"For the people of Belfast I have a profound admiration; I have known them long, and loved them much. They are strong and generous. . .I long to see Belfast the freest place in Ireland. May there be given to us a vision of our city, as it might be, a city of justice, a city of plenty, a city of peace, where all success should be founded on service and all honour given to nobleness alone. . ." These words were from John Frederic MacNeice, Church of Ireland Bishop of Down, in July 1935, shortly after most serious rioting causing many deaths. On another occasion he said: "I call Ireland our beloved country. No man is to be more pitied than the man who has no country, or the man who is not sure what his country is." He was a Home Ruler, born on Omey Island off the Galway coast, and father of Louis, the poet. These words were come across again before opening a splendid book, The Belfast Anthology, published by Blackstaff in Belfast, edited by Patricia Craig (£27.75). She stresses that it is not a history of the city. Right, but from about 200 writers she has collected a pile of jewels. Such as from Kate O'Brien's My Ireland, finding warmth and friendliness: "that friendliness in passage, the bright word on the wing - a kind of unheeding grace". She examines the concept further and decides: "Perhaps it is just an expression of energy and love of life. . .It is in any case a happy corrective against the clanking ugliness of industrial success. And, come to think of it, it has always sweetened Belfast writing, the best of which has been strongly regional, and because of that laced with a peculiar humaneness and good sense, qualities not primary ever in the best writing of Dublin or Munster."
All the modern outstanding writers are in there, then too Denis Ireland's generation, many from abroad - you just have to buy it and see. Every TD and senator would benefit. Everyone who deals in business with the North. And all who just want to know. William Conor, the painter, has probably the shortest entry: "I suppose to some Belfast is sordid and ugly. I never found it so. I never run out of subjects with which to illustrate its industry and the beauty it has for me." The mountains around the city show big. Gerry Adams on Divis and the Black Mountain and, below "an acre of bluebells raised their head amid heather and whin bushes". The Cave Hill with the United Irishmen's oath is there and Alice Milligan's poem ending: Made when the world was fashioned,/ Meant with the world to last,/ The glorious face of the sleeper/ That slumbers above Belfast. Y