Identiity

The great Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, used a line from Ulysses as the final line in his poem, 'Traditions'. It addresses the tortuous question of identity that bedevils politics in Northern Ireland. 

MacMorris, gallivanting 
around the Globe, whinged 
to courtier and groundling 
who had heard tell of us

as going very bare 
of learning, as wild hares, 
as anatomies of death: 
"What ish my nation?"

And sensibly, though so much 
later, the wandering Bloom 
replied, "Ireland," said Bloom, 
"I was born here. Ireland."