#Donegal #Fermanagh #Tyrone enjoyed our common European times when our Ulster Border softened. The binary opposition of US and THEM seeping through religion and British/Irish identity was slowly dissipating along the border until the exit of the UK from the EU. In the first lecture of the Queen’s Universtity 100 series on partition Paul Bew acknowledges the binary opposition between the industrial North East Ulster and the rural west as a factor in partition. (link below)

#IrishPartition cut #Donegal off from urban life with a poor rural population spread very thinly and no major centres of population. (The growth of Letterkenny is recent.) Landscape is a more powerful influence than urban cultural life on Border writers such as Donegal poets, Francis Harvey (Fermanagh born), and Annemarie NíChurreáin who explores “emotional experience through the physicality of rural landscapes.” My former teacher at QUB, the poet #Seamus Heaney carries the rural versus industrial binary through this UlsterBorder series,. Will his suggestion of a non-binary alternative, where “Two buckets were easier carried than one” be evident in the QUB lectures? http://www.qub.ac.uk/talks-100