell rebellion were often brutal in themselves. By conservative estimates, 3,500 people died in the thirty years of "The Troubles." These included the thirteen killed on "Bloody Sunday," the 1972 event in which members of the British military attacked pro-republican marchers with tear gas and rubber bullets. The Irish Republican Army responded with bombings, killing civilians as well as soldiers. Negotiators were eventually able to establish a 1997 ceasefire, leading to a power-sharing agreement in 1998, known as the Good Friday Agreement. In recent years, however, the peace of the 1990s has become somewhat more fragile, in part because the United Kingdom's departure from the European Union threatens the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Heaney's "Storm on the Island" was published in 1966, in the early years of the Troubles. Heaney himself was born to an Irish Catholic family in Northern Ireland. He later moved to the Republic of Ireland. His poetry delved into the devastation of the Troubles, often using folklore and metaphor to describe the conflict in his home. At the same time, he is regarded as a unifying figure, in part because his descriptions of pastoral life in Ireland cut across cultural and regional divides.
